Drug warriors and their prey
Subtitle: from police power to police state
By: Richard Lawrence Miller.
Publisher: Praeger
Published: 1996
Place of publication: Westport, Conn
Language: eng
Number of pages: 255
Subjects: Drug control -- United States.; Drug addicts -- Government policy -- United States.
Other titles: Drug warriors & their prey
Description: The war on drugs is a war on ordinary people. Using that premise, historian Richard Lawrence Miller analyzes America's drug war with a 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.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. [195]-250) and index.