Beware Euphoria : The Moral Roots and Racial Myths of America's War on Drugs

George Fisher seeks the moral roots of America''s antidrug regime and challenges claims that early antidrug laws arose from racial animus. Those moral roots trace to early Christian sexual strictures, which later influenced Puritan condemnations of drunkenness, and ultimately shaped the early American drug war. Early laws against opium dens, cocaine, and cannabis rarely rose from racial strife, but sprang from the traditional moral censure of intoxication and perceived threats to respectable white women and youth. The book closes with an examination of cannabis legalization, driven in part by the movement for racial justice.

Beware Euphoria uncovers the roots of America''s moral obsession with drug regulation, offering a lively and fascinating history of the nation''s racialized fear of intoxication. Challenging the idea that early antidrug laws in the US arose from racial animus, George Fisher instead shows in textured detail how US drug laws were driven by a deep-seated cultural taboo against euphoria and a preoccupation with white moral integrity.From nineteenth-century opium dens to the war on cocaine and cannabis, and more, Fisher offers a vivid tour of the sites of conflict, along with a convincing case for how the moral discourses and social contexts of the day pit drugs against the law. Bringing this history up to the present, Fisher shows how the racial dynamic has changed dramatically. As harsher penalties swell prisons with mostly nonwhite dealers, antidrug laws have come under renewed scrutiny as a tool of racial oppression. The book closes with an examination of cannabis legalization, driven in part by the movement for racial justice.