Joel Miller Bad Trip Analysis

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The War on Drugs has had negative consequences on people and has not been very effective. Joel Miller in his book Bad Trip: How The War Against Drugs Is Destroying America outlines several of the negative consequences of the War on Drugs and I will discuss some of them. One of Millers biggest arguments that lay’s a foundation for his book is that he believe making drugs illegal and criminalizing them creates the circumstances for crime and violence (Miller 1). While the government approaches drugs as though they themselves are the cause of crime and violence, Miller says this is wrong because just by making something illegal does not mean you eradicate the demand for it. An illegal market will arise for the illegal substance and without the …show more content…
This has led to the militarization of the police in attitude, training, tactics and weapons (Miller 139). This is evident in the methods increasingly used by the police. Those include the use of forceful invasions and paramilitary policing. An example of this is the increased use of SWAT teams for invasions of homes (Miller 144). SWAT will forcefully enter homes with stun grenades and storm the place. Miller considers several examples of how this has been done on innocent people because a raid was conducted based on minimal information and investigation. The result was that usually someone ended up dead or injured (Miller 140). This is just one way that civilians are trapped and hurt by the war on …show more content…
civilians in several ways including increasing government invasion of privacy and allowing the police to unnecessarily seize people’s stuff but probably the biggest and worst way that civilians are affected is through mass incarceration. About 25% of all people imprisoned are there for drug related crimes and in federal prisons it is about 55% of people imprisoned (Miller 163-164). Four out of five arrests for drugs in 2005 were for the mere possession of drugs (which is not a violent crime) and one of five arrests is for selling drugs (which is not a violent crime either) (Alexander 38). Michelle Alexander, in her book The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, details how one particular group is affected my mass incarceration–African American males. According Michelle Alexander, the War on Drugs has resulted in the “systematic mass incarceration of people of color” (Alexander 38). One reason for the packing of prisons with non-violent drug offenders is mandatory minimums (Miller 164). Mandatory minimums can be very harsh. For example, 28 grams of crack cocaine will get a person 5 years in prison whereas 500 grams of regular cocaine would be equivalent to 5 years (drugpolicy.org). Because of these punishments most of those in prison are non-violent people in a place that is supposed isolate violent, scary criminals from mainstream society (Miller 170). Imprisonment changes people’s lives. Prisoners lose “liberty,

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