This book explores the increasingly broad terrain of drugs in American society with an emphasis on politics. It begins with the War on Drugs initiated by President Richard Nixon in the early 1970s and extends to the current day with the vast power of the pharmaceutical industry (Big Pharma), expansion of global criminal syndicates, militarization of the drug war, and struggles between states and federal government over the legalization of marijuana. From the beginning, the drug war produced increasing authoritarian tendencies in American politics, visible not only in swollen national bureaucracies and burgeoning police functions, but in the rise of the largest prison-industrial complex in the world, a surveillance state, and the weakening of personal privacy and freedoms. At the same time, the legal drug system with some of the most profitable business operations anywhere has expanded to create a huge medical edifice, affecting the delivery of health care, development of modern psychology, evolution of the treatment industry, and many other areas of contemporary life, including the world of sports and recreation. Although prohibitionism remains very much alive, targeting a wide range of illicit drugs, today it is the hundreds of widely-marketed chemical substances sold by Big Pharma that result in some of the most serious health problems affecting society. This book explores the long historical trajectory of both the War on Drugs and the growth of Big Pharma, focusing on social outcomes and political consequences in the US and beyond.

Historians have long neglected Afghanistan's broader history when portraying the opium industry. But in Poppies, Politics, and Power, James Tharin Bradford rebalances the discourse, showing that it is not the past forty years of lawlessness that makes the opium industry what it is, but the sheer breadth of the twentieth-century Afghanistan experience. Rather than byproducts of a failed contemporary system, argues Bradford, drugs, especially opium, were critical components in the formation and failure of the Afghan state. In this history of drugs and drug control in Afghanistan, Bradford shows us how the country moved from licit supply of the global opium trade to one of the major suppliers of hashish and opium through changes in drug control policy shaped largely by the outside force of the United States. Poppies, Politics, and Power breaks the conventional modes of national histories that fail to fully encapsulate the global nature of the drug trade. By providing a global history of opium within the borders of Afghanistan, Bradford demonstrates that the country's drug trade and the government's position on that trade were shaped by the global illegal market and international efforts to suppress it. By weaving together this global history of the drug trade and drug policy with the formation of the Afghan state and issues within Afghan political culture, Bradford completely recasts the current Afghan, and global, drug trade.

Offers new and cutting-edge research on the role of drugs in Iranian society and government. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

"Tobbell analyzes the political and economic history of the alignment of the pharmaceutical industry, academic institutions and their faculty and organized medicine. This book is essential reading for policymakers and their staff as well as persons who study the history of health policy and those who contribute to it through medical research, advocacy and journalism. " -Daniel Fox, author of The Convergence of Science and Governance: Research, Health Policy, and American States "Dominique Tobbell’s vivid, balanced and probing account of pharmaceutical politics is a significant, needed analysis of the relationships between the pharmaceutical industry, university researchers, the medical profession and government in the Cold War period. More than this, Pills, Power, and Policy shows why it continues to be difficult to agree in the United States on the relative roles of corporate enterprise, government regulation, technological innovation, freedom to prescribe, and consumer marketing and protection, all played out against the rising costs of health care. Timely and thought-provoking."--Rosemary A. Stevens. DeWitt Wallace Distinguished Scholar, Department of Psychiatry, Weill Cornell Medical College "A superb and compelling account of the creation of one of America’s most reviled entities: Big Pharma. With clarity and subtlety, Pills, Power, and Policy weaves together the political, economic, and the medical to reveal the entangled history behind our modern pharmaceutical predicament."--Andrea Tone, Ph.D., Professor of History & Canada Research Chair in the Social History of Medicine, McGill University “Pills, Power and Policy provides an outstanding description and analysis of the evolution of drug policy. It is an extremely important contribution to our understanding of the political, scientific, and economic nature of pharmaceutical regulation." -Daniel S. Greenberg, Washington journalist and author of Science, Money and Politics: Political Triumph and Ethical Erosion

One of the most surprising developments in Mexico's transition to democracy is the outbreak of criminal wars and large-scale criminal violence. Why did Mexican drug cartels go to war as the country transitioned away from one-party rule? And why have criminal wars proliferated as democracy has consolidated and elections have become more competitive subnationally? In Votes, Drugs, and Violence, Guillermo Trejo and Sandra Ley develop a political theory of criminal violence in weak democracies that elucidates how democratic politics and the fragmentation of power fundamentally shape cartels' incentives for war and peace. Drawing on in-depth case studies and statistical analysis spanning more than two decades and multiple levels of government, Trejo and Ley show that electoral competition and partisan conflict were key drivers of the outbreak of Mexico's crime wars, the intensification of violence, and the expansion of war and violence to the spheres of local politics and civil society.

At least 200,000-250,000 people died in the war in Bosnia. "There are three million child soldiers in Africa." "More than 650,000 civilians have been killed as a result of the U.S. occupation of Iraq." "Between 600,000 and 800,000 women are trafficked across borders every year." "Money laundering represents as much as 10 percent of global GDP." "Internet child porn is a $20 billion-a-year industry." These are big, attention-grabbing numbers, frequently used in policy debates and media reporting. Peter Andreas and Kelly M. Greenhill see only one problem: these numbers are probably false. Their continued use and abuse reflect a much larger and troubling pattern: policymakers and the media naively or deliberately accept highly politicized and questionable statistical claims about activities that are extremely difficult to measure. As a result, we too often become trapped by these mythical numbers, with perverse and counterproductive consequences. This problem exists in myriad policy realms. But it is particularly pronounced in statistics related to the politically charged realms of global crime and conflict-numbers of people killed in massacres and during genocides, the size of refugee flows, the magnitude of the illicit global trade in drugs and human beings, and so on. In Sex, Drugs, and Body Counts, political scientists, anthropologists, sociologists, and policy analysts critically examine the murky origins of some of these statistics and trace their remarkable proliferation. They also assess the standard metrics used to evaluate policy effectiveness in combating problems such as terrorist financing, sex trafficking, and the drug trade.

In The Global Politics of Pharmaceutical Monopoly Power, researcher and global advocate Ellen 't Hoen explains how new global rules for pharmaceutical patenting impact access to medicines in the developing world. The book gives an account of the current debates on intellectual property, access to medicines, and medical innovation, and provides historical context that explains how the current system emerged. This book supports major policy changes in the management of pharmaceutical patents and the way medical innovation is financed in order to protect public health and, in particular, promote access to essential medicines for all. The Open Society Institute provided support to translate this report into Russian.