Product Information
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.Product Identifiers
PublisherNew York University Press
ISBN-139781479811366
eBay Product ID (ePID)4049923897
Product Key Features
Number of Pages368 Pages
Publication NameThe War on Drugs: a History
LanguageEnglish
SubjectLaw, History
Publication Year2021
TypeTextbook
AuthorDavid Farber
FormatPaperback
Dimensions
Item Height229 mm
Item Width152 mm
Additional Product Features
EditorDavid Farber
Country/Region of ManufactureUnited States