9780691248950

9780691177281

9780691248943

"How the drug war transformed American political culture. Since the 1950s, the American war on drugs has positioned white middle-class youth as sympathetic victims of illegal drug markets who need rehabilitation instead of incarceration whenever they break the law. The Suburban Crisis traces how politicians, the media, and grassroots political activists crusaded to protect white families from perceived threats while criminalizing and incarcerating urban minorities, and how a troubling legacy of racial injustice continues to inform the war on drugs today. In this incisive political history, Matthew Lassiter shows how the category of the "white middle-class victim" has been as central to the politics and culture of the drug war as racial stereotypes like the "foreign trafficker," "urban pusher," and "predatory ghetto addict." He describes how the futile mission to safeguard and control white suburban youth shaped the enactment of the nation's first mandatory-minimum drug laws in the 1950s, and how soaring marijuana arrests of white Americans led to demands to refocus on "real criminals" in inner cities. The 1980s brought "just say no" moralizing in the white suburbs and militarized crackdowns in urban centers.The Suburban Crisis reveals how the escalating drug war merged punitive law enforcement and coercive public health into a discriminatory system for the social control of teenagers and young adults, and how liberal and conservative lawmakers alike pursued an agenda of racialized criminalization"-- Provided by publisher.

"Most accounts of post-1950s political history tell the story of of the war on drugs as part of a racial system of social control of urban minority populations, an extension of the federal war on black street crime and the foundation for the "new Jim Crow" of mass incarceration as key characteristics of the U.S. in this period. But as the Nixon White House understood, and as the Carter and Reagan administrations also learned, there were not nearly enough urban heroin addicts in America to sustain a national war on drugs. This book argues that the long war on drugs has reflected both the bipartisan mandate for urban crime control and the balancing act required to resolve an impossible public policy: the criminalization of the social practices and consumer choices of tens of millions of white middle-class Americans constantly categorized as "otherwise law-abiding citizens."" That is, the white middle class was just as much a target as minority populations. The criminalization of marijuana - the white middleclass drug problem - moved to the epicenter of the national war on drugs during the Nixon era. White middle-class youth by the millions were both the primary victims of the organized drug trade and excessive drug war enforcement, but policymakers also remained committed to deterring their illegal drug use, controlling their subculture, and coercing them into rehabilitation through criminal law. Only with the emergence of crack cocaine epidemic of the mid-1980s did this use of state power move out of suburbs and remgaged more dramatically in urban and minority areas. This book tells a history of how state institutions, mass media, and grassroots political movements long constructed the wars on drugs, crime, and delinquency through the lens of suburban crisis while repeatedly launching bipartisan/nonpartisan crusades to protect white middle-class victims from perceived and actual threats, both internal and external. The book works on a national, regional, and local level, with deep case studies of major areas like San Francisco, LA, Washington, and New York. This history uses the lens of the suburban drug war to examine the consequences when affluent white suburban families serve as the nation's heroes and victims all at the same time, in politics, policy, and popular culture"-- Provided by publisher.

Cover

Contents

List of Illustrations

List of Tables

List of Abbreviations

Introduction

The Drug-War Consensus and the Carceral State

White Drug Crime: Hidden in Plain Sight

Youth Politics and Social Control

The Power and Permanence of Suburban Crisis

Prologue: Los Angeles, 1950-51

1. Pushers and Victims

Producing the White Teenage Narcotics Crisis

California's Early War on Narcotics

Nationalizing the Suburban Narcotics Crisis

California Drug Enforcement and the Mexican Border

2. Suburban Rebels

Constructing the White Middle-Class Delinquency Epidemic

Sensationalizing and Medicalizing Suburban Drug Crime

Campus Rebels and the Psychedelic Drug Culture

Hippies, Runaways, and Heroin

3. Generation Gap

San Francisco Bay Area: Drug Markets and High School Politics

Suburbs of New York City: Race, Class, and De Facto Decriminalization

Metropolitan Washington, DC: Diverting the "Normal" Youth Revolt

Metropolitan Los Angeles: Mass Arrests in White Suburbia

Drug Prevention and the "Credibility Gap"

4. Public Enemy Number One

Cruel and Unusual Punishment?

Bipartisan Consensus for Federal Drug Reform

Saving the White Suburban Victim-Criminal

Marijuana, Heroin, and the War on Drugs

"All-Out War, On All Fronts"

5. Impossible Criminals

Marijuana Legalization vs. Decriminalization

State-Level Reform: "Concerned Parents" and "The Wrong Kids"

Marijuana Decriminalization in Oregon

Marijuana Reform and Race in California

The Rockefeller Drug Laws and the "Real Criminals"

6. Parent Power

Marijuana Decriminalization at the Crossroads

The Origins of the "Parents' Movement"

The Carter Administration's "Political Powder Keg"

The Demand-Side Drug War

National Federation of Parents for Drug-Free Youth

7. Zero Tolerance

The Reagan Administration and the "Parents' Movement"

Marijuana and Alcohol: The Gateway Drugs

"Tough Love" at the Grassroots

Teen Drinking: Get MADD

Crack Cocaine and the Racially Divergent Drug War

Epilogue

Acknowledgments

Archives and Abbreviations in Notes

Notes

Index

Suburbs > United States > History > 20th century.

White people > United States > History > 20th century.

Middle class > United States > History > 20th century.

Drug control > United States > History > 20th century.