ABSTRACT
This chapter examines how unhealthy health-related laws, policies and practices worsened the suffering of illegal drug users. The health of drug users has not been a primary concern of legal and criminal-justice institutions. On the contrary, these institutions have promoted the darkest images of drug users, portraits that justify their marginalization, arrest, and incarceration. The law in its many expressions from drug bans, sentencing structures, the War on Drugs, and policing practices has been a primary force in the Othering of drug users in society. While marihuana is the most widely used illicit drug, the two most significant hard drugs throughout US history have been cocaine and the opiates. The development of the legal system that comprises the drug-control regime in the United States did not come into being as whole cloth, but rather in pieces large and small, local, state, and federal, with a focus often on specific drugs rather than the panoply of available psychoactive drugs.
