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| 1 |
ID:
183944
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| Summary/Abstract |
Confronted by a host of policy challenges in the summer of 1977, the new Jimmy Carter administration set about articulating its approach to U.S. drug control. Carter inherited from prior administrations, and would continue, a slate of policies centered on reducing heroin production in Asia and Latin America, particularly Mexico. Washington’s Mexico program posed a number of contradictions for the environmentalist and human-rights president. Abuses by Mexican soldiers and police during drug-control sweeps and Mexico’s use of herbicides to destroy marijuana generated controversy, but domestic drug policy likewise presented dilemmas. Between 1973 and 1976, seven states had decriminalized marijuana possession and candidate Carter’s remarks about reforming marijuana laws led supporters to soon expect a reversal of the country’s punitive approach to marijuana use. Carter’s main drug policy advisor, Peter G. Bourne, pushed for unequivocal federal-level decriminalization, but Carter and other advisors were concerned that Bourne was too dismissive of harm from marijuana. When the policy paper was finally released, many of Bourne’s draft statements, describing the harm from marijuana as “minimal” and marijuana prohibition as an “unhappy and misguided chapter” in U.S. history, were cut. Ultimately, Carter did not want the White House to be seen as advocating marijuana use.
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| 2 |
ID:
183945
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| Summary/Abstract |
Often dubbed “America’s longest war,” the U.S. War on Drugs has an even longer history than most observers realize.1 At the heart of that history lies a paradox; the drug war has failed, over and over, and yet it manages to persist. To its defenders, including generations of policymakers on both sides of the aisle, the drug war is a difficult but necessary campaign to protect the U.S. population from a scourge of addiction, crime, and foreign enemies. To its many critics, the War on Drugs is better described as a war on people and therefore a tool of imperialism, social control, and white supremacy. In that view, this so-called war looks less like a total failure and more like a wild success—a clash of interpretations that has major implications for the history and future of the drug war.
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