Hurt

Forty years into the American War on Drugs, a wide body of literature has developed on its punitive and racially disproportionate outcomes. Still, despite the increasing decriminalization of cannabis and calls for a public health approach to the opioid epidemic, drugs remain a central criminal justice priority and an important contributor to our enduring system of mass incarceration. In Hurt: Chronicles of the Drug War Generation, Miriam Boeri qualitatively illustrates how it is the War on Drugs—rather than drugs themselves—that wreaks the most havoc in drug users’ lives. In doing so, she calls for a humanized and contextualized understanding of drug use and addiction—a welcome contribution to a field of research that has too often relied on removed methods and pathologizing perspectives. Urging a paradigm shift beyond individual-centered perspectives on drug use and a societal move toward social and structural solutions, Boeri successfully weaves rich narratives with astute analysis into an immensely readable, yet scientifically rich, account of baby-boomer drug-use trajectories and the pain caused by the War on Drugs.

Addiction · Criminal justice · Criminology · Decriminalization · Mass incarceration · Political science · Psychiatry · Public health · Punitive damages · Sociology · Law · Medicine · Substance Abuse Treatment and Outcomes

• Poly-prescription drug misuse across the life course

  Open Access•Jason A Ford, Ty S Schepis et al.•International Journal of Drug…•2021

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