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A Rhetorical Critique of the Drug War, Slavery, and the "Nauseous Pendulum" of Reason and Violence

University of Illinois

This article offers detailed rhetorical analyses of the recent National Drug Control Strategy (NDCS) reports, which outline President Clinton's strategies for winning the so-called war on drugs. Unpacking their arguments tells us much about our government's understanding of the relationships among drugs, violence, race, crime, and democracy. To situate this critique of the drug war in a historically based analysis of the relationships among law, power, and force, this article turns to Thucydides' Peloponnesian Wars and Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, which emphasize the "nauseous pendulum" that swings between reason and violence. Considering the drug war in relationship to Thucydides and Aristotle bolsters the thesis that our contemporary means of producing power via reasonable political discourse that in practice serves as but the veneer on state-sanctioned violence is not a necessarily abhorrent form of hypocrisy but, rather, one of the fundamental traditions of law itself.

Journal of Contemporary Criminal Justice, Vol. 16, No. 3, 247-271 (2000)
DOI: 10.1177/1043986200016003002


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