“My crimey here think the way to go is more drugs. But I know better. I think making money is okay,

For many years, drugs have been the center of crime and the criminal justice system in the United States. Due to this widespread epidemic, President Richard Nixon declared the “War on Drugs” in 1971 with a campaign that promoted the prohibition of illicit substances and implemented policies to discourage the overall production, distribution, and consumption. The War on Drugs and the U.S. drug policy has experienced the most significant and complex challenges between criminal law and the values of today’s society. With implemented drug polices becoming much harsher over the years in order to reduce the overall misuse and abuse of drugs and a expanded federal budget, it has sparked a nation wide debate whether or not they have created more harm than good. When looking at the negative consequences of these policies not only has billions of dollars gone to waste, but the United States has also seen public health issues, mass incarceration, and violent drug related crime within the black market in which feeds our global demands and economy. With this failed approach for drug prohibition, there continues to be an increase in the overall production of illicit substances, high rate of violence, and an unfavorable impact to our nation.

Most criminological research focuses on communities, where some assume and think that small towns are quite safe and crime-free environments. Meanwhile, using methamphetamine has become surrounded in rural parts of the country. In her book Methamphetamine: A Love Story, Rashi K. Shukla focused and enlightened on the understudied of poverty and drug abuse. Through her journey, she proves emotionally how meth has become the spotlight to the lives of some residents. In the process of uncovering how and why she participated in their drug using careers, Shukla tells how the lifestyle surrounding meth use becomes as addicting as the drug itself and highlights the unsustainability of meth addiction and the struggles

The book being reviewed in this papers is Code of the Suburb: Inside the World of Young Middle-Class Drug Dealers by Scott Jacques and Richard Wright. This book is written on the context of 30 different individuals from a small location referenced as “Peachville” in Atlanta Georgia (Jacques & Wright 1). Each of these known individuals during their time in high school were selling drugs. Marijuana was the particular substance to be sold, but few dove into other illicit drugs including ecstasy, cocaine etc. (3). Generally speaking, the first questions that appears is what pushed these students to dive into the prospects of peddling and using drugs? Better yet, why continue to use them? The 7 chapters included in this book contain various stories of popularity and financial gains and losses along with the destruction of relationships.

In Randol Contreras’s The Stickup Kids, Contreras explores the South Bronx through the lens of a sociologist. He describes the lives of the stickup kids such as Gus, Pablo, and other teenagers living in the South Bronx. Contreras uses the research method of ethnography to provide a sociological analysis of the drug trade and business in the South Bronx. His research shows how social factors impact the lives of these stickup kids to become active in the drug trade. Through his field notes and interviews with the stickup kids, Contreras examines in depth of how social factors such as, socialization, social class, the thrill of crime, deviance, and culture affect the individual.

How To Sell Cocaine is the first textbook in the world that teaches drug dealers how to become a professional at it. There are no schools on this topic so we are educating people through the form of this book. This book will teach you how to run a successful drug organization and will teach you the ins and outs. In this industry, the knowledge is strictly guarded among the elite few. This makes it so the rest of the dealers have to figure it out on their own. However, the learning curve is so steep that many die or end up in jail even before they learn anything. Our job is to prevent that. We want to teach the dealers the proper fundamentals so that they start off on the right foot. We want to give everyone a solid foundation to build upon.

One of the main economic problems that many people, particularly gangs, in Robert Taylor faced was the fact that they didn’t want to trade in their status for entry-level jobs because in many cases, gang leaders made far more than they would have if they worked minimum wage jobs (72). Many of the gang leaders such as J.T. held the false belief that the drug economy was “useful for the community, since it redistributed the drug addict’s money back into the community via the gang’s philanthropy” (115). However, the drug economy is not a stable or lucrative economy compared to your average jobs because it was clearly very hard for people to get ahead in gangs, thus no one ever had a fair shot of earning more money in their life span. Nevertheless, the situation can tend to be a grey area of debate since a lot of the residents did attempt to hold blue-collar jobs but continued to get laid off (60). In this case, the underground economy of drug sales may have been the only choice for residents looking for an income. Another way the gangs play into the economic situation is when there are drive by shootings, in which case parents

Crack users range from the Wall Street stockbroker to a homeless person living in Central Park, but by and large this evil drug called crack had its biggest impact on New York’s inner city minority population. A New York doctor, Dr. Mark Gold who is the person who set up and helps run the not for profit organization called 800-COCAINE, a hotline set up to help addicts and perspective users answer questions about the drug and also offers counseling and drug intervention services; suggested that his findings showed that, “occasional users of crack quickly increased, the amount and frequency of crack use until total dependency was achieved.” Men and women who were once law abiding citizens and honest people were now robbing and stealing to pay for the drug, and many who once enjoyed good health were now suffering from a variety of physical and mental aliments springing from their cocaine abuse. Crack brings along with its amazing high, some ominous dangers. Dr. Robert Maslansky is the director of New York City’s Bellevue Hospital

Contributing to these drug issues throughout America are multiple street gangs, drug cartels and drug lords. These groups to transport illegal drugs into America, to sell them illegally on the streets, for a very hefty profit. High crime profiled states and cities such as, New York, Baltimore, Maryland, District of Columbia, and Chicago host some of America’s most notorious gangs, cartels, and drug lords. The purpose of this research paper is to analyze the life of a notorious Baltimore drug lord, by the name of Anthony Ayeni Jones, and how a life of drugs effected his personal life, caused criminal actions, and resulted in court trials and a life sentence in prison.

I know. If you were to see me walking on the street you would never suspect I’m a drug dealer – let alone a drug lord. You know, I’ve always resented that title: drug lord. It makes me seem like a vehement Colombian with an imperial moustache and ostentatious golden rings, not to mention most people assume the worst of you the instant you tell them – even the weed obsessed Rastafarians and the acid infatuated Hipsters don’t respond too well to that particular title. I have to admit, most drug lords esteem the supremacy that comes with the title, and live up to the character as much as they can – but then again most of them actually look like Pablo Escobar. I never have – I mean, look at me, I’m a gawky ginger with glasses; by no means am I threatening enough to have anyone go, “Don’t mess with that guy”. But as a matter of fact I am a drug lord – and how I came to be – well that’s what sets me apart from others.

In Claire’s Sterk’s book, “Fast Lives: women who used crack cocaine”, she uses information from observation, conversations, interviews and group discussions to explain how using crack affects active users. She also shows how they started using, how they survived, how they developed and maintained relationships with friends and family, and how they were mothers and drug users at the same time. In addition, Sterk started Project FAST, the Female Atlanta Study to identify the impact of drug use patterns on lives of active female users. In this study, most of the women’s stories are similar but yet different in many ways to each other. While curiosity and peer pressure caused these women to experiment with drugs, others were

The book traces the devastating effect that the drug war has had on minority Communities, classed as ghettos where predominantly black or brown people reside. This group of people have suffered from years of harassment and biased law enforcement. Frankly the War on Drugs is a racist cause, an excuse to discriminate against African American communities in order to achieve

Drug trafficking has played a huge role on many people's lives. It is believed to be stimulated by their environments, peers, upbringings and psychological factors.

Phillipe Bourgois’s study of social marginalisation in inner city America in his ethnography ‘In Search of Respect – Selling Crack in El Barrio’, won critical acclaim when first published in 1995. For the first time, an anthropologist had managed to gain the trust and long-term friendship of street-level drug dealers in one of the nation’s roughest ghetto neighbourhoods – East Harlem (Bourgois, 2003). He had originally come to study poverty and ethnic segregation, the political economy of inner-city street culture, ' but found himself mired in a world conditioned by drugs, a world on which the literature is surprisingly sparse (Clatts, 1997). The people who inhabit it--men and women with names like Benzie, Little Pete, Gigi, Candy, Primo,

Conducting ethnographic field work places the anthropologist in the position of a student in the environment/culture they are studying. Emerging one’s self into the culture of something such as: prostitution or drug dealing causes potential risks not only to the anthologist but the people they interact with as well. For this paper, I will imagine myself conducting the same crack cocaine users and dealers study as anthropologist Bourgois, I will analyze the issues and personal conflicts I would encounter in the field work. I will also apply several experiences faced by anthropologist Bourgois and Sterk in relation to my own.

The only method to keep him from taking the drug is imprisoning him” (http://www.druglibrary.org/schaffer/history/negro_cocaine_fiends.htm). These words are haunting, especially when taking into consideration society’s response to crack cocaine and the African American communities in which were flooded with the drug.