The drug question divides the Right. Libertarians thunder against the prosecution of victimless crimes, while traditional conservatives fear the character-corroding effects of heroin or even pot. But surely all can agree that the drug wars are a study in government incompetence.

Ryan Grim, who frequently breaks away from the topic of drugs in America to discuss the drugs in his bloodstream, makes a largely persuasive case that Americans have always loved drugs (though fashion and policy influence the popularity of this or that substance), that public-service campaigns (such as the fried-egg warning that he sends up in his title) exert little influence on demand, and that law-enforcement efforts don’t much alter the overall supply. He quotes Dr. William Woodward, lobbyist for the American Medical Association, speaking to Congress in 1937:

The trouble is that we are looking on narcotic addiction solely as a vice. It is a vice, but like all vices, it is based on human nature. The use of narcotics . . . represents an effort on the part of the individual to adjust himself to some difficult situation in his life. He will take one thing to stimulate him, another to quiet him. . . . And until we develop young men and young women who are able to suffer a little and exercise a certain amount of control, even though it may be inconvenient and unpleasant to do so, we are going to have a considerable amount of addiction to narcotics and addiction to other drugs.

Hands up, all those who think Americans are increasingly prone to self-discipline. How many of your tax dollars do you really want to spend trying to foster it?

Grim intriguingly traces the drug explosion not to the Summer of Love but to the mid-1800s, when urbanization led to more churchgoing and a powerful, preacher-backed temperance movement. An engraving of George Washington making a toast with a glass and a bottle was reimagined for the less convivial moment of the centennial with the glass removed and the bottle replaced by a hat. Giving up drink, Americans simply switched to “medicinal” morphine, freely dispensed to the nervous or bored by doctors. Grim calculates that around 1840, 30 million opium doses were being imported annually into a nation of 17 million, while domestic farmers cultivated poppies from New Hampshire to California.

When morphine’s addictiveness became impossible to overlook, Bayer marketed an improved substitute under the trademark Heroin, because it made users feel heroic. Grim dryly quotes a 1900 article in The Boston Medical and Surgical Journal: “It’s not hypnotic, and there’s no danger of acquiring a habit.”

Around the same time, advertisements for cocaine, which was sold complete with a syringe, said it could “supply the place of food, make the coward brave, the silent eloquent.” Decades later, in 1981, a Time cover story discussed cocaine as “the all-American drug.” Writer Michael Demarest proclaimed, “A snort in each nostril and you’re up and away for 30 minutes or so. Alert, witty and with it. No hangover. No physical addiction. No lung cancer. No holes in the arms or burned-out cells in the brain.” One would love to see Demarest’s expense reports from the time.

The cluelessness of hucksters and journalists, and the lobbying of business, fascinate Grim but they’re largely beside his major point: Government crackdowns on suppliers amount to so much squeezing of a balloon. As Reagan-era pot-plant seizures rose from 2.5 million in 1982 to more than 7 million in 1987, the price of pot rose from $25 for an eighth of an ounce in 1981 to $53 in 1986. But cocaine prices dropped from nearly $600 a gram in 1982 to $200 a gram in 1989, while purity levels nearly doubled. Miami Vice was both touchstone and tautology, as the city was flush with drug money: Its Federal Reserve branch built up a surplus of $5 billion, and in the late 1980s a fifth of all real-estate transactions were paid in cash. Who says it doesn’t snow in South Florida?

George H. W. Bush threw more resources against the Caribbean cocaine trade, so it moved to Mexico and elsewhere. In the Clinton years, a DEA official called NAFTA “a deal made in narco heaven” for Mexican and Colombian drug lords. Yet in his bid for reelection in 1996, Clinton sought to steal the drug issue from the Republicans by dumping accommodationist drug czar Lee Brown in favor of hard-nosed Gen. Barry McCaffrey, who soon tried to override California’s new medical-marijuana law. McCaffrey was assaulting a state policy change that didn’t involve interstate commerce. Government sometimes seems less a leviathan than an octopus: At times its tentacles flail comically against one another. At other moments its silent power takes its prey unawares.

True, the medical exemption for marijuana use in California is risible. Among the conditions for which pot may legally be prescribed are glaucoma, AIDS, cancer, irritable bowel syndrome, and insomnia. If that doesn’t cover you, try pleading anything else, since “etc.” is also an eligible condition. But if California wants to be Amsterdam, what business is it of the czars in Washington?

While one government tentacle was lashing medical-marijuana clubs in California, another (the state tax collector) was stroking them with reminders to pay sales taxes. “A special notice sent to clubs by the Board of Equalization,” Grim writes, “assured sellers they ‘may decline to provide information on products sold due to concerns about self-incrimination.’”

Amusing though such anecdotes are, there is a frustrating Jeff Spicoli casualness to Grim’s work. Perhaps, when dealing with an underground economy, the necessity of protecting sources requires the occasional deployment of a smokescreen, but the whole book is enveloped in it. Consider the colorful saga of an FBI agent who, in the process of raiding an LSD lab while ignoring its proprietor’s warnings to don protective gear, accidentally drenched himself with the drug. The agent had to be induced into a coma with Thorazine to suppress the trippy effects. Grim provides no source for this tale, and there is no particular reason to believe it.

There are four meager pages of endnotes in which the author thanks various people for their input and lists some secondary materials while being vague about the provenance of facts. Even the anecdote about California’s dunning notice to pot dealers is untraceable. The relevant paragraph of endnotes consists of such lines as “I couldn’t have written chapter 12 without the help of . . . ” But acknowledgments, though they may be good manners, are not the same as sources. Whether you choose to believe the testimony of characters who identify themselves as “David Wedding Dress” or “Fire Erowid” is up to you.

So is this book a rigorous brief for policymakers or a breezy read for the grateful head, pleased to have his suspicions about the narcocracy confirmed? Basically the latter disguised as the former. A section on the hallucinogenic brew ayahuasca is undisguised advocacy for fellow “psychonauts.” Yet it’s couched in earnest tones. At a Brooklyn industrial warehouse in 2007, Grim took ayahuasca in a group whose members were briskly issued vomit buckets. Later, minus his lunch, “I saw colors and objects and serpentlike demons and prayed to God that there is actually no God.” Thanks, I’m good with my Bordeaux.

Still, Grim’s appeals to democracy should be taken seriously. In an aside, he notes that voters at the state level usually support some degree of pot legalization even though they may think their neighbors disapprove. Polling in Vermont and Rhode Island pegged support for legalizing medical marijuana at 69 and 71 percent. But when the voters were asked whether a majority supported the initiative, 38 percent of Vermonters and only 25 percent of Rhode Islanders said yes. A poll taken on then-President-elect Barack Obama’s website last winter revealed that 16 of the 50 questions considered most pressing by respondents were about liberalizing drug policy; what seems the epitome of frivolousness to the policy mavens may be more than that.

It wasn’t so long ago that Washington was uncertain it even had the authority to regulate how Americans got blitzed. Originally, Congress couldn’t figure out how to ban narcotics directly, so it did so using its authority to tax. The 1914 Harrison Act, Grim notes, required all narcotics distributors to register with the IRS precursor and pay a tax — of $1 per year. But only medical practitioners were allowed to register, meaning nonmedical narcotics became illegal. Think of all of the subsequent government action that was built on that innocent dollar a year.