A revealing look at the history and legacy of the "War on Drugs"
Fifty years after President Richard Nixon declared a "War on Drugs," the
United States government has spent over a trillion dollars fighting a
losing battle. In recent years, about 1.5 million people have been
arrested annually on drug charges--most of them involving cannabis--and
nearly 500,000 Americans are currently incarcerated for drug offenses.
Today, as a response to the dire human and financial costs, Americans
are fast losing their faith that a War on Drugs is fair, moral, or
effective.
In a rare multi-faceted overview of the underground drug market,
featuring historical and ethnographic accounts of illegal drug
production, distribution, and sales, The War on Drugs: A History
examines how drug war policies contributed to the making of the carceral
state, racial injustice, regulatory disasters, and a massive underground
economy. At the same time, the collection explores how aggressive
anti-drug policies produced a "deviant" form of globalization that
offered economically marginalized people an economic life-line as
players in a remunerative transnational supply and distribution network
of illicit drugs. While several essays demonstrate how government
enforcement of drug laws disproportionately punished marginalized
suppliers and users, other essays assess how anti-drug warriors
denigrated science and medical expertise by encouraging moral panics
that contributed to the blanket criminalization of certain drugs.
By analyzing the key issues, debates, events, and actors surrounding the
War on Drugs, this timely and impressive volume provides a deeper
understanding of the role these policies have played in making our
current political landscape and how we can find the way forward to a
more just and humane drug policy regime.
