Drug Hate and the Corruption of American Justice

The hatred of drugs, according to the author, is the axis of politics that has fundamentally shifted the nation's policy format—from the progressive orientation that dominated from from the time of Roosevelt to the Sixties, to the punitive orientation that emerged during the Nixon presidency and continues to this day. This triumph of the political use of drug hate is simultaneously a disaster in policy consequences as it corrupts the criminal justice system, exacerbates class inequality, drains public resources, and denies the public their Constitutional heritage. Sadofsky Baggins shows that the political success of the domestic war has overwhelmed the policy failure in the nation's deliberations. The War on Drugs is politically successful because it serves traditional racial antagonisms, media need for theater, religious needs for piety and denunciation of sinful pleasures, and maintains conservative coalition politics by emphasizing punishment over progress toward social justice. This book recognizes the need to reassess the War on Drugs as a necessary step toward national healing and future policy development. Recent popular movements and initiatives, as well as the failure of some politicians to benefit from deploying drug hate rhetoric, are considered as the opening of such an awakening.

Sadofsky Baggins treats the War on Drugs as the epic of politics and civilization in our time. This book continues his efforts to explain how well-meaning citizens and manipulative politicans and institutions construct laws that miserably fail in their intended purpose and harm the nation in significant unintended ways. This book is of interest to concerned citizens as well as scholars, researchers, and policy makers involved with legal, drug, and political issues.

DAVID SADOFSKY BAGGINS is Associate Professor of Political Science at California State University at Hayward. Among his earlier publications are The Question of Privacy in Public Policy: An Analysis of the Reagan-Bush Era (Praeger, 1993) and Knowledge as Power (Praeger, 1990).