Books about Legalization from Amazon.com

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This meticulously researched study represents the first effort to provide a nonpartisan and objective analysis of how the United States should approach the drug legalization question. It surveys what is known about the effects of different drug policies in Western Europe and what happened when cocaine and heroin were legal in the US a century ago. The book shows that legalization involves different tradeoffs between health and crime and the interests of the inner city minority communities and the middle class. The book explains why it is so difficult to accomplish substantial reform of drug policy..
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This timely and important book is the first serious work of philosophy to address the question: Do adults have a moral right to use drugs for recreational purposes? Many critics of the "war on drugs" denounce law enforcement as counterproductive and ineffective. Douglas Husak argues that the "war on drugs" violates the moral rights of adults who want to use drugs for pleasure, and that criminal laws against such use are incompatible with moral rights. This is not a polemical tract but a scrupulously argued work of philosophy that takes full account of all available data concerning drug use in the United States today. The author is careful to describe the properties a recreational drug would have to possess before the state would be justified in prohibiting it. Since criminal laws against the use of recreational drugs are justified neither by the harm users cause to themselves nor by the harm users cause to each other, Professor Husak concludes that such laws are, in almost all cases, unjustified. This book will be of particular interest to philosophers in applied ethics and philosophers of law, but it will prove provocative reading for anyone with a serious concern in the issue of drug use and drug control..
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The war on drugs is a war on ordinary people. Using that premise, historian Richard Lawrence Miller analyzes America's drug war with passion seldom encountered in scholarly writing. Miller presents numerous examples of drug law enforcement gone amok, as police and courts threaten the happiness, property, and even lives of victims--some of whom are never charged with a drug crime, let alone convicted of one. Miller not only argues that criminal justice zealots are harming the democracy they are sworn to protect, but that authoritarians unfriendly to democracy are stoking public fear in order to convince citizens to relinquish traditional legal rights. Those are the very rights that thwart implementation of an agenda of social control through government power. Miller contends that an imaginary "drug crisis" has been manufactured by authoritarians in order to mask their war on democracy. He not only examines numerous civil rights sacrificed in the name of drugs, but demonstrates how their loss harms ordinary Americans in their everyday lives. Showing how the war on drug users fits into a destruction process that can lead to mass murder, Miller calls for an end to the war before it proceeds deeper into the destruction process. This is a book for anyone who wonders about the value of civil liberties, and for anyone who wonders why people seek to destroy their neighbors. Using voluminous examples of drug law enforcement victimizing blameless people, this book demonstrates how the loss of civil liberties "in the name of drugs" threatens law-abiding Americans at work and at home..
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The use or possession of many drugs is currently a criminal offense in the U.S. Can these criminal laws be justified? What are the best reasons to punish or not to punish drug users? These are the fundamental issues debated in this book by two prominent philosophers of law. Douglas Husak argues in favor of drug decriminalization, by clarifying the meaning of crucial terms, such as legalize, decriminalize, and drugs. Peter de Marneffe argues against drug legalization, demonstrating why drug prohibition, especially the prohibition of heroin, is necessary to protect youth from self-destructive drug use..
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There are currently nearly half a million drug offenders incarcerated in US jails, more than the entire EU prison population. Added to the financial consequences of current drug policy there is the enormous human cost. Police corruption, organized crime, contempt for the law and drugs made dangerous because they are illegal and thus not subject to proper controls are other consequences of current drug policies. Politicians from all sides of the political spectrum are now beginning to ask: is it worth it? In arguing that criminalization is unjust, Douglas Husak explodes many of the myths that surround drug use. In some years, more than half of high school seniors take drugs, yet the US is not overrun with drug-crazed addicts. Horror stories of the dangers of drug use abound, but the truth is more prosaic; although recreational drugs are sometimes bad for users, there are between 80 and 90 million US citizens who have used illicit drugs without ill effects..
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A conservative Republican examines how and why America is losing the war against illegal drugs--and presents a case for carefully controlled legalization..
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