The War on Drugs: A History

The War on Drugs has cost the US over a trillion dollars and resulted in 1.5 million arrests annually. It has contributed to the carceral state, racial injustice, regulatory disasters, and a massive underground economy. The book explores how drug war policies have created a "deviant" form of globalization and how government enforcement of drug laws disproportionately punishes marginalized suppliers and users. It 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.

Format: Paperback / softback
Length: 368 pages
Publication date: 11 November 2021
Publisher: New York University Press

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.

Weight: 568g
Dimension: 152 x 229 x 25 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781479811366