Drug War Ideologies: Exposing the Propaganda by Wayne Martin Mellinger, Ph.D.
Drug War Ideologies: Exposing the Propaganda Wayne Martin Mellinger, Ph.D. ⸻ Section I: The Invention of Drug War Ideology The so-called “War on Drugs” is not a war against chemicals; it is a war against certain people, certain bodies, and certain ways of knowing. It has never been merely a policy or a campaign but a totalizing ideology—a moral cosmology that divides the pure from the impure, the disciplined from the deviant, the “productive citizen” from the “social contaminant.” Its origins lie not in pharmacology but in politics; not in evidence but in myth. From its beginnings in early twentieth-century America, drug policy was crafted not to heal addiction but to manage populations, to criminalize racialized and ...