Crack In America : Demon Drugs and Social Justice / Reinarman/Levine; ed. by Craig Reinarman, Harry G. Levine.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Reinarman/Levine, Author.

Contributor:

Levine, Harry G., Editor.

Reinarman, Craig, 1948- Editor.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Cocaine abuse--United States.

Cocaine abuse.

Crack (Drug)--United States.

Crack (Drug).

Drug control--United States.

Drug control.

Drugs and mass media--United States--United States.

Drugs and mass media.

Drugs and mass media--United States.

Social problems.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (359 p.) ill

Place of Publication:

Berkeley, CA : University of California Press, [1998]

Language Note:

In English.

Summary:

Crack in America is the definitive book on crack cocaine. In reinterpreting the crack story, it offers new understandings of both drug addiction and drug prohibition. It shows how crack use arose in the face of growing unemployment, poverty, racism, and shrinking social services. It places crack in its historical context-as the latest in a long line of demonized drugs-and it examines the crack scare as a phenomenon in its own right. Most important, it uses crack and the crack scare as windows onto America's larger drug and drug policy problems.Written by a team of veteran drug researchers in medicine, law, and the social sciences, this book provides the most comprehensive, penetrating, and original analysis of the crack problem to date. It reviews the social pharmacology of crack and offers rich ethnographic case studies of crack binging, addiction, and sales. It explores crack's different impacts on whites, blacks, the middle class, and the poor, and explains why crack was always much less of a problem in other countries such as Canada, Australia, and The Netherlands.Crack in America helps readers understand why the United States has the most repressive, expensive, and yet least effective drug policy in the Western world. It discusses the ways politicians and the media generated the crack scare as the centerpiece of the War on Drugs. It catalogues the costs of the War on Drugs for civil liberties, situates crack use and sales in the political economy of the inner cities in the 1980s, and shows how the drug war led to the most massive wave of imprisonment in U.S. history. Finally, it explains why the failures of drug prohibition have led to the emergence of the harm reduction movement and other opposition forces that are changing the face of U.S. drug policy.

Contents:

Frontmatter

CONTENTS

LIST OF FIGURES AND TABLES

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

CONTRIBUTORS

1. Crack in Context: America's Latest Demon Drug

2. The Crack Attack: Politics and Media in the Crack Scare

PART I. MYTHS AND REALITIES

Introduction

3. In Search of Horatio Alger: Culture and Ideology in the Crack Economy

4. The Contingent Call of the Pipe: Bingeing and Addiction Among Heavy Cocaine Smokers

5. Two Women Who Used Cocaine Too Much: Class, Race, Gender, Crack, and Coke

6. Crack and Homicide in New York City: A Case Study in the Epidemiology of Violence

7. The Social Pharmacology of Smokeable Cocaine: Not All It's Cracked Up To Be

PART II. CRACK IN COMPARABLE SOCIETIES

8. Crack Use in Canada: A Distant American Cousin

9. Crack in Australia: Why Is There No Problem?

10. Crack in the Netherlands: Effective Social Policy Is Effective Drug Policy

PART III. THE PRICE OF REPRESSION

11. "When Constitutional Rights Seem Too Extravagant To Endure": The Crack Scare's Impact on Civil Rights and Liberties

12. The Pregnancy Police Fight the War on Drugs

13. Pattern, Purpose, and Race in the Drug War: The Crisis of Credibility in Criminal Justice

14. Drug Prohibition in the U.S.: Costs, Consequences, and Alternatives

PART IV. FROM PUNITIVE PROHIBITION TO HARM REDUCTION

15. Punitive Prohibition in America

16. The Cultural Contradictions of Punitive Prohibition

17. Real Opposition, Real Alternatives: Reducing the Harms of Drug Use and Drug Policy

Epilogue. We've Been Here Before: Excerpts from the 1967 Report of the Task Force on Narcotics and Drug Abuse of the President's Commission on Law Enforcement and the Administration of Justice

SUBJECT INDEX

NAME INDEX

Notes:

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 09. Dez 2023)

ISBN:

0-520-91691-3

0-585-09107-2