Contents
List of Figures
Preface
PART ONE. CONFRONTING DENIAL
1. The Drug War Syndrome
2. Three Fatal Flaws in the War on Drugs
3. The Collateral Damage of the War on Drugs
PART TWO. PARADIGMS, POWER, AND THE POLITICS OF DENIAL
4. The Punitive Paradigm: The Early Struggles, 1900—1930
5. The Punitive Paradigm: Entrenchment and Challenge, 1930—1980
6. Presidential Drug Wars and the Narco-Enforcement Complex
7. Congress, the Electorate, and the Logic of Escalation
8. The Punitive Paradigm Revisited
PART THREE. PUBLIC HEALTH AND THE STRUGGLE FOR REFORM
9. Paradigm Shifts
10. Envisioning a Public-Health Paradigm
11. The Politics of Drug Reform
Afterword
Appendix 1. Trends in Drug-Control Spending
Appendix 2. Trends in Drug Prices
Appendix 3. Trends in Drug Use and Its Consequences
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Excerpt From the Preface:
We came to write this book out of a deep concern over how a politics
of fear, insecurity, and intolerance can crowd out the possibility
of a politics of reason, care, and collective responsibility.
We were also troubled by a common pattern in public policy: the
persistence of unworkable policies in the face of overwhelming
evidence of their failure. We saw these two concerns as connected
in certain cases: when policies seeking to address social problems
through the exercise of fear, coercion, and force reaped failure
and further problems, the response was often to "get tougher."
It seemed to be conventional wisdom that the reason force had
not worked was that not enough had been applied and that the logical
response to failure, therefore, was escalation—not reevaluation.
For many years, similar concerns informed our work on U.S. foreign
policy, and in the late I980S we turned our attention to the escalating
U.S. drug war in Latin America. Longtime students of the region,
we saw the danger that counternarcotics could become a prime driving
force of U.S. intervention there, given the waning of anticommunism.
Our initial research on the drug war in the Andes convinced us
that this policy was senseless: it would never reduce significantly
the supply of drugs coming into the United States; it was wasting
billions of dollars; and it was undermining democracy and human
rights in the region by strengthening the hands of repressive
militaries and weakening already fragile civilian governments.
Evidence of the drug war's failure and harm was widely available,
not only in academic circles but also in government documents
and media reports. Yet the reports of failure only reinforced
the resolve of public officials to "try harder," to
apply a little more funding, a little more firepower—and the
deeper flaws and harms of the policy were rarely part of the official
debate.
It soon became clear to us that the same kinds of flaws and policy-generated
harms were built into the drug war at home. Rather than ameliorating
the problems of drug abuse and addiction, current policies of
tough law enforcement are deepening many serious health and crime
problems related to drug use. Yet the drug-policy debate is extraordinarily
stultifying. It does not distinguish the harms caused by drugs
from the harms caused by the social conditions in which drugs
are used. It does not distinguish between the injuries caused
by taking these illicit substances and those brought about by
the policy solutions. It does not address the deeper reasons Americans
use and abuse drugs, but instead weighs the most effective means
to suppress this use.
The debate is polarized and simplistic, often phrased in terms
of good versus evil, prohibition versus a free market, individual
blame versus social causation. Politicians look for quick-fix
solutions; many seem addicted to the idea of the drug war itself.
People who want to open or expand the debate are delegitimized:
there is a tendency to shoot the messenger rather than to analyze
the message carefully. At home and abroad, the official response
to failure has commonly been one of more fear, with calls for
more force and more punishment.
Faced with such a situation both beyond and within our borders,
our initial interest in the drug war shifted. Convinced by our
research that the drug war strategy was inherently flawed at home
and abroad, that it would not alleviate the growing problems of
drug abuse and addiction, and that the war itself was exacerbating
these and other social problems, we wanted to figure out why this
strategy had persisted for so long and why the repeated response
to failure was simply to continue the same policies. Persevering
in a "march of folly," "becoming our own worst
enemy," "shooting ourselves in the foot"—these
were the metaphors for a puzzle we wanted to solve.
So we sought not to write a book about drugs themselves or about
the causes of drug abuse and addiction. Nor did we simply want
to write another book about the failure of U.S. drug policy (though we
will need to address the causes of failure and the harmful consequences
of the drug war). Rather, this is a book about the politics of the drug war—a
politics of denial—and the struggle for drug-policy reform.
