Abstract

The history of drug control in this nation has traced a strange and frustrating course. Its critics have, throughout the past several decades, noted its many flaws: its financial costs, its restriction of civil liberties, its creation of a violent black market, its disproportionate impact on poor and minority populations. Its most remarkable feature is perhaps that drug prohibition has endured and flourished for nearly a century, despite its manifest failure to alleviate the problems associated with drug use. In this dissertation, a genealogy of the drug war, I account for the improbable durability of drug prohibition by showing that the drug control serves an unacknowledged cultural function in this country. This function is a performance of Americanness---not only in the sense that it reveals some aspect of American identity, but that it creates and reinforces that identity. ;This performance can be observed in various phenomena of drug control. I explore two sets of these phenomena: first, the government's resistance to alternative drug control practices and the language it uses to defend that resistance; and second, the construction of the addict as morally dangerous, and the role of that construction in the inception and the tenacity of drug prohibition. ;In all its manifestations, the drug war performance is a ritual that enforces moral norms and calls for or effects the exclusion of deviants. This performance is rooted in and modeled on another uniquely American phenomenon: the Puritan jeremiad, a religious/political rhetorical form that reminded Puritans that America was the product of their covenant with God and that the collective fate of the community rested on the pious behavior of the individual. ;I show that the drug war operates according to the same logic as the jeremiad, and serves the same function of enforcing obedience, constituting identity, and managing anxiety by policing moral as well as physical boundaries. The nation's reliance on the drug war to perform this function helps to explain why we have seemingly become so dependent on it, and why it has proven so resistant to efforts to inject rationality into drug control policy