The Long War on Drugs opens by stating, “No single, accessible book existed” (ix) exclusively on the topic of the long war on drugs. Anne L. Foster’s scholarship complements a growing field of work by academics such as Michelle Alexander, David T. Courtwright, and Jeffrey Dhywood. Spanning from the late nineteenth century to the present day, The Long War on Drugs is a comprehensive history of continued efforts in the United States to prohibit and criminalize drug use domestically and across the globe.
Part I clears up a common misconception, that the war on drugs did not begin with President Richard Nixon’s declaration in 1971. In fact, it had been an ongoing effort for over one hundred years prior, starting in the mid-nineteenth century (1). Foster successfully ties together the various factors that caused these efforts for prohibition.
Foster highlights the elements of European empires that initially created the infrastructure for a global drug market. This history primarily focusses on opiates, giving limited space to other drugs and campaigns such as the temperance movement. Foster justifies her focus on opiates, however, and effectively describes the transition from medical and accepted recreational uses to the concerns of campaign groups in the mid-nineteenth century who worried about “the effects on society, the family, and individuals who were addicted” (14). Foster’s most enlightening passages on these increasing worries stress three crucially important factors: religion, class, and race. These three factors, which are common themes in this history, are threaded continuously throughout the book.
Part II focusses on aspects of the war on drugs during the mid-twentieth century. The impact of the director of the US Federal Bureau of Narcotics, Harry Anslinger, and President Richard Nixon are analysed in depth. Despite Nixon’s infamy for waging the war on drugs, his legacy is aptly summarized in two sentences by Foster: “The drug problem did not seem to improve during his time in office … The Nixon War on Drugs approach nevertheless continued to shape policy for many years” (69). Nixon’s declaration came on the back of various advisers, scientists, and activists suggesting that demand reduction and harm prevention were much more suitable approaches to take. Foster recognizes Nixon’s contribution to the increasingly aggressive approach to the war on drugs, but equally she situates him in a much larger story.
Anslinger’s impact is woven throughout Part II, including his strategy of stockpiling all illicit drugs seized in the United States (73) and buying licit drugs from countries that ignored international narcotics regulations (75), and his influence on the Boggs Act of 1951, which introduced mandatory minimum sentences for drug offences that are still considered highly controversial and counterproductive. Foster convinces readers that these damaging decisions by Anslinger perpetuated the hypocrisy of the war on drugs, complicated US foreign affairs, and negatively impacted citizens domestically in the United States. Foster details how Anslinger’s decisions, like Nixon’s, were made emotionally and not rationally.
The Long War on Drugs isn’t simply a linear historical narrative. Part III dedicates chapters that focus on mandatory minimum sentencing, environmental effects, the rise of synthetic drugs, and the movement towards legalization of marijuana in the United States. Beginning with President Ronald Reagan’s reaffirmation of the war on drugs in 1982, Foster stresses that his aggressive tactics, such as mandatory minimums, were highly unsuccessful, with more drug arrests and more drugs available by the end of his term in office (124). His term exacerbated the racial disparities of drug convictions with the rise of crack cocaine, with much higher conviction rates for Black users despite white people using the drug more predominantly (136, 137).
Chapter 11, titled “Environmental Effects on the War on Drugs,” is a necessary inclusion that Foster believes is understated in the conversation on the war on drugs. Supply-control regimes have vastly damaged ecosystems across the globe. The continued damage caused by the production of licit drugs in the United States due to the lack of federal oversight is detailed here too.
The remainder of the book is committed to two contrasting contemporary issues faced by the war on drugs. Since the 1970s, grassroots efforts to decriminalize and legalize marijuana and make it available for medical use in the United States have been highly successful. Although this is a necessary conversation about alternative routes away from the long war on drugs, Foster fails to discuss other contemporary campaigns, such as the movement that led to various cities and states decriminalizing psilocybin after 2019.
Entering an increasing realm of scholarship on the war on drugs, Foster’s text succeeds in being concise whilst equally providing a broad overview of the complex web of history that leads to the present-day predicament of politicians and policy makers. However, it is this concise nature that sometimes lacks focus where other books such as The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness by Michelle Alexander (2010) succeed by focussing on specific consequences of the war on drugs in greater detail, such as its function as a form of racial control. It is this narrow and detailed focus that Alexander provides that is lacking in Foster’s scholarship.
The conclusion, titled “Never-Ending War on Drugs?”, is a succinct prediction based on Foster’s findings. Although cynical in tone, the content of The Long War on Drugs justifies this prophecy. This is a vital text for scholars, policy makers, and activists researching in this area who want an understanding of the repeated failures of the long war on drugs and how they persist into the present day, such as the narrow focus on supply-control, the visceral nature of policy makers and politicians in decision making, and the complicity of pharmaceutical companies. Recognition of these failures, and the recommendations made by Foster for alternative approaches to “war tactics” (178), could benefit all those harmed by the long war on drugs. Foster’s book is a welcome addition to scholarship on the war on drugs, providing readers with a succinct and focussed outline of a complex history.
