1st Edition
Drugs, Power, and Politics Narco Wars, Big Pharma, and the Subversion of Democracy
By Carl Boggs
Copyright 2015
268 Pages
by
Routledge
256 Pages
by
Routledge
268 Pages
by
Routledge
Also available as eBook on:
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... Read more
Chapter 1 Drugs: The Historical Matrix
Chapter 2 An American Crusade
Chapter 3 Delusions of an Epoch
Chapter 4 Drug War, Authoritarian Politics
Chapter 5 Narco Globalism
Chapter 6 The Medical-Drug Behemoth
Chapter 7 The Medicalized Society
Chapter 8 The Great Pot Wars
Biography
Carl Boggs is Professor of Social Sciences at National University in Los Angeles, Adjunct Professor at Antioch University in Los Angeles, and author or editor of numerous books including Imperial Delusions: American Militarism and Endless War (Rowman & Littlefield 2004) and Masters of War: Militarism and Blowback in an Era of American Empire (Routledge 2003).
“Drugs, Power, and Politics is that rare thing: an urgently written book about a profound political and ethical crisis that appears on the scene at the precise moment when we need it most. Carl Boggs deftly navigates the warped history of American drug policy and the misbegotten war that has ravaged two generations of young Americans and shredded basic civil liberties for all of us. Boggs focuses a merciless light on this corrosive form of social control that masquerades under a banner of moral rectitude. A fierce, brave, and exacting history that is also a passionate call for peace and redemption on the home front.”
—Jeffrey St. Clair, editor of CounterPunch and coauthor of Whiteout: The CIA, Drugs, and the Press
“A wide-ranging historical and political treatise, Drugs, Power, and Politics explores American drug policy and its consequences from the Nixon era to the present day. Trenchant, contemporary, and astute, Boggs’s book dismantles the hypocrisy surrounding drugs from early moral campaigns, media sensationalism, global economics, violent cartels, and the power and rise of huge pharmaceutical companies to the current debates about marijuana legalization. Under one cover, the reader will learn why America is stuck in a morass of misinformation, dirty politics, economic travesties,
and human suffering, all the while being lied to about the pros and cons of licit and illicit ways we medicate ourselves.”
—Patricia A. Adler, University of Colorado Professor Emerita and author of Drugs and the American Dream
