Download or read book Beyond the War on Drugs written by Steven Wisotsky and published by Prometheus Books. This book was released on 1990-03 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This provocative and controversial book rejects the popular pablum of more laws, more money, more enforcement personnel, and more jails as the road to victory in the "war on drugs." Author Steven Wisotsky masterfully documents the failure of the drug war and the erroneous premise central to its destructive and doomed strategy: the idea that drug taking controls human behavior; that drugs "cause" physical dependency. Americans must move beyond the war on drugs by repudiating their obsessive preoccupation with controlling or prohibiting drugs. Instead, we must replace this mindset with a new view that acknowledges individual freedom and the power of directing our choices toward responsible human behavior. According to Wisotsky, the idea of "waging war" on drugs is central to the problem rather than a fundamental part of any solution. He takes the Reagan-Bush-Bennett campaign to task for its failed efforts to cut the supply of drugs, reduce public demand, and enforce laws regarding the sale and distribution of controlled substances. Wisotsky contends that the war on drugs will remain inadequate so long as society continues to be seduced by the battle cries of its own stepped-up combat in which the "enemy" (drugs) must be eradicated at all cost. The rationale for doing battle has become so embedded in the public mind that we no longer recognize the need for a critical review of social policy, strategy, or the methods needed to achieve our desired goals. Have we simply created a new type of Prohibition, which is destined to fail? And if this is the case, then what does it say about our society? Have we lost the ability to reflect critically on our social motives and purposes, as well as our justification for the actions we take, simply because we've declared "war" on the "enemy" and we aren't going to stop the good fight until we've "won"? Beyond the War on Drugs offers hard-hitting arguments to support the growing public opinion that this war, as it is currently conceived, cannot be won and ought not to be fought. Wisotsky argues persuasively for a reassessment of this struggle. We must go beyond the war on drugs to develop a public policy that acknowledges human intelligence, free choice, and individual responsibility.
Download or read book The War on Drugs written by David Farber and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2021-11-30 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Smoke and Mirrors written by Dan Baum and published by Little Brown. This book was released on 1996 with total page 396 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Argues that despite increasing levels of government action, illicit drugs are more readily available than ever, and analyzes the failure of our drug policy
Download or read book Ending the War on Drugs written by and published by Random House. This book was released on 2016-03-24 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For the last 50 years, drug prohibition laws have put the market for illegal drugs into the hands of organised criminals. Now, it’s time to take control. Ending the failed war on drugs will reduce drug-related violence, tackle organised crime, end the needless criminalisation of millions, and will halt the drain on government funds and resources. In this book, global opinion-leaders on the frontline of the drug debate describe their experiences and perspectives on what needs to be done. Highlighting the pitfalls behind drug policy to-date and bringing to light new policies and approaches, which make a clear case for galvanizing governments to end the war on drugs – once and for all.
Download or read book Drug War Capitalism written by Dawn Paley and published by AK Press. This book was released on 2014-11-10 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Though pillage, profit, and plunder have been a mainstay of war since pre-colonial times, there is little contemporary focus on the role of finance and economics in today's "Drug Wars"—despite the fact that they boost US banks and fill our prisons with poor people. They feed political campaigns, increase the arms trade, and function as long-term fixes to capitalism's woes, cracking open new territories to privatization and foreign direct investment. Combining on-the-ground reporting with extensive research, Dawn Paley moves beyond the usual horror stories, beyond journalistic rubbernecking and hand-wringing, to follow the thread of the Drug War story throughout the entire region of Latin America and all the way back to US boardrooms and political offices. This unprecedented book chronicles how terror is used against the population at large in cities and rural areas, generating panic and facilitating policy changes that benefit the international private sector, particularly extractive industries like petroleum and mining. This is what is really going on. This is drug war capitalism. Dawn Paley is a freelance journalist who has been reporting from South America, Central America, and Mexico for over ten years. Her writing has been published in the Nation, the Guardian, Vancouver Sun, Globe and Mail, Ms. magazine, the Tyee, Georgia Straight, and NACLA, among others.
Download or read book Killer High written by Peter Andreas and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2020 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Introduction: How drugs made war and war made drugs -- Drunk on the front -- Where there's smoke there's war -- Caffeinated conflict -- Opium, empire, and Geopolitics -- Speed warfare -- Cocaine wars -- Conclusion: The drugged battlefields of the 21st century .
Download or read book The U S War on Drugs at Home and Abroad written by Jonathan D. Rosen and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2021-04-12 with total page 148 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines the U.S. war on drugs at home and abroad. It provides a brief history of the war on drugs. In addition, it analyzes drug trafficking and organized crime in Colombia and Mexico, and the role of the United States government in counternarcotics policies. This work also examines the opioid epidemic, addiction, and alternative policies.
Download or read book The War on Drugs written by Paula Mallea and published by Dundurn.com. This book was released on 2014-06-28 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Explores the spectacular failure of the war on drugs to weaken drug cartels and the illegal drug supply, as well as the modern history of drug use and abuse, the pharmacology of illegal drugs, and the economy of the illegal drug trade.
Download or read book The War on Drugs and the Global Colour Line written by Kojo Koram and published by Pluto Press (UK). This book was released on 2019 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Fifty years of the War on Drugs has led to millions of deaths, displacements, and incarcerations. Disproportionately enacted on oppressed races, international drug prohibition has reinforced the color line across the globe. This collection reveals the racist impact of the war on drugs across multiple continents and in numerous situations, from racialized drug policing at festivals in the United Kingdom to the necropolitical wars in Juarez, Mexico, and from the exchange of drug policing programs between the United States and Israel to the management of black bodies in Brazil. Pushing forward the debate and activism led by groups such as Black Lives Matter and calling for radical changes in drug policy legislation and prison reform, this collection proves that the problem of drugs and race is an international, and intentional, disaster.
Download or read book Shooting Up written by Vanda Felbab-Brown and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2009-12-01 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Most policymakers see counterinsurgency and counternarcotics policy as two sides of the same coin. Stop the flow of drug money, the logic goes, and the insurgency will wither away. But the conventional wisdom is dangerously wrongheaded, as Vanda Felbab-Brown argues in Shooting Up. Counternarcotics campaigns, particularly those focused on eradication, typically fail to bankrupt belligerent groups that rely on the drug trade for financing. Worse, they actually strengthen insurgents by increasing their legitimacy and popular support. Felbab-Brown, a leading expert on drug interdiction efforts and counterinsurgency, draws on interviews and fieldwork in some of the world's most dangerous regions to explain how belligerent groups have become involved in drug trafficking and related activities, including kidnapping, extortion, and smuggling. Shooting Up shows vividly how powerful guerrilla and terrorist organizations — including Peru's Shining Path, the FARC and the paramilitaries in Colombia, and the Taliban in Afghanistan — have learned to exploit illicit markets. In addition, the author explores the interaction between insurgent groups and illicit economies in frequently overlooked settings, such as Northern Ireland, Turkey, and Burma. While aggressive efforts to suppress the drug trade typically backfire, Shooting Up shows that a laissez-faire policy toward illicit crop cultivation can reduce support for the belligerents and, critically, increase cooperation with government intelligence gathering. When combined with interdiction targeting major traffickers, this strategy gives policymakers a better chance of winning both the war against the insurgents and the war on drugs.
Download or read book Kingpin written by Richard Stratton and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2017-05-02 with total page 341 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This fast-paced sequel to Smuggler's Blues is a harrowing and at times comical journey through the criminal justice system at the height of America's War on Plants. Captured in the lobby of the Sheraton Senator Hotel at LAX following a fifteen-year run smuggling marijuana and hashish as part of the hippie mafia, Richard Stratton began a new journey. Kingpin tells the story of the eight years that followed, through two federal trials and the underworld of the federal prison system, at a time when it was undergoing unprecedented expansion due to the War on Drugs. Stratton was shipped by bus from LA's notorious Glass House to jails and prisons across the country, a softening process known as diesel therapy. Resisting pressure to falsely implicate his friend and mentor, Norman Mailer, he was convicted in his second trial under the kingpin statute and sentenced to twenty-five years without the possibility of parole. While doing time in prisons from Manhattan's Criminal Hilton to rural Pennsylvania, Virginia, Kentucky, and New York, he witnessed brutality as well as camaraderie, rampant trafficking of contraband, and crimes by both guards and convicts. He first learned the lessons of survival. Then he learned to prevail, becoming a jailhouse lawyer and winning the reversal of his kingpin sentence and eventual release. Kingpin includes cameos by Norman Mailer, Muhammad Ali, and John Gotti, and an account of the author's friendship with mafia don Joe Stassi, a legendary hitman from the early days of the mob who knew gangsters Meyer Lansky, Bugsy Siegel, and Abe Zwillman and has insights into the killing of Dutch Schultz and the Kennedy assassination. Kingpin is the second volume in Richard Stratton's trilogy, Remembrance of the War on Plants.
Download or read book War on Drugs written by Neal Bernards and published by Greenhaven Press, Incorporated. This book was released on 1990 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Presents sets of differing opinions on a range of social, political, and legal issues associated with the war on drugs.
Download or read book The War on Drugs Is a War on Freedom written by Laurence M. Vance and published by . This book was released on 2012-09-30 with total page 103 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Transforming the War on Drugs written by Annette Idler and published by Hurst Publishers. This book was released on 2021-09-30 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The war on drugs has failed, but consensus in the international drug policy debate on the way forward is missing. Amidst this moment of uncertainty, militarised lenses on the global illicit drug problem continue to neglect the complexity of the causes and consequences that this war is intended to defend or defeat. Challenging conventional thinking in defence and security sectors, Transforming the War on Drugs constitutes the first comprehensive and systematic effort to theoretically, conceptually, and empirically investigate the impacts of the war on drugs. The contributors trace the consequences of the war on drugs across vulnerable regions, including South America and Central America, West Africa, the Middle East and the Golden Crescent, the Golden Triangle, and Russia. It demonstrates that these consequences are ‘glocal’. The war’s local impacts on human rights, security, development, and public health are interdependent with transnational illicit flows. The book further reveals how these impacts have influenced the positions of governments across these regions, with significant ramifications for the international drug control regime. Crucially, it shows that, at a time when global order is in flux, critically evaluating the regime’s securitisation through the war on drugs provides key insights into other global governance realms.
Download or read book America s War on Drugs written by Mary Lu Anna Diaz and published by . This book was released on 1995 with total page 139 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Recently, Congress, the literary community, and the public at large have come to reconsider the war on drugs. There are many opinions regarding alternatives to this pseudo war or new measures to be taken in the war effort, but the ongoing effort itself has escaped evaluation (to determine if the United States is winning this campaign). The intent of this thesis, then, is to explore the objectives of the war on drugs, and to determine if America is winning. This work concludes that the current drug war is failing. The emphasis (supply or demand) and the methodology (interdiction, etc.) need to be reconsidered; and, a new plan which has the support of political and enforcement leadership must be made--its objectives should be made clear, and its goals should be meaningful, measureable and achieveable.
Download or read book How to Win the War on Drugs written by F.N. Peters and published by . This book was released on 2021 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book War on drugs written by Alexander Cockburn and published by . This book was released on 2000 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: