In The Suburban Crisis: White America and the War on Drugs, Matthew D. Lassiter offers the kind of bold, complex argument that is simultaneously surprising and immediately convincing. He argues that the racial motivations behind the War on Drugs (focusing on the 1950s through 1980s) were as much about a need to protect (innocent) white victims as they were about punishing Black and brown people caught up in drugs. The bulk of the War on Drugs scholarship has focused on the punishment side of the story, rightly calling attention to the injustices and harmful effects of mandatory minimums and differential sentencing. Lassiter reminds us that this War on Drugs against Black and brown Americans was also a war on behalf of another group: white Americans, especially middle-class to wealthy young people, who were deemed the “impossible criminals” and whose law-breaking prompted calls for rehabilitation rather than jail so that their youthful missteps would not ruin their future.
The title reveals Lassiter’s priorities. He is most interested in suburbia and in how it is intertwined with the war on drugs. The politics of suburbia—particularly those casting white, middle-class, or wealthy, young people as perpetually under threat from the “pushers” and “dealers” of drugs—drive not merely the racialized policies of the war on drugs but also race-based injustice, residential segregation, the growth of the carceral state, and punitive approaches to public health. Lassiter is at his best when describing the intersection of parental activism with local and state politics, resulting in both laws and policies that protected white middle-class youth from the consequences of their lawbreaking by intensifying the criminality of others, particularly urban, poor, immigrant, and brown or Black people.
The book moves chronologically, starting in the 1950s with the growing fear about drug use by young white people. Their parents and politicians argued that pushers, always represented as coming into suburban spaces from outside, whether that meant East Los Angeles or Mexico, were enticing or trapping these young white people into drug addiction. Lurid stories about dealers providing free samples or even injecting people with heroin in order to “make” them into addicts circulated, proving more compelling than the prosaic reality that young white people sought out drugs by driving to Mexico, where they could more easily purchase them, and then returning to share with friends. Nearly all the elements of the story are present from the beginning. Young white people, sufficiently wealthy to have disposable income for recreational drugs, sought out drugs—usually marijuana but sometimes other hallucinogens or amphetamines, more rarely heroin or (later) cocaine. Most of them got those drugs from friends, although someone in the group had to go to a source. When caught, the young white people were deemed “impossible criminals” who had made a mistake or who were sick in some way, deserving of only a light encounter with the criminal justice system but subject to parental discipline and enforced rehabilitation treatment. In turn, the villain in these narratives was the supposed pusher or dealer, who was represented as coming from outside the community and as what we might call the “punishable criminal.” He—the pusher usually was represented as a man—deserved a harsh jail sentence.
In the 1950s, this pattern emerged across suburbs in places like southern California, New York, and Illinois, fueled by conservative parents influencing local politics. It then blossomed into the federal narcotics laws of 1951 and especially 1956, which introduced the first federal mandatory minimum sentences for drugs in the United States. Subsequent chapters demonstrate how the pattern repeated, with variation, in three additional time periods, which have some overlap: the 1960s, the late 1960s through the early 1970s, and the late 1970s through the early 1980s, with a final chapter on the Reagan-era War on Drugs and an epilogue to bring the story into the present. The narrative is constructed like a fugue, with the theme consistent throughout the domestic War on Drugs since the 1950s, and the variations only serving to emphasize the consistency of the racialized suburban politics fueling U.S. drug policy.
It is commonplace, for instance, to talk about the massive use, or even the massive increase in use, of drugs in particular time periods in post-World War II America. (Even Lassiter sometimes uses similar language.) One is struck, however, by the fact that each chapter includes descriptions of widespread illicit drug use, across both pharmaceutical and recreational drugs. Although this book is focused on showing the intertwined nature of a particular racial politics of suburbia and the persistence of the war on drugs—rather than advancing a discussion of the effectiveness of the war on drugs approach—it is impossible not to notice that none of the government policies pursued since the 1950s have made a dent in availability or use of drugs.
Or we can think about the different concerns that young people’s drug use caused parents and officials over the years. In the 1950s, young white people using drugs were victims of outsider “pushers” and “dealers” who threatened to seduce or trick them. In the 1960s, it was harder to deny that young white people were seeking out drugs as a rebellious act, but parents and officials imagined this as a phase of youth rather than viewing them as criminals. By the late 1960s and early 1970s, concern focused on the ways that peer pressure, more than outsiders, led to drug use, but this narrative frame still highlighted supposed external pressures acting on fundamentally “good” or “innocent” young white people. Although parents in the 1970s worried that increasing pot use by the children led to “amotivational syndrome” (p. 321), the nation first flirted with and then moved away from decriminalization of marijuana, all while preserving the idea that young white people’s drug use did not make them criminals. White, wealthy parents in the late 1970s and early 1980s, in particular, projected their fears onto even younger children, noting consumption by 12- and 13-year olds, and cast their blame on an even wider net of potential outsiders, including their children’s peers who ostensibly had lax parents or came from broken homes.
Just as the threats were conceived as similar but also shifting, the political response was fundamentally the same, even if it took on different appearances. Consistently, young white, middle-class people did not go to jail for the crime of using illicit drugs. They might have been arrested, as they famously were during the initial years of the Nixon-era War on Drugs. They might have been forced to go to rehabilitation, a common alternative to jail given only to this group. They might have experienced harsh parental discipline, as when both school and law enforcement officials remanded them to parental care rather than charging them with a crime. But throughout the time period covered by the book, young white people did not go to jail. That fact probably will not surprise any reader of this book; the politics that produced this racialized indemnity, however, and its many implications have been too little considered. The investigation of those implications and politics is one of the great strengths of this book.
In The Suburban Crisis, Lassiter also argues that the focus of previous scholarship on only those punished in the War on Drugs, understandable though it is, obscures the ways that the carceral state and a coercive public health approach to drugs worked together, forged by a political consensus among Republicans and Democrats alike. Democrats, such as Senators Charles Rangel and Joseph Biden, chided the Reagan administration for inflicting insufficiently harsh punishments on traffickers, even as they softened their stance with simultaneous calls for more spending on prevention and treatment. But when the prevention and treatment funding did not survive the legislative process, the Democrats always voted for the harsh punishments. Rangel and Biden were neither the first nor the last Democrats to engage in these racialized drug politics. Lassiter’s attention to how these policies grew out of local and state politics helps too to explain the enduring power of this approach to drugs policy, even as nearly all observers agree it has not and does not work.
Lassiter does not shy away from the complexity of his story, meticulously weaving the disparate strands of parental advocacy movements, local police forces and their charging decisions, the politics of the courtroom, the persistent but futile efforts of young people to explain and advocate for themselves, politics at the local, state, and national levels, and representations of all of these in the media to create a rich picture of politics in post-World War II America.
