Latest episode of "Drugs on the Docket" podcast engages with David Pozen and his new book, The Constitution of the War on Drugs

In this post from last month, I highlighted that the Drug Enforcement and Policy Center at The Ohio State University had started releasing episodes from Season Two of the "Drugs on the Docket" podcast.  (All of the first season's episodes are all still available via Apple Podcasts and YouTube, where you can also find prior Season 2 episodes as well.)   Now, as detailed on this podcast webpage, we just recently released the fourth episode of this new season. which I consider absolutely fascinating on a number of fronts because it covers the intersections of constitutional right and jurisprudence and modern drug enforcement law and policy.  Here is the episode's description along with some notable show notes from the podcast website:

Season 2 Episode 4 – “The Constitution of the War on Drugs” with David Pozen

In this episode, host Hannah Miller and co-host Douglas Berman, executive director of the Drug Enforcement and Policy Center, speak with author and professor David Pozen to discuss his new book, The Constitution of the War on Drugs. In this groundbreaking work, Pozen provides a comparative history lesson on U.S. court cases in which constitutional arguments for drug rights were or were not employed, explains how the Constitution helped to legitimate and entrench punitive drug policy, and offers a constitutional roadmap to drug policy reform that may yet prevail in an increasingly originalist-leaning federal court system.

David Pozen is Charles Keller Beekman Professor of Law at Columbia Law School.

Show notes:

• Purchase The Constitution of the War on Drugs
• Access a free copy of The Constitution of the War on Drugs
• Balkinization blog symposium on The Constitution of the War on Drugs
• Read Perspectives on The Constitution of the War on Drugs: A Collection of Posts from the Balkinization Blog

Because there is so much richness in this podcast discussion and throughout the book, I am disinclined to here highlight any one aspect of the constitutional discussions. And yet, for sentencing fans, I will still flag that Chapter 4 of the book focuses on punishment issues and the Eighth Amendment, closing with this observation and teaser:

Even as American jurists have insisted that scrutinizing the severity of prison sentences is an invitation to lawlessness, the rest of the world has determined that a significantly more ambitious and demanding version of proportionality — one that eschews categorical rules in favor of structured balancing — is a foundation stone of the rule of law. Applying this version of proportionality, apex courts in Africa, Asia, Europe, North America, and South America have limited the penalties that may be applied to a growing set of drug users.  In the concluding chapter, I will return to these cases and to the question of what they might teach the United States.