This book examines the U.S. war on drugs at home and abroad. It provides a brief history of the war on drugs. In addition, it analyzes drug trafficking and organized crime in Colombia and Mexico, and the role of the United States government in counternarcotics policies. This work also examines the opioid epidemic, addiction, and alternative policies.

This book examines the geographic displacement of the illicit drug industry as a side effect of United States foreign policy. To reduce the supply of cocaine and heroin from abroad, the US has relied on coercion against farmers, traffickers and governments, but this has only exacerbated the world's drugs problems.US Foreign Policy and the War on Dr

Introduction: How drugs made war and war made drugs -- Drunk on the front -- Where there's smoke there's war -- Caffeinated conflict -- Opium, empire, and Geopolitics -- Speed warfare -- Cocaine wars -- Conclusion: The drugged battlefields of the 21st century .

Examines how and why the US government went from regulating illicit drug traffic and consumption to declaring war on both.

One of the New York Times’s Best Books of the 21st Century Named one of the most important nonfiction books of the 21st century by Entertainment Weekly‚ Slate‚ Chronicle of Higher Education‚ Literary Hub, Book Riot‚ and Zora A tenth-anniversary edition of the iconic bestseller—"one of the most influential books of the past 20 years," according to the Chronicle of Higher Education—with a new preface by the author "It is in no small part thanks to Alexander's account that civil rights organizations such as Black Lives Matter have focused so much of their energy on the criminal justice system." —Adam Shatz, London Review of Books Seldom does a book have the impact of Michelle Alexander's The New Jim Crow. Since it was first published in 2010, it has been cited in judicial decisions and has been adopted in campus-wide and community-wide reads; it helped inspire the creation of the Marshall Project and the new $100 million Art for Justice Fund; it has been the winner of numerous prizes, including the prestigious NAACP Image Award; and it has spent nearly 250 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. Most important of all, it has spawned a whole generation of criminal justice reform activists and organizations motivated by Michelle Alexander's unforgettable argument that "we have not ended racial caste in America; we have merely redesigned it." As the Birmingham News proclaimed, it is "undoubtedly the most important book published in this century about the U.S." Now, ten years after it was first published, The New Press is proud to issue a tenth-anniversary edition with a new preface by Michelle Alexander that discusses the impact the book has had and the state of the criminal justice reform movement today.

Most policymakers see counterinsurgency and counternarcotics policy as two sides of the same coin. Stop the flow of drug money, the logic goes, and the insurgency will wither away. But the conventional wisdom is dangerously wrongheaded, as Vanda Felbab-Brown argues in Shooting Up. Counternarcotics campaigns, particularly those focused on eradication, typically fail to bankrupt belligerent groups that rely on the drug trade for financing. Worse, they actually strengthen insurgents by increasing their legitimacy and popular support. Felbab-Brown, a leading expert on drug interdiction efforts and counterinsurgency, draws on interviews and fieldwork in some of the world's most dangerous regions to explain how belligerent groups have become involved in drug trafficking and related activities, including kidnapping, extortion, and smuggling. Shooting Up shows vividly how powerful guerrilla and terrorist organizations — including Peru's Shining Path, the FARC and the paramilitaries in Colombia, and the Taliban in Afghanistan — have learned to exploit illicit markets. In addition, the author explores the interaction between insurgent groups and illicit economies in frequently overlooked settings, such as Northern Ireland, Turkey, and Burma. While aggressive efforts to suppress the drug trade typically backfire, Shooting Up shows that a laissez-faire policy toward illicit crop cultivation can reduce support for the belligerents and, critically, increase cooperation with government intelligence gathering. When combined with interdiction targeting major traffickers, this strategy gives policymakers a better chance of winning both the war against the insurgents and the war on drugs.

"Since the United States declared its "war on drugs" in the early 1980s, cocaine addiction rates have increased, "crack wars" have become an urban phenomenon, heroin use has multiplied, U.S. prisons have become overstuffed with convicted street users, and the Third World's production of narcotics has skyrocketed. U.S. drug policy failures are legion, and the essays in this volume explain why. One of the most pervasive reasons, which is addressed by several contributors to this book, is that U.S. intelligence organizations have long abetted the international traffic in narcotics as they carried out their cold-war missions. This point is rigorously argued and documented in the essays focusing on Latin America, Southeast Asia, and Pakistan." "Among other themes explored is the notion that drug policy has been formulated without paying sufficient attention to the history of narcotics as a global commodity subject to the same stimuli as other goods produced in some of the world's most impoverished nations. In addition, U.S. trade policy has been almost willfully counter-productive. Closing U.S. markets to licit agricultural goods from these nations often stimulates the production of narcotics." "With contributions from historians, criminologists, sociologists, political scientists, journalists, and policy analysts, the book provides a complete survey of U.S. narcotics policy in relation to Latin America's cocaine traffic and Asia's heroin trade."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved