"High Hopes" and "Bad Bundles": The Political Economy of U.S. Drug Control Policy

The primary goal of this dissertation is to discover, critically analyze, and articulate how policies impact drug markets and how they affect all economic actors involved in these markets. In order to tackle these unresolved questions, I focus on three major inflection points in the history of drug control policies. At each of these points, the methods of drug control implemented by policymakers changed drastically, and consequently, drug markets altered significantly as well. These three inflection points are the Harrison Narcotics Tax Act of 1914, the Controlled Substances Act of 1970, and state-level medical marijuana legalization in the late 1990s and 2000s.

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