Prof. David Farber, 'The War on Drugs'

“What makes one drug or another useful to politicians?” David Farber asks. At the seminar, Farber presented new work on the late twentieth-century “war on drugs” in the United States—what it was, how it functioned, and whether it has proven politically durable. Focusing on the legislative process, he examines the 1986 Anti-Drug Abuse Act and its disproportionate criminalisation of crack cocaine,…