The memories of politicians and police have been allowed to dominate our understanding of the emergence of crack cocaine in the 1980s. A new book seeks to elevate the voices of urban Black Americans and others who experienced it directly and still live with its effects.
The state-by-state variation in marijuana laws means that legalization has the potential to create inequalities and subject some users to state violence. The history of opium in China shows the need for coherent overarching policies.
The brainchild of LAPD Chief Darryl Gates, DARE wasn't good at steering kids away from drugs. But it was good at bringing police into schools and encouraging kids to report anyone using drugs to the cops.
Amy C. Sullivan tells the history of the "Minnesota Model" of inpatient treatment followed by sponsorship and 12-step recovery, but says the model isn't working for the opioid epidemic and a pragmatic "harm reduction" approach is needed.
Violence is not so much in the DNA of the drug trade as the DNA of drug prohibition. And until both American and Mexican police forces stop treating it like a war, the violence won’t stop.
"This summer marks 50 years since the war on drugs began under President Richard Nixon. But the opioid overdose epidemic continues to ravage the country, and incarceration—especially of Black people—has skyrocketed over the past 5 decades."
A historian of past drug epidemics and narcotics regulation is an expert witness for New York State in a case against opioid manufacturers, who relaxed the regulatory standards put up in response to opioid addiction in the 19th century.
David Farber's book examines the entrepreneurial culture of crack cocaine and how the drug trade meshed with Reagan-era changes in urban political economy.
Source: North American Congress on Latin America (NACLA)
The history of American alliances abroad doesn't make sense as a drug control strategy, but is consistent with a strategy of invoking the war on drugs to punish governments that resist U.S. domination.
In the 1970s, just as now, people living with and recovering from substance use disorders faced prejudice and mistreatment at the hiring stage and in the workplace itself.
As Norman Ohler shows in Blitzed: Drugs in Nazi Germany, while other drugs were banned or discouraged, methamphetamine was touted as a miracle product when it appeared on the market in the late 1930s.
As cinematic portrayals of opioid use and abuse tend to be this sensational, commonplace opioid usage almost feels as if it doesn’t fit into this pattern of addiction at all.
Both supporters and opponents of legalization are quick to use sensationalism to prove their points, stunting the pursuit of real research needed to determine cannabis’ social effects.
A Colombian senator told the U.S. Embassy in 1993 that the founders of the Medellín drug cartel “financed” the election campaign of then-senator Álvaro Uribe Vélez, according to documents posted by the National Security Archive.
Rather than relying on our hopeless forty-fourth president and an even more hopeless Republican-controlled Congress, citizen groups need to mobilize together to oppose the waste of their hard earned taxpayer dollars in the War on Drugs.
