Miriam Boeri, Hurt: Chronicles of the Drug War Generation

Authors

Kathleen E. Padilla

Abstract

In 1971, President Nixon officially declared the War on Drugs. Flash forward to 2020 and the prison population is approximately 2.3 million people, with 1 in 5 of those individuals having been incarcerated for a non-violent drug offense (Wagner & Wagner, 2020). Among those caught up in drug offenses stemming from the policies enacted during the War on Drugs, the majority are baby boomers. Baby boomers are those that are born between the years 1946 and 1964, and whose current population is approximately 73 million, the second largest generation aside from Millennials (Census, 2019). By the start of the 21st Century, the youngest baby boomers were 36 years of age, and based on Winick’s (1962) “maturing hypothesis,” should have developed coping abilities that precluded the need for drug use and abuse to deal with the tenacities of life. Their inability to do so is often viewed as a personal failure, with the shame and stigma to be internalized by the individual. What is often lacking in society, however, is an understanding of the social ecology and context surrounding why individuals engage in drug use in the first place, and how they get caught up in a system that seemingly was never designed to help them succeed.

Creative Commons License

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Recommended Citation

Padilla, Kathleen E. (2021) "Miriam Boeri, Hurt: Chronicles of the Drug War Generation," Qualitative Criminology (QC): Vol. 10: No. 1, Article 6.
Available at: https://dc.swosu.edu/qc/vol10/iss1/6