War On Drugs: Studies In The Failure Of U.s. Narcotics Policy

About this book

Since the United States declared its "war on drugs" in the early 1980s, cocaine addiction rates have increased, "crack wars" have become an urban phenomenon, heroin use has multiplied, U.S. prisons have become overstuffed with convicted street users, and the Third World's production of narcotics has skyrocketed. U.S. drug policy failures are legion, and the essays in this volume explain why. One of the most pervasive reasons, which is addressed by several contributors to this book, is that U.S. intelligence organizations have long abetted the international traffic in narcotics as they carried out their cold-war missions. This point is rigorously argued and documented in the essays focusing on Latin America, Southeast Asia, and Pakistan.Among other themes explored is the notion that drug policy has been formulated without paying sufficient attention to the history of narcotics as a global commodity subject to the same stimuli as other goods produced in some of the world's most impoverished nations. In addition, U.S. trade policy has been almost willfully counter-productive. Closing U.S. markets to licit agricultural goods from these nations often stimulates the production of narcotics.With contributions from historians, criminologists, sociologists, political scientists, journalists, and policy analysts, the book provides a complete survey of U.S. narcotics policy in relation to Latin America's cocaine traffic and Asia's heroin trade.