Drug Wars

2004 History

Author : Curtis Marez
Release : 2004
Genre : History
Kind : eBook
Book Rating : 591/5 ( reviews)

Book Synopsis Drug Wars by : Curtis Marez

Download or read book Drug Wars written by Curtis Marez. This book was released on 2004. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Inaugurated in 1984, America's "War on Drugs" is just the most recent skirmish in a standoff between global drug trafficking and state power. From Britain's nineteenth-century Opium Wars in China to the activities of Colombia's drug cartels and their suppression by U.S.-backed military forces today, conflicts over narcotics have justified imperial expansion, global capitalism, and state violence, even as they have also fueled the movement of goods and labor around the world. In Drug Wars, cultural critic Curtis Marez examines two hundred years of writings, graphic works, films, and music that both demonize and celebrate the commerce in cocaine, marijuana, and opium, providing a bold interdisciplinary exploration of drugs in the popular imagination. Ranging from the writings of Sigmund Freud to pro-drug lord Mexican popular music, gangsta rap, and Brian De Palma's 1983 epic Scarface, Drug Wars moves from the representations and realities of the Opium Wars to the long history of drug and immigration enforcement on the U.S.-Mexican border, and to cocaine use and interdiction in South America, Middle Europe, and among American Indians. Throughout Marez juxtaposes official drug policy and propaganda with subversive images that challenge and sometimes even taunt government and legal efforts. As Marez shows, despite the state's best efforts to use the media to obscure the hypocrisies and failures of its drug policies-be they lurid descriptions of Chinese opium dens in the English popular press or Nancy Reagan's "Just Say No" campaign-marginalized groups have consistently opposed the expansion of state power that drug traffic has historically supported. Curtis Marez is assistant professorof critical studies at the University of Southern California School of Cinema-Television.

Home Grown

2012-04-23 History

Author : Isaac Campos
Release : 2012-04-23
Genre : History
Kind : eBook
Book Rating : 682/5 ( reviews)

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Book Synopsis Home Grown by : Isaac Campos

Download or read book Home Grown written by Isaac Campos. This book was released on 2012-04-23. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Historian Isaac Campos combines wide-ranging archival research with the latest scholarship on the social and cultural dimensions of drug-related behavior in this telling of marijuana's remarkable history in Mexico. Introduced in the sixteenth century by the Spanish, cannabis came to Mexico as an industrial fiber and symbol of European empire. But, Campos demonstrates, as it gradually spread to indigenous pharmacopoeias, then prisons and soldiers' barracks, it took on both a Mexican name--marijuana--and identity as a quintessentially "Mexican" drug. A century ago, Mexicans believed that marijuana could instantly trigger madness and violence in its users, and the drug was outlawed nationwide in 1920. Home Grown thus traces the deep roots of the antidrug ideology and prohibitionist policies that anchor the drug-war violence that engulfs Mexico today. Campos also counters the standard narrative of modern drug wars, which casts global drug prohibition as a sort of informal American cultural colonization. Instead, he argues, Mexican ideas were the foundation for notions of "reefer madness" in the United States. This book is an indispensable guide for anyone who hopes to understand the deep and complex origins of marijuana's controversial place in North American history.

Cultivating Drug Wars

2023

Author : Joel Salvador Herrera
Release : 2023
Genre :
Kind : eBook
Book Rating : /5 ( reviews)

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Book Synopsis Cultivating Drug Wars by : Joel Salvador Herrera

Download or read book Cultivating Drug Wars written by Joel Salvador Herrera. This book was released on 2023. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Drug trafficking represents a major sociopolitical concern across the developing world. In Latin America, organized crime groups have emerged as quasi-governmental authorities that exercise strict control over local economies and political institutions. Through a comparative-historical analysis of two Mexican states (Sinaloa and Michoac n), this dissertation explains the origins of illicit drug markets, as well as social responses to contemporary dynamics of criminal rule. I argue that the expansion of the drug trade in the twentieth century stems from state building projects that attempted to modernize the countryside, and from the selective application of prohibitionist policies in drug-producing regions and trafficking centers. By the turn of the century, trafficking networks, commonly referred to as drug cartels, emerged as perpetrators of violence in the context of militarized state repression. In Sinaloa, its eponymous cartel initiated a series of armed conflicts in key border cities that gave it the semblance organizational coherence. Yet its horizontal structure made the network resilient in the face of internal schisms and leadership removals. In southern Michoac n, criminal actors emerged as de facto local authorities, governing their communities through violence and exorbitant taxation. I argue that repressive criminal rule elicited an armed reaction from local elites who organized vigilante groups that reflected the region's unequal agrarian social structures.

Beyond the War on Drugs

1990-03 Political Science

Author : Steven Wisotsky
Release : 1990-03
Genre : Political Science
Kind : eBook
Book Rating : 359/5 ( reviews)

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Book Synopsis Beyond the War on Drugs by : Steven Wisotsky

Download or read book Beyond the War on Drugs written by Steven Wisotsky. This book was released on 1990-03. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This provocative and controversial book rejects the popular pablum of more laws, more money, more enforcement personnel, and more jails as the road to victory in the "war on drugs." Author Steven Wisotsky masterfully documents the failure of the drug war and the erroneous premise central to its destructive and doomed strategy: the idea that drug taking controls human behavior; that drugs "cause" physical dependency. Americans must move beyond the war on drugs by repudiating their obsessive preoccupation with controlling or prohibiting drugs. Instead, we must replace this mindset with a new view that acknowledges individual freedom and the power of directing our choices toward responsible human behavior. According to Wisotsky, the idea of "waging war" on drugs is central to the problem rather than a fundamental part of any solution. He takes the Reagan-Bush-Bennett campaign to task for its failed efforts to cut the supply of drugs, reduce public demand, and enforce laws regarding the sale and distribution of controlled substances. Wisotsky contends that the war on drugs will remain inadequate so long as society continues to be seduced by the battle cries of its own stepped-up combat in which the "enemy" (drugs) must be eradicated at all cost. The rationale for doing battle has become so embedded in the public mind that we no longer recognize the need for a critical review of social policy, strategy, or the methods needed to achieve our desired goals. Have we simply created a new type of Prohibition, which is destined to fail? And if this is the case, then what does it say about our society? Have we lost the ability to reflect critically on our social motives and purposes, as well as our justification for the actions we take, simply because we've declared "war" on the "enemy" and we aren't going to stop the good fight until we've "won"? Beyond the War on Drugs offers hard-hitting arguments to support the growing public opinion that this war, as it is currently conceived, cannot be won and ought not to be fought. Wisotsky argues persuasively for a reassessment of this struggle. We must go beyond the war on drugs to develop a public policy that acknowledges human intelligence, free choice, and individual responsibility.

Marijuana Boom

2020-03-24 History

Author : Lina Britto
Release : 2020-03-24
Genre : History
Kind : eBook
Book Rating : 478/5 ( reviews)

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Book Synopsis Marijuana Boom by : Lina Britto

Download or read book Marijuana Boom written by Lina Britto. This book was released on 2020-03-24. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Before Colombia became one of the world’s largest producers of cocaine in the 1980s, traffickers from the Caribbean coast partnered with American buyers in the 1970s to make the South American country the main supplier of marijuana for a booming US drug market, fueled by the US hippie counterculture. How did Colombia become central to the creation of an international drug trafficking circuit? Marijuana Boom is the story of this forgotten history. Combining deep archival research with unprecedented oral history, Lina Britto deciphers a puzzle: Why did the Colombian coffee republic, a model of Latin American representative democracy and economic modernization, transform into a drug paradise, and at what cost?

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Drug Wars

Home Grown

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