Civil and Criminal Forfeiture

The laws of forfeiture dictate that the government may confiscate property that has been associated with the commission of a crime. In the 1970's and 1980's, law enforcement agencies increasingly used this controversial tactic and, as a result, reaped tremendous financial profit. In A License to Steal, Leonard W. Levy traces the development and implementation of forfeiture and contends that it is a questionable practice that, because it is so often abused, serves only to undermine civil society.

Epstein (law, U. of Chicago) defends the principles of limited government and argues that it can work to the advantage of almost all of society. He warns, however, that a careful dilution of pure laissez-faire policies is necessary to balance a powerful economic engine with individual liberty. He analyzes the interaction of law and social norms, and highlights a handful of restraints that he says provide a moral foundation to a resilient and adaptive capitalist system.

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.

Global Drug Enforcement: Practical Investigative Techniques provides basic and advanced techniques for conducting modern drug investigations. With coverage of source countries, drug identification, conspiracy investigations, clandestine laboratories, drug intelligence, and money laundering, the book includes the drug-specific topics that every detective assigned to a drug investigation unit must know. The chapter on drug identification not only explains the drugs of abuse all law enforcement officers are likely to encounter, such as heroin, marijuana, and cocaine, but also contain in-depth information about methamphetamine, PCP, and the emerging club drug, Ecstasy, GHB, and Ketamine.