the War on Drugs and racial disparities in the criminal justice system, Alexander started to focus more firmly on mass incarceration. The title The New Jim Crow refers to the fact that the War on Drugs is a racist response to the Civil Rights movement just as the original Jim Crow was a direct response to emancipation. Rhetoric related to the War on Drugs presented a narrative that drove fears deep within the mind of the American public: centering on inner city urban ghettos filled with African Americans using and… Continue Reading...
Drug Enforcement Administration, the Controlled Substances Act, and the War on Drugs all show that drug prohibition has been framed as a federal issue. Recent state-by-state legalization of cannabis (marijuana) has challenged and undermined the efficacy of federal drug laws and anti-drug policies. Almost half the states have now legalized marijuana for either medical or recreational use (Hill, 2015). The state-by-state legalization scheme creates legal and ethical conundrums. For example, Hill points out that federal anti-drug legislation prohibits legal marijuana businesses operating in states like Colorado to use national financial institutions for banking. Without access to the usual… Continue Reading...
sustain an addiction than it is to acquire food.
In fact, the film shows that the war on drugs is the main problem. The government of Afghanistan, ostensibly due to international anti-drug pressure from the UK and the United States, has obliterated opium poppy crops -- the main source of income for many rural families. Cut off from their primary source of income, the families in those regions have nothing else to live on and thus use drugs because it is cheaper than eating and also cuts down their appetites. Drugs are a natural human need, and the war on drugs only makes the situation… Continue Reading...
a drug issue that they have never before had to deal with, their support for a hard-line stance on the war on drugs has shifted: now, as it is their own children and family members who are being affected… Continue Reading...
healing. Ideally, the social worker in Joe's case recognizes the inherent harm that the war on drugs creates, and advocate on behalf of Joe. Social work aims to reduce harm, which means refusing to place moral judgments on people like Joe and to especially refrain from criminalizing the client or diverting clients into the criminal justice system.
However, social workers also understand how policies constrain their ability to take action to help people like Joe. Joe's case exhibits gaps in service delivery related to intersectionality and social class status. Guiding principles… Continue Reading...
on the individual's worldview and his belief in the possibility for change.
Policy: The War on Drugs
The War on Drugs has been described as "the most expensive and longest-running policy initiatives ever pursued by the American government," (Williams, 2016). However, the war on drugs is not a singular piece of legislation but the War on Drugs does refer to a cohesive public policy that affects people like the 23-year-old black male. The primary target of the war on drugs is Black men, who are disproportionately represented in prison populations for drug offenses (Drug Policy Alliance, 2017). Likewise, Holloway (n.d.) reveals striking evidence… Continue Reading...
the War on Drugs is a pretext for oppressing the black community, as is evidenced by the fact that black defendants are routinely denied representation and are threatened to accept plea deals to avoid the possibility of even harsher sentences—but all the same they get sucked into the prison industrial complex all the same, and once inside there is almost no possibility of escape;3 and 3) the “prison label” is applied to ex-convicts to keep them oppressed even after they are released from prison, which makes it harder for them… Continue Reading...
the War on Drugs, the government only strengthened cannabis, a plant whose intoxicating qualities are so desirable that almost 15 million Americans risk arrest each month by smoking it” (Pollan, p.130). “America jailed more of their citizens than any other country in history, and every three of those were in prison because of their involvement with drugs, nearly fifty thousand of them solely for crimes involving marijuana. In the last years of the 20th century, a series of Supreme Court cases and government actions specifically involving marijuana led to a… Continue Reading...
the war on drugs, and so on. The government in America is authoritarian in the sense that behind the elected positions is a “deep state” of unelected officials—officials who are appointed, administration after administration to keep the “state” running while the representatives who serve as window dressing for the state are rotated out over 4 to 8 years.
In Russia, the situation is the same. Putin is recognized globally as the supreme power in Russia, and yet the Russian state has a system similar to the Western form of democracy,… Continue Reading...
