Crack in America: Demon Drugs and Social Justice

By: Reinarman, Craig

Book Overview

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.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0520202422
• ISBN13: 9780520202429
• Release Date: August 1970
• Publisher: University of California Press
• Length: 359 Pages
• Weight: 1.10 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 6.0" x 8.9"

Customer Reviews

Absolutely essential reading

This is a truly brilliant book that utterly destroys the logic (if one could call it that) behind the so-called war on drugs. It is written in a highly accessible language such as to be appropriate for anyone with a concern for this topic. The genuine sympathy and concern of the various authors shines out from each chapter. In my view, it should be required reading for every social worker, judge, police officer and policy maker. I am normally a stern critic but I cannot praise it too highly. Frederick Toates Professor of Biological Psychology, The Open University, United Kingdom.

This book is great

I'm telling you this book is really enlightening and shocking. You won't find a better laid argument against our nation's drug policies. Must Read!

The book is well-written, clear-sighted and informative

In Crack in America, Reinerman and Levine have brought together a wealth of facts and expertise. The authors' chapters are well-written, and hardhitting. Their arguments are carefully composed, and the authors present sensible alternative models. The editors and their contributors have obviously spent time and effort researching the medical, legal and social components of drugs in America and elsewhere. Reinerman, Levine, and their contributors - Loren Siegel and Ira Glasser from the ACLU, Troy Duster, Ethan Nadelman from the Lindesmith Center, Marsha Rosenbaum and Sheigla Murphy, et al, are informed by a sense of social context - the issues of class, race, the economy and popular culture. They are sharp-minded thinkers and writers, who obviously should be involved in the creation of our nation's drug policies. The answers aren't easy, but if we are going to start anywhere we first need to ask the right questions. Levine's and Reinman's book poses substantial questions and issues that must be addressed if we plan to be a more inclusive society, and not a culture that marginalizes and demonizes people in trouble.