Conclusion

Kathleen J. Frydl

doi:10.1017/CBO9781139012829.011

Conclusion

War on Trade – The Drug War as Past and Future

Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 April 2013

Kathleen J. Frydl

Book contents

Get access

Summary

Modern drugs and the war against them have produced a number of alternate states. Countless people, be they broken or bored, frail or fearless, sought refuge in the altered reality produced by drugs. Those who denounced such behavior often endorsed a set of interventions that contradicted other cherished beliefs. Conservatives who normally embraced a minimal state presence nonetheless supported aggressive state actions of interdiction and punishment; isolationists critical of U.S. international engagement came to believe that only extraterritorial action abroad would diminish the supply of drugs at home. Similarly, urban liberals and left-wing intelligentsia who worked to install confidence in the operations of the state began, in the 1980s, to express a skeptical view of the state-sponsored efforts of the “drug war.” Like the drug users they claimed to steward, crusaders of either stripe experienced a temporary disconnect when it came to drugs. Significantly, the drug war has produced an “alternate state” in the most literal sense: a statutory structure, law enforcement regime, and international project that stood astride the normal functioning of the state, ostensibly to help strengthen and legitimize its function, but ultimately demonstrating that state’s manifest weakness and vulnerability. Whether the drug war was notional, deployed mainly as a rhetorical device, or fully realized, featuring military assaults and, in the case of Manuel Noriega in Panama, toppling a regime, it is a war that has been lost.

Its futility does nothing to undermine its significance as a project of the state. Indeed, there are a number of ways in which the federal government’s prosecution of the modern drug war provides a lens through which to view the recent past. First, the state’s prosecution of the modern drug war joins with some aspects of African American history, and especially so given the newly restored focus on race discrimination and segregation above the Mason-Dixon line. What is more, while older work on the black freedom movement typically adopted a chronology that culminated in the historic legislation of the Great Society, newer scholarship maps the fight for equality onto urban history – either directly, or by sketching the white backlash that animated suburban development – and brings the story well into the 1970s.

Type: Chapter
Information: The Drug Wars in America, 1940–1973 , pp. 418 - 440

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139012829.011 [Opens in a new window]

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Print publication year: 2013

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Sugrue, Thomas, Sweet Land of Liberty: The Forgotten Struggle for Civil Rights in the North (New York: Random House, 2009)

Self, Robert O., American Babylon: Race and the Struggle for Postwar Oakland (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005)

Kruse, Kevin M., White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of the Modern Conservative Movement (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007)

Lassiter, Matthew D., The Silent Majority: Suburban Politics in the Sunbelt South (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007)

Schneider, Eric C., Smack: Heroin and the American City (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008)

Okrent, Daniel details these antagonisms in Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition (New York: Scribner, 2011)

Provine, Doris Marie, Unequal Under Law: Race in the War on Drugs (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), p. 12

Narcotic Misconceptions, by Martel, Nick (2012)

Anslinger, Harry, The Murderers: The Story of Narcotic Gangs (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Cudahy, 1961), p. 167

Marshall, , Cocaine Politics: Drugs, Armies, and the CIA in Central America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998)

Wilkinson, Daniel, “The Killers of Colombia,” New York Review of Books 58, no. 11 (June 23, 2011): 38–41Google Scholar

Maier, Charles S., “Consigning the Twentieth Century to History: Alternative Narratives for the Modern Era,” American Historical Review 105, no. 3 (June 2000): 807–31Google Scholar

Anderson, Benedict, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1991)

Mann, Michael, The Sources of Social Power, Volume II (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993)

Blackbourn, David, The Long Nineteenth Century: A History of Germany, 1780–1918 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998)

Mora, Anthony P., Border Dilemmas: Racial and National Uncertainties in New Mexico, 1848–1912 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011)

Limerick, Patricia Nelson, The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West (New York: Norton, 1987)

John, Rachel St., Line in the Sand: A History of the Western US-Mexico Border (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011)

Jacobs, and Skocpol, , Health Care Reform and American Politics: What Everyone Needs to Know (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010)

Silverstein, Gordon, Law’s Allure: How Law Shapes, Constrains, Saves and Kills Politics (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009)

Ecker-Racz, L. L., “Tax Simplification in This Federal System,” Law and Contemporary Problems 34 (1969): 781Google Scholar

Turner, James R., “Federal-State Cooperation in Tax Administration,” William and Mary Law Review, Issue 4 (1968): 958–71Google Scholar

Gilmore, Ruth Wilson, Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007)

Perkinson, Robert, Texas Tough: The Rise of America’s Prison Empire (New York: Picador, 2010)

Drucker, Ernest, A Plague of Prisons: The Epidemiology of Mass Incarceration in America (New York: New Press, 2011)

Gardbaum, , “New Deal Constitutionalism and the Unshackling of the States,” University of Chicago Law Review 64 (1997): 483–566Google Scholar

Peck, Garrett, The Prohibition Hangover: Alcohol in America from Demon Rum to Cult Cabernet (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2009)

Morgan, Patricia A., “Power, Politics, and Public Health: The Political Power of the Alcohol Beverage Industry,” Journal of Public Health Policy 9, no. 2 (Summer 1988): 187Google Scholar

Nagin, Daniel S., “Criminal Deterrence Research at the Outset of the Twenty First Century,” Crime and Justice 23 (1998): 1–42Google Scholar

Tyler, T. R., Why People Obey The Law: Procedural Justice, Legitimacy, and Compliance (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990)

“Police Fairness,” in Fairness and Effectiveness in Policing: The Evidence, Skogan, and Frydl, , eds. (Washington, DC: National Academies Press, 2004), chap. 8

Fagan, Jeff and Meares, Tracy, “Punishment, Deterrence and Social Control: The Paradox of Punishment in Minority Communities,” Ohio State Journal of Criminal Law 6 (2008): 173–229Google Scholar

Durkheim, Emile on anomie in Suicide: A Study in Sociology, Spaulding and Simpson translation (London: Routledge: 1952)

Weber, Max, Wirtschaft and Gesellschaft, Talcott Parsons introduction (London: W. Hodge, 1947)

Wilson, James Q., The Investigators: Managing FBI and Narcotics Agents (New York: Basic Books, 1978)

Rachal, Patricia, Federal Narcotics Enforcement: Reorganization and Reform (Boston: Auburn House, 1982)

Nadelmann, Ethan A., Cops Across Borders: The Internationalization of US Law Enforcement (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1993): chaps. 3–5

Howell, and Shyrock, , “Cracking Down on Diaspora: Arab Detroit and America’s War on Terror,” Anthropological Quarterly 76, no. 3 (2003): 443–62Google Scholar

Book contents

Conclusion

Summary

Access options

References

Save book to Kindle

Save book to Dropbox

Save book to Google Drive