Customer Reviews

Drug Warriors and Their Prey: From Police Power to Police State

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The author has done the work and now the citizens must spread the "gospel". Like a seer Lawrence is able to anticipate the insane trajectory of where this drug war is leading. Though the picture he paints is ugly, if these drug warrior zealots are not vigorously challenged now he clearly shows how much uglier it will become. The evil of Nazi Germany and that of the US drug war are clearly shown to progress via the same chain of events: identification, ostracism, confiscation, concentration, and the final solution ie annihilation. Miller is an American hero doing the best he can to awaken conciousness.

As a passionate archenemy of the "Drug War", the "Drug Czar" and everything else brearhing of fascism in this once-free country, I have read many many boks and articles against this so-called war. I even try (if possible without gagging) to read books that try to support this horrendous farce - many of which are written by people who are drug warriors themselves or just terribly deluded) because I think it's very important to know my enemy. Of all the books that I have ever read on this atrocity, this book has got to be the most articulate and momentous. Other books slash at the war, make fun of it, and are often quite entertaining as well as frightening. Entertainment definitely has its place, and it is great when one is (somehow) able to laugh at even matters as horrendous as child-beatings, rapes, and drug warriors. Sometimes that's the only way we can face the grim realities. This book spares, for the most part, any humor, however, and just tells us, very convincingly, how it is. The author's thesis is simple: He sees a direct parallel between the drug war and the Nazis in Germany. I would like to believe that he is being too extremist in his position. Surely our drug czar and his henchmen will never be as ruthless and terrifying as Hitler! That's what I once thought too, but after reading the book I was convinced otherwise. The creators of this "drug-war" are no mere well-intentioned fools or people ignorant of abstract concepts such as freedom. They have one clear goal in mind: power, power and more power. Let's hope enough Americans wake up in time and the see chasm into which the road is leading us! This incredibly well researched and articulate just may wake us up in time - that is, if it doesn't scare us to death first. Read the book! Read it NOW!!!! PLEASE!!!!!!

Gordon Wilson (Mathematician, Libertarian, and a bit of a mixture between Paul Revere and Patrick Henry )

This is one of the most powerful books I've read in a long time. Richard L. Miller deserves an award. In this book, the author details the erosion of civil liberties by the current war on drugs. For those familiar with this area, he trots out the typical points: harsh penalties for minor violations and loss of civil liberties for all.

But what makes this book special is the author's analysis of legal issues and history. Richard Miller is an independent scholar who has written about Nazi justice (in "Nazi Justiz"). I thought his application of Nazi jurisprudence to the drug war was overkill at first. Little did I know just how wrong I was. As one reviewer put it, this book will help you lose weight.

What sets this book above the others on the drug war is that Miller explains how the war effects the innocent, and how innocence is no longer an adequate defense. In fact, Miller has a Justice Department official quoted as saying that innocence was not a defense to forfeiture of assets. He argues that asset forfeiture has corrupted law enforcement at all levels.

In one example, Miller tells of an elderly couple in one California county who owned a mutil-million dollar ranch adjacent to a national park. Apparently, the Park Service wanted the land, the local law enforcement the assets (in the form of the house, possessions, etc.). Thus, police had to get a warrant to raid the property. First, they searched it illegally. This is a typical tactic of DEA agents and local law enforcement, who search a house and either plant or discover evidence that they can use to get a warrent later. Regardless, the courts have determined that even illegal searches and seizures are acceptable in the war on drugs. All of this is documented in the book. Even in the illegal search, no drugs were discovered. An elderly couple, go figure?

If you think that stopped the police, DEA, et al., then you haven't read the book. One local officer testified before a judge that "thousands" of marijuana plants were being cultivated on the property. This testimony was based on a lie told to the officer by another. Although both were aware of the lie (and the couple's complete innocence of ANYTHING), this way neither officer could be chared with perjury. Needless to say, the judge issued the warrant.

During the raid, the husband was sleeping. He was roused awake by his wife's screaming and was shot to death as he put down his rifle, which he had becuase he thought he was being robbed and was defending his wife. The agents participating in the raid evicted the wife. Even agents of the U.S. Park Service were involved, in case you doubted their complicity.

It gets better. The location of the ranch was in a different county than the one in which the local police were from! They went out of their own jurisdiction for the express purpose of seizing property from people THEY KNEW were innocent. All of this was expressed by the county prosecutor (where the ranch was), when he said that they appeared to be motivated by a desire to obtain the property and assests of its owners.

This book is meticulously documented and researched. The analysis of the legal issues with references to the Nuremburg Tribunal and Nazi legal principles is stunning. As well as his telling of the internment of Japenese-Americans to demonstrate how segments of society can be treated if the propaganda warriors desire their elimination.

If you're not enraged by the time you're finished reading this book, your heart is dead.

This book is intense. It's basic premise, the drawing of parallels between America's insane War on Drugs and the Nazi War on the Jews is surprisingly compelling. When I first read it I was convinced this was just another lunatic having gone overboard. However, a chapter later I was able to follow Miller's reasoning. As a matter of fact his argument is so compelling and motivating that the book has become somewhat of an all-time great in anti-prohibitionist circles. The books is well-researched, a quarter of the book dedicated to references for Miller's findings. It reads easily although the facts it presents are more than a little disturbing. Miller has presented a passionate masterpiece here, well worth the reading.

This book could have been the inspiration for the expression, "If you're not outraged, you're not paying attention." I wish every person in the U.S. would read it. Maybe then the insanity known as the War on Drugs could come to a peaceful end. Also highly recommended is _Ain't Nobody's Business If You Do: The Absurdity of Consensual Crimes in our Free Country_ by Peter McWilliams.

If you're not familiar with how the War on Drugs really works in American society, this book is a must read. Miller argues that the War on Drugs is really an attempt to identify and remove drug users as a class from our society. Using a five-step model, he meticulously compares the excesses of drug warriors against the excesses of Nazi Germany in its campaign against the Jews, and uncovers many chilling similarities. He then extrapolates based on the Nazi model the possible future of the drug war, if left unchecked.

Most people (including myself) are usually turned off by comparisons of anything to Nazi Germany, dismissing it as a too often used rhetorical tactic. However, this book is different: Miller has done the research and has the facts to back up his analogy, as is shown by his extensive high-quality bibliography.

Having said that, I didn't quite like this book as much as _The Case for Legalizing Drugs_, precisely because his earlier book is much more value-neutral, and therefore more persuasive to the skeptical reader (many of whom will need to be convinced of the correctness of Miller's research before the drug war will ever be stopped). Since I thought that _Case_ deserved a 10, I give this one a 9.

This book is an anomaly amidst the typical drug policy literature available. Miller's argument stems from his scholarship on Nazism. He applies Raul Hilberg's "chain of destruction" to the current "war," not on drugs, but on drug users. William Bennett was less than secretive about his abhorrence for those who used drugs, especially those "hard-core users who were too far gone to care about" - stated differently, the real issue is not the drugs themselves, but the type of people who use drugs. America is full of social problems, e.g. poverty, crime, &c.; problems that most politicians are timid in addressing because of the complexities involved in solving them. Yet, politicians need a platform to stand on and the American public needs a scapegoat. Drug users, that most alien element in the population, according to Miller, are the perfect group to identify, ostracize, confiscate, concentrate, and then annihilate as scapegoats for all the ills in society: in fact this sequence of stages is Hilberg's "chain of destruction." It is from his "seminal" study on the Holocaust, later published as: The Destruction of the European Jews, that Hilberg constructed his theory of the chain of destruction. Nazi Germany, like America, was in the throes of profound social discord and the public demanded a scapegoat. The Jews became the literal manifestation of a scapegoat for the German people. Hitler, faced with harsh social problems, exercised his own prejudices to isolate, blame and thus use the Jews as a scapegoat for Germany's problems. It was identification of the scapegoat with a real entity and the eventual acceptance of this scapegoat by a German majority that led to the conceptualization and employment of a "final solution" for the riddance of social ills from German society. Miller's argument is provocative, to say the least, in that he sees a direct correlation between the processes of Nazism and the processes of the "drug warriors." Moral indignation when it is directed toward a highly specified group of people can have disastrous consequences. Miller is not the only scholar who has applied the scapegoat theory to drug users in American society, but he is the first to take it to its disturbing, but logical end.

This is one of the best books I have read. I am against prohibition. Many people are but whenever the subject comes up in conversation the retort to my sugestion that prohibition be repealed is typically something along the line of "all you want to do is smoke pot" ...followed by some chuckling and then some stories about the days when we use to get high as kids.
This book is not about smoking pot. It is about the use of the drug war and prohibition law to circumvent Americans civil liberties. It is very well written. It helped me to form reasonable counter arguments to the for mentioned statement such as... "is it OK to strip search a child?"
This book is made even more relative when used as background material to analyze what I witness while watching the Judge Alito confirmatio hearings.
The scariest part of this book is watching the events described come alive right before our eyes on C-span.
I think you should read this if you, like me, suspect that something is rotten in Denmark and the official version of what is happening just isn't making sense.

If you are like me, reading this book may help you lose weight. Reading (even parts of) each page of this book makes me so mad that I have to get up and walk around to work off the outrage I feel towards the evil and criminal system of 'justice' that is evolving in this country. While I am making a joke, I am definitely not kidding.

I would like not to see the parallels. Any rational and compassionate person should like not to see the parallels. But the parallels are there, and Miller lays them bare in this devastating and meticulous extended analogy.

This is an astonishing book. Its thesis is provocative, to say the least, and it may not be for everyone -- but if you've ever wondered if just maybe our current federal drug policy wasn't delivering quite what you'd hoped, crack this book open and prepare to lose sleep.