Title: Medicalizing addictions, criminalizing addicts: Race,

           politics and profit in narratives of addiction

   Pub No: 3194408

   Author: Glenn, Jason Edwin

   Degree: PhD

   School: HARVARD UNIVERSITY

     Date: 2005

    Pages: 413

  Adviser: Harrington, Anne

     ISBN: 0-542-39177-5

   Source: DAI-A 66/11, p. 4162, May 2006

  Subject: HISTORY OF SCIENCE (0585); HISTORY, UNITED STATES (0337);

           HISTORY, BLACK (0328); LAW (0398)

 Abstract: The focus of this dissertation is a historical

           investigation of the interactions, convergences, but

           especially the tensions and disjunctions that mark the

           political and medical histories of addiction theory and

           policy throughout the period of the War on Drugs, as

           begun in the Nixon presidency through the beginning of

           the first Bush administration. This project aims to give

           other scholars working toward drug policy reform an

           additional tool in their efforts: a historical

           perspective that illuminates the culture-systemic reasons

           why drug abuse remains such a symbolically charged, as

           well as an economically and politically lucrative issue.

           It argues that, if drug use is the systemic consumptive

           response to the metaphysical ills of the citizens of the

           United States, then a punitive drug policy has functioned

           as the answering mechanism by which lower class, inner

           city drug users are sacrificed in a ritual of justice and

           retribution that functions to create identity-affirming

           cohesion for the rest of American society.

 

 

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    Title: Policing for profit:  United States imperialism and the

           international drug economy

   Pub No: 3195479

   Author: Reiss, Suzanna J.

   Degree: PhD

   School: NEW YORK UNIVERSITY

     Date: 2005

    Pages: 308

  Adviser: Kelley, Robin D. G.

     ISBN: 0-542-40362-5

   Source: DAI-A 66/11, p. 4159, May 2006

  Subject: HISTORY, UNITED STATES (0337); HISTORY, LATIN AMERICAN

           (0336)

 Abstract: This dissertation is a study of the circulation and

           control of coca commodities (including coca leaves,

           pharmaceutical-grade cocaine, and Coca-Cola) in the

           western hemisphere from World War II through the early

           Cold War. The history of drug control provides a window

           onto the hemispheric political and ideological order the

           United States government pursued with the expansion of

           the American capitalist system. It studies the

           delineation of a line between legal and illegal

           participation in the international provision and

           consumption of drug commodities and the attendant

           managerial arrangements of global power. The project

           presumes the global as a constitutive element of

           figurations of national power, and by tracing

           participation and control over the flow of drug

           commodities (and the social and political narratives

           which accompanied them), grounds the history of the rise

           of US capitalism within the international sphere from

           which it sought raw materials, consumer markets and

           political and economic collaborators.

           The dissertation examines the postwar rise to global

           dominance of the American pharmaceutical industry; the

           extension of markets for U.S. manufactured commodities

           overseas; and the selective criminalization of 'drug'

           production and consumption within an international

           capitalist economic system where the aggressive marketing

           of some drugs, to some people, was encouraged. It is a

           study of US empire and the ways in which control over the

           manufacturing, distribution and consumption of

           commodities within the capitalist system has shaped the

           cultural, legal and economic lives of people and the

           inter/national geography within which they live. Studying

           the business of health and warfare through attempts to

           control and pursue the legal and illegal provisions of

           medicaments, reveals the ways in which diplomatic

           leverage in contexts of both war and peace has operated

           historically in part through efforts to control the flow

           of strategic commodities. The research reveals how

           cultural narratives about drugs, and public health and

           safety intersected with institutional powers in the

           United States at mid-century to consolidate the authority

           of select corporate and state participants in the drug

           trade and control apparatus, while structuring an unequal

           relationship between the United States and other

           countries in the hemisphere.

 

 

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Forwarded by:

 
David T. Courtwright
John A. Delaney Presidential Professor
Dept. of History
University of North Florida
Jacksonville, FL 32224-2645
Home office: (904) 745 0530
University office: (904) 620-1872
Fax: (904) 620-1018
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