Richard Lawrence Miller

The war on drugs is a war on ordinary people. Using that premise, historian Richard Lawrence Miller analyzes America's drug war with a passion seldom encountered in scholarly writing. Miller presents numerous examples of drug law enforcement gone amok, as police and courts threaten the happiness, property, and even lives of victims - some of whom are never charged with a drug crime, let alone convicted of one. Miller not only argues that criminal justice zealots are harming the democracy they are sworn to protect, but that authoritarians unfriendly to democracy are stoking public fear in order to convince citizens to relinquish traditional legal rights. Those are the very rights that thwart implementation of an agenda of social control through government power. Miller contends that an imaginary "drug crisis" has been manufactured by authoritarians in order to mask their war on democracy. He not only examines numerous civil rights sacrificed in the name of drugs, but demonstrates how their loss harms ordinary Americans in their everyday lives. Showing how the war on drug users fits into a destruction process that can lead to mass murder, Miller calls for an end to the war before it proceeds deeper into the destruction process.

Death camps are the most enduring image of the Holocaust, but they were only the final expression of a destruction process that began in 1933. In that year the Nazi regime mobilized members of an entire society to destroy their neighbors. Lawmakers, judges, attorneys, and the rest of the legal system played a crucial role in reassuring "good Germans" that a war on Jews was legitimate. Using original decrees, court decisions, and first-hand recollections of participants, Nazi Justiz documents how the German legal system transformed itself into a criminal organization. We also see not only how the legal system shaped everyday life, but how good Germans and the business community benefited from the Holocaust. Germany in the 1930s - before the war - is emphasized. Such emphasis demonstrates that a Holocaust can happen in any country sharing the heritage of Western civilization, and warns of the inevitable outcome once ordinary people are targeted in a process of destruction.