How did the courts manage to leave drugs alone while meddling in so much else?
David Pozen’s The Constitution of the War on Drugs is a fascinating and thorough history of constitutional challenges to drug laws, and well worth reading—though the way this history is framed can be maddening.
In the book’s strident introduction, Pozen declares the drug war to be a “policy fiasco” with virtually no support among serious experts. The book’s purpose, he says, is to explain why the resistance to this fiasco so rarely takes the form of constitutional challenges, rather than policy arguments and legislative efforts.
Yet his project, Pozen also writes, concentrates especially “on the physically nonaddictive ‘soft drugs,’ above all cannabis.” Some reasons for this focus are fair enough: Such drugs have spurred the most constitutional litigation, he says, and their prohibition is the most debatable as a policy matter. However, Pozen also argues that soft drugs dominate the drug war itself. He notes that marijuana generates the most arrests and that the drug war has been a war on pot in “significant part,” then uncritically quotes an ACLU executive director claiming, around the turn of the century, that “if you took marijuana out of the equation, there would be very little left of the drug war.”
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Robert VerBruggen is a fellow at the Manhattan Institute. Follow him on Twitter here.
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