The United States had in its history, many wars against the international terrorism after the 11. September is generally considered to be the longest. The really longest, however, is a “war” – called fight Inside. More than 70 000 people came into the country alone in 2017 by drug abuse, died. The drug war is raging harder and harder. Currently apply between a half a Million Americans as dependent on heroin, more than 11 million are to be dependent on painkillers. The historian Timo Bonengel has presented against this Background, in the context of his Erfurt dissertation, an analysis of the “war on Drugs” from the 1960s until the early 1990s. He stresses that the American drug policy during the investigation period, always in close connection to social discourses of poverty, crime and ethnic minorities.
Bonengels claim is huge. He aims at nothing less than a “systematic historical analysis of the modern war on Drugs’ as a Social and health policy”. He can redeem this claim only in part, is for a Dissertation is not uncommon. To the Ritual of such writings is part of it nowadays, obviously, to set the theoretical framework, which can then be empirically filled in often. In this case, it is Foucault, the appeal to Michel and its power term, without the work – not least because of the numerous and profitable archival research in the United States – would get on well. Bonengels book contains much that is interesting and worth Reading. This includes the cooperation of law enforcement and health authorities as well as health experts had at the beginning of the “war on Drugs”, a war that President Richard Nixon in 1971, out. For Nixon, the drug abuse America’s “public enemy number one”, and this at a time in which the Vietnam war was raging unabated, and the American society deeply split.
the 37 Advanced. President especially the consistent law enforcement in drug policy in the forefront of his strategy, his successor Gerald Ford and then Democrat Jimmy Carter in the White house to decriminalisation and liberalisation sought. This was mainly related to the consumption of marijuana. This drug played a political adviser in the White house as the psychiatrist Peter Bourne, a crucial role. A change in the discourse was. The consumption of marijuana has been decriminalized””. At the level of the individual States of Oregon, 1973 had made the beginning, and the possession of small amounts of marijuana quasi-legalized. It’s eleven of the Federal States of Colorado over Ohio, Alaska, California, Maine, Minnesota, South Dakota, Mississippi, New York, North Carolina, and Nebraska followed up in 1978.
Also, cocaine was considered temporarily as a quasi – “manageable”, because scientific experts considered the primarily white consumers with middle – and upper-class in their use of drugs, in many places, as “capable of self-leadership”. A certain amount of “Permissiveness” was to Bonengel wide. Of ,a controlled‘ drug use, the speech was now in some places. The “rehabilitative welfare state” was write-UPS summoned, an indication of the “socio-cultural Dimension” of “Significance” in drug policy, as the author maintains. Nevertheless, the law enforcement of drug abuse did not let up.
were affected after Bonengel, but especially in “precarious conditions of the ethnic minorities living in the large cities”. With the presidency of the Republican Ronald Reagan, who succeeded Carter in 1981, was accompanied by a paradigm shift in the policy of the fight against drugs. Promoted by Reagan’s drug policy Advisor, Carlton Turner, advanced henceforth preventive strategies in the foreground.
Bonengel speaks of the “disciplining techniques of Government”. This stressed the importance of deterrence, and “zero tolerance”, and put the individual more in the forefront of the Federal political attention. “Instead of social circumstances and structural factors”, says the author, “made these concepts (…) the individual himself responsible for his way of life, for sickness or health, for poverty and crime.” The “rehabilitative welfare state” was put in question. Whether this was a “conservative Backlash” remains to be seen. In any case, the places of drug prevention advanced now in the foreground. To the family, the school and the work.
