One of the more pernicious, if often overlooked, myths underpinning the emergence of the "War on Drugs," was the overblown fear that the American army in Vietnam was awash with drug addiction. So argues Kuzmarov (history, U. of Tulsa), who here shows how the myth was constructed by the media and various political actors, including Richard Nixon, who sought justifications for a harsher punitive approach to crime and a move away from liberal social policies, and even the antiwar movement, which used the myth of the addicted army as a means of condemning the war. He also shows how the myth was rhetorically deployed both for incarcerating larger and larger numbers of Americans and in connection with other nationalistic myths concerning the failures of the Vietnam War. Annotation ©2010 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)