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Stuart J Kaufman, The Drug War as a Tragedy and a Crime, International Studies Review, Volume 23, Issue 3, September 2021, Pages 1010–1011, https://doi.org/10.1093/isr/viab010
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Extract
Horace Bartilow's creative and important new book starts with a simple-seeming question: given that the United States’ war on drugs has failed, why do both Democratic and Republican presidential administrations continue to pursue it? The failure is clear, as widespread drug abuse and the attendant crime remain rampant in the United States and beyond. The reason for the failure is equally clear: the United States persists with a heavy-handed and militarized “supply-reduction” approach to addressing the problem of drug addiction rather than a more humane “demand-reduction” strategy focused on drug treatment, despite repeated studies showing the latter to be the more effective approach (pp. 21–22, 28).
Bartilow's answer to this puzzle starts with the observation that the war on drugs has been a great budgetary success, with over $15 billion appropriated for the war on drugs in 2010 and $25 billion in 2014 (p. 22). Numerous beneficiaries of this spending exist, but Bartilow zeroes in on the large corporations that have persistently lobbied for such a massive and militarized effort. This is the answer to Bartilow's question: the drug war is attributable to a system of “embedded corporatism,” in which a C. Wright Millsian power elite crafts policy for its own benefit, indifferent to human costs the policy inflicts. Part II of the book documents those human costs.
