Lawfare Archive: David Pozen on ‘The Constitution of the War on Drugs’

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4.7 • 6.2K Ratings

🗓️ 28 September 2025

⏱️ 58 minutes

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Summary

From May 10, 2024: David Pozen is the Charles Keller Beekman Professor of Law at Columbia Law School and the author of the new book, “The Constitution of the War on Drugs,” which examines the relationship between the Constitution and drug prohibitions. He joined Jack Goldsmith to talk about the constitutional history of the war on drugs and why the drug war was not curbed by constitutional doctrines about personal autonomy, limits on the federal government’s power, the Equal Protection Clause, or the prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment. They also talked about whether the political process is working with advancing decriminalization and how this impacts the constitutional dimension of the drug war.

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0:44.7	Learn more at spotleukemia.org.ukymea or search spot leukemia. I'm Isabella, I'm Isabella Royo, intern at Lawfare, with an episode from the Lawfare
1:06.0	archive for September 28, 2025. As of this recording on September 25th, the U.S. military has carried out three lethal strikes
1:14.6	on boats from Venezuela in the southern Caribbean. The White House has asserted that these
1:18.6	boats were engaged in drug trafficking and manned by members of the Trans-Daragua gang,
1:23.6	whom the President has referred to as narco-terrorists.
1:26.6	The use of lethal military force against civilian drug traffickers has raised questions
1:31.2	under both international and constitutional law.
1:34.4	For today's archive, I picked an episode from May 10, 2004, in which Jack Goldsmith sat down
1:40.2	with David Pozen, author of the Constitution of the War on Drugs.
1:44.4	They discussed the constitutional history of the non-military initiatives conventionally known
1:48.6	as the War on Drugs. Why the Drug War has been comparatively unrestrained by doctrines
1:53.2	about limited federal power, the Equal Protection Clause, or the Eighth Amendment,
1:57.0	how decriminalization would affect the drug war's constitutionality and more.
2:11.6	It's the Lawfare podcast. I'm Jack Goldsmith of Harvard Law School with David Posen of Columbia Law School.
2:19.0	I try to tell a story about how the kind of constitutional culture,
2:22.6	as well as the institutional structure of how we resolve constitutional claims,
	...

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