Document Type

Article

Publication Date

Summer 2017

Publication Title

Harvard Law and Policy Review

Volume

11

Issue

2

Pages

375-418

Abstract

Over the last forty years, perhaps no issue has affected the United States’s criminal justice system as profoundly as has drug policy. Since President Nixon declared drug abuse “America’s public enemy number one,”1 concerns about the manufacture, distribution, and possession of drugs have remained at the fore of criminal justice policy discussions.2 President Reagan’s subsequent pronouncement of drugs as “an especially vicious virus of crime” set a course for national drug policy that emphasized enforcement and punishment over treatment to “win the war on drugs.”3 Throughout the 1980s, increasing public concern about the effects of drug abuse4 further pressured policymakers at the state and federal levels to adopt new mandatory sentences and sentence enhancements that increased the probability and length of prison sentences.

Comments

Author Posting. © Harvard Law and Policy Review 2017. This article is posted here by permission of Harvard University for personal use, not for redistribution. The article was published in the Harvard Law and Policy Review, vol. 11, no. 2, 2017, http://harvardlpr.com/print-archive/volume-11-2

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.

Download

Share

COinS