Notwithstanding the title, The War on Drugs: A History, this illuminating book is not “a” history of “the” War on Drugs but an edited collection with a sampling of new research into the intertwined histories of drug regulation and criminalization, deregulation and decriminalization, both in the United States and around the world. To use the parlance of Jotwell, I like this book a lot.
But I am also writing this Jot because I worry that the title may mislead legal scholars into thinking that this is only a book for historians of criminal law or scholars of the “carceral state.” It certainly offers insights for those burgeoning subfields. But it contains a little something for everyone—well, everyone in the legal academy—whether they focus on the administrative state, on international law and foreign relations, or even on corporations. Indeed, one lesson reinforced by this book is that siloing the fields I just listed into separate scholarly communities, publications, and curriculums can hinder understanding of the various forms of relief and suffering, power and oppression, wealth and poverty produced by the drug trade and efforts to control that trade.
In law schools, the War on Drugs is often categorized as a “criminal law” topic or, in recent years, a “mass incarceration” topic. Should policymakers treat drug use as a crime or a public health issue? How should we understand and respond to racial disparities in arrest and imprisonment rates? These are important questions but, considered in isolation, could give students the distorted impression that narcotics have somehow been an idiosyncratic concern of U.S. politicians, rather than global commodities with long, complex, and transnational histories.
Drug historians, instead, have long written about the War on Drugs, in its Nixon-Reagan-Clinton-era iterations, as part of those longer and global histories. Law matters in this venerable and often eye-popping historiography, but domestic criminal law is only one piece of the story, since the initial decision to define any given substance as illicit has often been made somewhere else before getting backed up with local criminal prohibition. The War on Drugs is best understood as a “law” topic writ large, encompassing multilateral treaties, import-export regimes, taxation, corporate governance, and a variety of other legal arrangements, all of which have historically combined to decide, for example, which coca derivatives would become dental anesthetics or soda flavoring, and which were destined only for a future as street-grade cocaine.1
The multifaceted nature of the topic explains why I found this book so useful. Edited collections can feel like a disconnected group of papers, but in this case, the fact that each chapter has a different approach and preoccupation, and yet they can all be perused together in one sitting, is (as they say) a feature rather than a bug. What is the War on Drugs, after all, but a collection of historical phenomena—cultural developments, entrepreneurial adventures, policy programs, military crackdowns, etc.—undertaken by a range of actors, both state-backed and otherwise, all around the world, all with different approaches and preoccupations?
To glimpse the War on Drugs in totality, you need to think about, say, the Chicago Police Department in the 1980s, poppy growers in Afghanistan in the 1970s, Mexico’s Partido Revolucionario Institucional in the 1960s, whatever happened to Quaaludes, and then puzzle all those things around in your mind and see how you might fit them all together. By reading this book, you can have that very experience.
In a Jot, there is not space to summarize each of the book’s chapters, so I will briefly highlight two that spotlight different dimensions of the legal history of greater Chicagoland. Elaine Carey’s “The Mexico-Chicago Heroin Connection” chronicles the Herrera drug trafficking organization; Peter Pihos’s “The Local War on Drugs” reconstructs how police and prosecutors ramped up the number of drug convictions in the 1980s.
These chapters exemplify a recurring theme throughout this volume (and drug historiography more generally): the interplay between drug enforcement and state-building. By the late twentieth century, scholars generally deem the American state fairly “built,” yet these chapters reveal deep caverns of ignorance, discoordination, and fragmentation beneath the surface. They show lawmakers and enforcers bumbling into processes and organizations they did not fully understand. An arrest might not be the end of an investigation but the tip-off to begin one. State actors used the tools of criminal law to map the drug trade, not just police it, and then, in an iterative loop, used their newfound knowledge to ask legislators for more tools.
Structured around the concept of “punitive capacity,” Pihos’s chapter documents how local actors pieced together over time the power to incarcerate large numbers of Chicago residents. New law-on-the-books, alone, could not and did not automatically produce mass incarceration; law-in-action also had to change. As late as 1980, Chicago police were making lots of arrests, but Cook County judges were only sentencing “half of a percent of drug-related arrestees to prison.” (P. 131.) Then, Richard M. Daley, elected state’s attorney on a tough-on-crime platform, commanded line prosecutors “to take many more cases to trial” and to file monthly reports documenting “their success in sending people to prison.” (P. 138.) He established special drug teams, staffed with especially “aggressive prosecutors,” and beefed up warrant applications to make sure that evidence held up in court. (P. 139.)
Carey provides complementary insights into the state’s investigative capacity (or lack thereof). A theme of Carey’s chapter is how little state agents knew about the Herrera organization. In 1973, when two dozen members were caught up in a Chicago gang bust, a police captain claimed that the ring had existed for “four to five years”; actually, they had been operating throughout Mexico and the United States for two decades. (Pp. 70-71.) Into the 1970s, law enforcement agencies employed few Spanish-speaking officers; ignorance of basic Mexican naming conventions generated confusion about the family tree and “which Herreras they needed to surveil.” (Pp. 72-74.)
Racial stereotypes reinforced this tendency to underestimate and misunderstand. Policymakers described Mexican drug labs as “primitive” in contrast to European ones—ignoring, Carey notes, Mexico’s “robust” pharmaceutical industry and university chemistry programs. (Pp. 67-69.) Over time, some of these gaps were addressed. Local arrests triggered more in-depth investigations by congressional committees and federal agencies. By the 1980s, the DEA had invested in bilingual agents, while also mastering new lawfare tactics recently authorized by Congress such as wiretapping and asset forfeiture. (Pp. 79-82.)
Together, these chapters underscore the importance, for legal historians, of attending to the state’s weaknesses and discontinuities.2 The various nodes and pathways of influence connecting state actors must always be charted and documented with evidence at a particular point in time, not assumed. We cannot presume that a Zeus-like “state” already existed at Point A and then decided at Point B to direct some lightning bolts towards drugs, thus reducing the historiographical debate into questions of why “the state” made that decision or whether it should have. Decisions to police drugs could set in motion events through which state entities gained new powers, and these powers presented more options to policymakers, making the War on Drugs ever less aspirational (and ever less metaphorical) over time.
In addition to the collection’s scholarly value, I would also recommend The War on Drugs: A History as a teaching resource. If your university library offers access to the e-book, it is easy to assign a chapter or two (which students can download as individual PDFs). And the book has a companion website linking to related images and primary sources.
- On coca, see, e.g., Paul Gootenberg, Andean Cocaine: The Making of a Global Drug (2009). On the need to integrate the drug war into more general questions about state power and governance, see Kathleen J. Frydl, The Drug Wars in America, 1940-1973 at 13-14, 418-29 (2013).
- Thus, the collection builds on Frydl’s point that “the state’s aggressive posture in the drug war is in fact a testament to the limits of its other resources, as well as to the fragile legitimacy of its institutions and activities.” Kathleen J. Frydl, The Drug Wars in America, 1940-1973, at 14 (2013).
