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Judyth Piazza Gets Up Close and Personal with Dan Baum, The New Yorker

Portrait of Dan, 2002

Dan Baum has worked as a staff reporter for The Wall Street Journal and The Atlanta Constitution, and as a freelance writer for The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Chicago Tribune, and many other newspapers and magazines. At the Constitution, Baum was assigned the "major crime" beat, which in 1985 and 1986 was largely a matter of covering the state-and-city's war on drugs and the appearance of crack cocaine.

During his two years at the Constitution Baum contributed his share of dispatches from the war front. "I myself wrote some of the most egregious crack-scare stories," admits Baum. "I didn't question the police propaganda at the time, and didn't understand how central to their budgets it was to keep the drug panic alive."In the summer of 1991, the drug war came to Dan's home town of Missoula, Montana, and police began arresting people for growing small amounts of marijuana in their basements, confiscating their homes, and sending them to prison for five years or longer.

After writing short pieces for the Nation and the Journal of the American Bar Association about the drug war and civil liberties, Baum began work on Smoke and Mirrors, a history of the war on drugs from the Nixon Administration to the present. As he discovered, "for more than a quarter century the United States has been on a rampage, kicking in doors and locking people up in the name of protecting its citizens from illegal drugs. Hundreds of billions of dollars into the Drug War, nobody claims victory. Yet we continue, devoted to a policy as expensive, ineffective, delusional, and destructive as government gets."

Dan Baum has been a staff writer for The New Yorkersince 2003. His first article for the magazine, "Jake Leg," is the lead piece in the volume "Best Music Writing of 2003.

Baum has mostly covered the military, but was sent to New Orleans when the levees broke and spent most of the following year there, writing a number of stories for the magazine. Now he's living in New Orleans, working on a book about the city and the storm, under contract to Spiegel & Grau. He also is writing a daily column on life in New Orleans, "New Orleans Journal," for The New Yorker's website.

Publications:
(1996). Smoke and Mirrors: The War on Drugs and the Politics of Failure. Boston: Little, Brown, & Company.

For More Information: http://www.knoxandbaum.com/

Source: The Student Operated Press

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