Is the War on Drugs Constitutional? – Manhattan Institute

How did the courts manage to leave drugs alone while meddling in so much else?

David PozensThe Constitution of the War on Drugsis a fascinating and thorough history of constitutional challenges to drug laws, and well worth readingthough the way this history is framed can be maddening.

In the books strident introduction, Pozen declares the drug war to be a policy fiasco with virtually no support among serious experts. The books purpose, he says, is to explain why the resistance to this fiasco so rarely takes the form of constitutional challenges, rather than policy arguments and legislative efforts.

Yet his project, Pozen also writes, concentrates especially on the physically nonaddictive soft drugs, above all cannabis. Some reasons for this focus are fair enough: Such drugs have spurred the most constitutional litigation, he says, and their prohibition is the most debatable as a policy matter. However, Pozen also argues that soft drugs dominate the drug war itself. He notes that marijuana generates the most arrests andthat the drug war has been a war on pot in significant part,then uncritically quotes an ACLU executive director claiming, around the turn of the century, that if you took marijuana out of the equation, there would be very little left of the drug war.

Continue reading the entire piece here at Law & Liberty

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Robert VerBruggenis a fellow at the Manhattan Institute. Follow him on Twitterhere.

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Is the War on Drugs Constitutional? - Manhattan Institute