![]() ![]() ![]() These scholars have written excellent texts showing how, historically, the pendulum has repeatedly swung between these two poles. David Courtwright, Arthur Benavie, James Inciardi, David Musto, and Caroline Acker and Sarah Tracy, among many others, have traced America's two-century quest to figure out what lies behind a person's abuse of chemical substances. As any scholar of addiction or drug history knows, Nixon wasn't the first president (let alone the first person) to ponder the question of whether drug abusers were victims of their environment or of their own personal vice. ![]() After all, why finance a war on poverty when there's a politically popular war against crime to fund? This tension has a long and complex history. This division has become the core of our modern war on drugs. This criminalization of drug users launched a trend Nixon's was one of the last administrations to spend more on prevention and treatment than law enforcement and nearly every administration since (with the exception of Jimmy Carter's) worked to increase the division between prevention and enforcement spending. Long before William Bennett wrote that the root cause of crime was moral poverty (and well after Richmond Hobson called drug users the vampires of society), Nixon was chewing on the same meaty ideas, privileging the view that drug abusers were criminals and decreasing social welfare funding would therefore attack the root causes of drug abuse.
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