The Constitution of the War on Drugs

Reviews / Votes

The war on drugs has been a moral, political, and policy catastrophe. This stunningly original, powerful book shows that it has been a constitutional catastrophe as well. Fundamental guarantees of liberty, privacy, free expression, fair punishment, and racial equality-all have been sacrificed by the Supreme Court in service of the war effort. Mapping an alternative constitutional path toward sane drug policy and social justice, Pozen masterfully teaches a painful lesson about the failures, if not limits, of constitutional law. * Daryl Levinson, New York University * The Constitution of the War on Drugs is a profound achievement. Pozen uncovers a lost and expansive history of legal challenges to draconian drug policies. The result is a bracing and truly innovative work of legal reconstruction and moral argument, one that compels lawyers and scholars to fundamentally rethink the role of constitutional law in fortifying a failed carceral state. It is essential reading for anyone, academic or activist, committed to understanding how we got here and how to imagine a different horizon. * Aziz Rana, author of The Constitutional Bind: How Americans Came to Idolize a Document That Fails Them * Constitutional litigation and drug liberalization have often gone hand in hand around the world. But not in the United States. Why not? What happened to the U.S. drug reform movement? And what does this tell us about modern American constitutional jurisprudence and social movement advocacy? In this brilliant and original new book, David Pozen answers these questions and more-leaving us with a profound sense of the limits of American constitutionalism as an answer to the challenges of our time. * Rosalind Dixon, University of New South Wales * David Pozen's The Constitution of the War on Drugs offers a masterful assessment of the clash between repressive drug policies and the values embedded in American constitutionalism. One inescapable lesson of the past half century is that criminalization of drug use and addiction have been costly (indeed deadly) and counterproductive. Pozen's detailed review sets the stage for long-overdue policy experiments relying less on criminalization while coming to terms with unavoidable tradeoffs between individual liberty and public health. * Richard Bonnie, author of The Marijuana Conviction: A History of Marijuana Prohibition in the United States * Pozen has produced a surprising, eye-opening account of how constitutional law might have been a bulwark against the worst excesses of the war on drugs if not for the highly contingent choices of lawyers and judges during the late twentieth century. Chock full of strategic insights and fascinating stories, The Constitution of the War on Drugs is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand how the drug war was created and sustained, as well as how it fits within the shifting landscape of American constitutional practice. * Monica Bell, Yale University * It can't have been easy to write a book whose central motif is that legal efforts to constitutionalize and decriminalize various drugs have usually led down 'paths to nowhere.' And yet the result is a triumph of the legal imagination. David Pozen's The Constitution of the War on Drugs offers a transcendent constitutional history of the last half-century of criminal drug bans. Brilliantly conceptualized and realized, filled with imaginatively researched stories, The Constitution of the War on Drugs is much more than a history of a particular arena of continuing constitutional failure, although the book is certainly that. * Hendrik Hartog, Princeton University * David Pozen's carefully researched and brilliantly argued book on the Constitution and the war on drugs is both illuminating and disturbing. No surprise there. Pozen is our country's most inventive and interesting young constitutional scholar. * Louis Michael Seidman, Georgetown University * I admit that I was surprised when I learned that David Pozen was hard at work on a book project about the war on drugs. Why, I wondered, would one of the leading constitutional scholars of his generation devote this much time and work to a topic that, while clearly enormously important, sounds more in policy than constitutional law? My reaction, of course, perfectly reproduced the failures of constitutional imagination that Pozen's extraordinary The Constitution of the War on Drugs reveals. The story of the drug war's policy failures is well known. What hasn't been previously understood, and what Pozen's book powerfully shows, is how implicated constitutional law is in all of this. * Kate Shaw, University of Pennsylvania * Much has been written about U.S drug prohibition over the years, so it is surprising that no one until now has used the constitution as a lens for examining it. In his excellent new book, The Constitution of the War on Drugs, David Pozen exhumes the long-buried history of constitutional challenges to punitive drug laws and masterfully chronicles how the judiciary was used by reformers and the state to dispute, rationalize, and ultimately enable the widely maligned war on drugs. * Jennifer Oliva, Indiana University * The Constitution of the War on Drugs is a major achievement in legal scholarship. * Paul Butler, Georgetown University * The Constitution of the War on Drugs is a must read. An important and necessary addition to the drug policy canon. * Kimani Paul-Emile, Fordham University * Pozen's book provides a wonderfully rich and astute perspective on a wide array of dynamic legal, political, and social stories at the intersection of constitutional jurisprudence and drug policy. Invaluable. * Douglas Berman, Ohio State University * David Pozen has produced the best existing critical examination of how and why nearly all U.S. courts ultimately upheld the constitutionality of drug prohibitions, even as the problems with these laws became increasingly visible. His argument is eminently readable while conforming to the highest standards of scholarship. Comprehensive, sophisticated, and original, The Constitution of the War on Drugs illuminates the tortured reasoning courts often use to allow so much of our failed drug policies to survive. Many persuasive critiques of the U.S. approach to drugs can be found, but none has been written by a scholar with such expertise in constitutional law. * Douglas Husak, Rutgers University * The War on Drugs is one of the greatest injustices in American public policy, and also one of the biggest constitutional issues in modern time. Pozen's book is a major contribution to our understanding of the relevant history and legal doctrine. * Ilya Somin, The Volokh Conspiracy * The genius of David Pozen's book is to bring constitutional law into the conversation as an additional root cause of the drug war. The Constitution of the War on Drugs develops previously missing connections between criminal law, health law, and constitutional law with the potential to enrich all three fields. It also makes possible a future constitutional praxis capable of breaking a 50-year cycle of addiction policy failure marked by mass death and mass incarceration. * Matthew Lawrence, Emory University * Rather than the sort of dry text encountered in case law and law review articles, Pozen offers a highly engaging, though still tragic, narrative. Highly recommended. * Choice * Truly a landmark. * Jeannie Suk Gersen, Harvard University * The War on Drugs is one of the greatest injustices in American public policy, and also one of the biggest constitutional issues in modern time. Pozen's book is a major contribution to our understanding of the relevant history and legal doctrine. * Ilya Somin, The Volokh Conspiracy * Elegant and lucid * New York Review of Books * A tour de force of constitutional critique. ... also an invaluable resource for legal practitioners and academics interested in how constitutional law can be leveraged--or reimagined--to address systemic injustices. Pozen's book not only illuminates the past and present of the drug war but also provides a roadmap for a more just and equitable future. * International Criminal Justice Review * [An] important contribution to our understanding of the war on drugs...The Constitution of the War on Drugs offers a series of historical and legal insights made all the more valuable by the remarkable absence of these insights from modern discourse. * Yale Law Journal * Pozen has written a brilliant book about how constitutional doctrines have failed to counter the war on drugs...His account not only explains why challenges to the war on drugs failed but also provides a superb summary of constitutional law over the last half century and how it has evolved in a very conservative direction. Masterful. * Erwin Chemerinsky, UC Berkeley *