Policing Methamphetamine:
Narcopolitics in Rural America
In its steady march across the United States, methamphetamine has become, to quote former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, “the most dangerous drug in America.
Addiction Trajectories
Bringing anthropological perspectives to bear on addiction, the contributors to this important collection highlight the contingency of addiction as a category of human knowledge and experience.
Policing and Contemporary Governance
This volume draws attention to the centrality of police and policing to the project of governance and the experience of being human in the contemporary world.
The Anthropology of Police
Even beyond the methodological particularities and geographic breadth of cultural anthropology, there are a set of conceptual and analytical traditions that have much to bring to broader scholarship in police studies.
Articles
2023 “The Social Equity Paradigm: The Quest for Justice in Cannabis Legalization.”
Seton Hall Journal of Legislation and Public Policy Symposium on Cannabis Law (with Jose Garcia-Fuerte).
2023 “Greening the Green Rush: How Addressing The Environmental Impact of Cannabis
“Greening the Green Rush: How Addressing The Environmental Impact of Cannabis Legalization Can Enhance Social Equity and Remediate the Harms of The War on Drugs.”
Book Chapters
2022 “Ethnographic Research: Immersing Oneself in the Rural Environment”
Research Methods for Rural Criminologists, edited by Ralph Weisheit, Jessica Peterson, and Artur Pytlarz. New York: Routledge.
2018 “Becoming a Police Ethnographer,”
Doing Ethnography in Criminology: Discovery through Fieldwork, edited by Stephen K. Rice and Michael D. Maltz, 187-94. New York: Springer.
Reports
Deflection and Pre-Arrest Diversion in Iowa
Testimonials
“Reveals how addiction is remaking rural America despite four decades of a & war on drugs. Garriott explores the day-to-day costs of policing drugs in a society increasingly organized around the illicit and the high. Compassionate and relentless, he demonstrates the brutal reality of narcopolitics in the United States. Essential reading.”
— Joseph Masco,The University of Chicago on Policing Methamphetamine:
Narcopolitics in Rural America
“I would highly recommend the book especially to readers within anthropology and other related disciplines, who are interested in addiction, diseases, illnesses, and also in organizing ideas of what it means to be human: these ideas assume specificity in different historical and spatial settings, as they are related to political and commercial histories of pharmaceuticals and illegal drugs and their translations and transformations.”
— Bjarke Nielsen, Ethnos on Addition Trajectories
“This book is an important contribution to the anthropology of drug use…it conveys a real sense of the bleakness and intractability of the problem, as well as the ultimate failure of policy and practice to meet this challenge.”
— Gilbert Quintero, Anthropological Quarterly on Policing Methamphetamine:
Narcopolitics in Rural America
William Garriott 