Disturbing History - DH Ep:54 The War On Drugs

Episode Date: January 2, 2026

What if the War on Drugs was never really about drugs at all?In this episode of Disturbing History, we pull back the curtain on a devastating truth. For over fifty years, the U.S. government has waged a costly, brutal campaign that’s locked up millions, empowered police militarization, devastated entire communities—and yet, drugs are cheaper and more accessible than ever, with overdose deaths now surpassing 100,000 annually.If the goal was to stop drug use, it’s been an undeniable failure. But what if that wasn’t the real goal?We take you on a journey through time, beginning in 1875 San Francisco, where America’s first anti-drug law targeted Chinese immigrants, not opium. From there, we trace a pattern—how drug policy after drug policy has been rooted in racism, fear, and control. You'll hear how Nixon’s declaration of the War on Drugs, Reagan’s crackdown on crack cocaine, Clinton’s crime bill, and beyond, each added layers to a system designed less to protect public health than to marginalize and imprison.Along the way, we follow the money—into the pockets of private prisons, testing firms, and police departments incentivized by seizures and incarceration quotas. We dig into how the CIA’s covert dealings with drug traffickers, the practice of civil asset forfeiture, and the arming of local police forces created a system that punishes the vulnerable while shielding the powerful.Y ou’ll meet real people who paid the price—like Kemba Smith and Weldon Angelos—whose sentences make clear just how unforgiving and uneven this war has been. We contrast the punitive crack era with the more compassionate response to the opioid crisis and ask: who gets treated, and who gets punished? We don’t stop at America’s borders either. From Mexico and Colombia to the Philippines, we explore how U.S. policy has fueled violence and instability abroad, pushing other nations into our prohibitionist mold. But there’s hope. We highlight what’s working—from Portugal’s bold decriminalization model to harm reduction in Switzerland—and reflect on the slow but steady reforms happening here at home. Legalization. Sentencing reform. Rescheduling. Change is coming—but the machine hasn’t stopped.

Some stories were never meant to be told. Others were buried on purpose. This podcast digs them all up. Disturbing history peels back the layers of the past to uncover the strange, the sinister, and the stories that were never supposed to survive. From shadowy presidential secrets to government experiments that sound more like fiction than fact, this is history they hoped you'd forget. I'm Brian, investigator, author, and your guide,

through the dark corners of our collective memory. Each week I'll narrate some of the most chilling and little-known tales from history that will make you question everything you thought you knew. And here's the twist. Sometimes the history is disturbing to us. And sometimes, we have to disturb history itself, just to get to the truth.

If you like your facts with the side of fear, if you're not afraid to pull at threads, others leave alone. You're in the right place. History isn't just written by the victim. Sometimes, it's rewritten by The Disturbed. The War on Drugs is a good thing, right? I mean, think about it.

Drugs destroy lives. They tear apart families. They ravage communities. They kill people. So when Richard Nixon stood before the American people in 1971 and declared drug abuse, public enemy number one, he was doing the right thing. He was protecting us. He was protecting our children.

He was launching a righteous crusade against the scourge of addiction that threatened to destroy the very fabric of American society. And for over 50 years now, we have waged this war. We have spent over $1 trillion fighting it. We have arrested tens of millions of people. We have built prisons. So many prisons. We have militarized our police forces.

We have sent soldiers and agents into foreign countries. We have sprayed poison on crops in Colombia and burned poppy fields in Afghanistan. We have done everything in our power to eradicate this menace. So here we are, five decades later, and surely the drug problem must be solved by now. Surely all those arrests, all that money, all that effort must have accomplished something. Except it hasn't. Drug use in America today is higher than it was when Nixon declared war. Overdose deaths have skyrocketed to over 100,000 per year.

The opioid epidemic has ravaged rural America. Fentanyl is killing people in numbers that would have been unimaginable in 1971. And despite all those arrests, despite all those billions of dollars, drugs are cheaper, more potent, and more available than ever before. So what exactly have we been fighting for all these years? What has the war on drugs actually accomplished? The answer to that question is disturbing, because when you dig beneath the surface, when you examine the historical record, when you look at the facts, the evidence, and the outcomes,

you discover something that should make every American deeply uncomfortable. The war on drugs was never really about drugs at all. Welcome to disturbing history. Today we're going to expose one of the greatest deceptions ever perpetrated on the American people. We're going to follow the money. We're going to examine the policies. we're going to listen to the words of the very people who designed this war. And what we discover might fundamentally change how you view your own government,

your own country, and the true meaning of justice in America. To understand the war on drugs, we have to go back long before Nixon. We have to understand that drug prohibition in America has always been intertwined with racism, xenophobia, and the control of marginalized populations. The first anti-drug laws in the United States were not about protecting public health. They were about controlling people. In 1875, San Francisco passed the first anti-drug law in American history. It prohibited the smoking of opium in opium dens.

Now here's what's interesting. It didn't prohibit the use of opium. Wealthy white Americans were free to consume opium in any form they wished. Patent medicines loaded with opium were sold openly and legally. What the law targeted was a specific practice associated with Chinese immigrants, smoking opium in dens. This wasn't about health. This was about fear of the Chinese.

The law came during a period of intense anti-Chinese sentiment on the West Coast. Chinese laborers brought to America to build the railroads were now seen as competition for jobs during an economic downturn. The opium den became a symbol of the yellow peril, a supposed threat to white America. and purity. The language used by supporters of these laws was explicitly racist. They spoke of Chinese men using opium to seduce white women. They painted pictures of moral degradation and racial mixing. The drug was merely the excuse. The target was always the people. This pattern repeated itself with every major drug prohibition that followed. Cocaine is another such example. In the late 1800s and early 1900s, cocaine was legal and widely used.

It was an ingredient in Coca-Cola until 1903. It was prescribed by doctors. It was used by people of all races and classes. But as cocaine used spread among black Americans, particularly in the South, the narrative changed. Newspapers began publishing sensational stories about Negro cocaine fiends, committing crimes under the drug's influence. The New York Times ran an article in 1905 with the headline, Negro cocaine fiends are a new southern menace. The stories claimed that cocaine gave black men superhuman strength and made them impervious to bullets.

Police departments reportedly began switching from 32-caliber to 38-caliber handguns because they believed cocaine-crazed black men could not be stopped with smaller rounds. None of this was based in reality. There was no epidemic of cocaine-fueled violence, among black Americans. The studies that later examined this period found no evidence to support these claims. But the narrative served its purpose.

It gave Southern lawmakers a justification for control. Dr. Hamilton Wright considered the father of American drug laws explicitly connected drug prohibition to race. In 1910, he reported to Congress that cocaine is often the direct incentive to the crime of rape by the Negroes of the South. South. This was presented as scientific testimony. It was nothing but racist propaganda dressed up in the language of public health. The Harrison Narcotics Tax Act of 1914, the first federal

drug law, emerged from this environment. Officially, it was a tax and regulatory measure. In practice, it became the foundation for drug prohibition. And its passage was driven not by concerns about public health, but by racial anxieties and international trade considerations. Marijuana followed the same pattern. In the 1920s and 30s, marijuana ewes became associated with Mexican immigrants in the southwest. The plant was even called marijuana specifically to emphasize its foreign Mexican origins. Cannabis sounded too scientific, too neutral. Marijuana sounded foreign and threatening.

Harry Anslinger, the first commissioner, of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, became the architect of marijuana prohibition. And Anslinger was explicit about his racial motivations. His personal files, which were later made public, contained statements like, Reifer makes darkies think they're as good as white men, and there are 100,000 total marijuana smokers in the United States, and most are Negroes, Hispanics, Filipinos, and entertainers. Anslinger specifically targeted black jazz musicians. He maintained files on dozens of prominent performers and made it his personal mission to destroy them.

His vendetta against Billy Holiday is well documented. When Holiday performed Strange Fruit, her haunting song about lynching, Anslinger reportedly became obsessed with bringing her down. Federal agents pursued her relentlessly. She was arrested multiple times on drug charges. Even on her deathbed, dying of cirrhosis in a hospital, Agents reportedly handcuffed her to the bed and refused to allow her medication. This is the foundation upon which the war on drugs was built.

From the very beginning, drug prohibition in America was a tool of racial control, masquerading as public health policy. But there's another layer to this story that often gets overlooked. The prohibition of alcohol during the same era provides an instructive contrast. Alcohol prohibition, which lasted from 1920 to 1933, was ultimately repealed because it created more problems than it solved. Organized crime flourished. Violence increased. And crucially, alcohol prohibition affected white Americans, including wealthy and politically connected white Americans. When prohibition caused problems for the right people, it ended. But drug prohibition,

targeting marginalized communities with far less political. power continued and expanded. The lesson is clear. Policies that harm the powerless can persist indefinitely. Policies that harm the powerful get changed. And let's not forget the economic interests at play even in these early years. The pharmaceutical industry had reasons to support drug prohibition as it eliminated competition from unregulated products. Law enforcement agencies gained funding and authority. Moral reformers gained influence. The coalition behind drug prohibition was diverse, but none of its members were primarily concerned with public health outcomes. The Marijuana Tax Act of 1937, pushed through Congress largely by Anslinger,

effectively criminalized marijuana at the federal level. During the congressional hearings, the American Medical Association actually opposed the bill, warning that it would interfere with legitimate medical uses of cannabis. Anslinger dismissed their concerns. He didn't need medical evidence. He had racism and fear. The entire framework for modern drug prohibition was established before Nixon was ever born. Nixon didn't invent drug prohibition.

What he did was weaponize it on a scale never before imagined. Richard Nixon formally declared the war on drugs on June 17, 1971. In a press conference at the White House, he announced that drug abuse had assumed the dimensions of a national emergency, and that he was asking Congress for emergency funding to combat, what he called public enemy number one. The conventional narrative tells us that Nixon launched this war because drugs, particularly heroin returning from Vietnam with American soldiers, posed a genuine threat to American society.

And there's some truth to this. Heroin use among returning veterans was a real concern. But that's not the whole story. Not even close. In 1994, a journalist named Dan Baum was working on a book about drug prohibition. He managed to secure an interview with John Ehrlichman, who had served as Nixon's domestic policy advisor. Erlickman was one of the architects of the war on drugs. He had been convicted for his role in Watergate and had largely disappeared from public life.

What Ehrlichman told Baum didn't make it into the 1994 book. Baum sat on it for over two decades before finally publishing it. in Harper's Magazine in 2016. Here's what Ehrlichman said, and I'm quoting directly. The Nixon campaign in 1968 and the Nixon White House after that had two enemies, the anti-war left and black people. You understand what I'm saying? We knew we couldn't make it illegal to be either against the war or black,

but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did. Now I need to be clear about something. After Baum published this quote, Ehrlichman's family disputed its accuracy. They said it didn't sound like something he would say. Ehrlichman himself had died in 1999, so he couldn't confirm or deny it. And Baum didn't record the interview. But here's the thing. Even if we set that quote aside entirely, even if we assume

Ehrlichman never said those words, the historical record tells the same story. The policies speak for themselves. Look at where the war on drugs was focused. Look at who was arrested. Look at the sentencing disparities. Look at the communities that were targeted. The outcomes are precisely what Ehrlichman described, whether he said those words or not. Nixon created. Nixon created the Drug Enforcement Administration in 1973, consolidating various federal drug agencies into one powerful organization. He dramatically increased funding for drug control. And he began the process of categorizing drugs into schedules,

with Schedule I reserved for the most dangerous substances with no accepted medical use. Now, here's where it gets interesting. When it came to categorizing marijuana, Nixon had a problem. The scientific evidence didn't support putting marijuana in Schedule 1. So in 1972, Nixon commissioned a study. He appointed former Pennsylvania Governor Raymond Schaefer to lead a Blue Ribbon Commission to study marijuana and make recommendations. The Schaefer Commission spent two years studying marijuana. They examined the scientific evidence. They consulted experts. And in 1972, they delivered their report.

Marijuana, a signal of misunderstanding. The commission's conclusion was unambiguous. Marijuana should be decriminalized. The report stated that the criminal law is too harsh a tool to apply to personal possession, even in the effort to discourage use, and that the actual and potential harm of use of the drug is not great enough to justify intrusion by the criminal law into private behavior. Nixon buried the report. He rejected its findings entirely and proceeded to place marijuana in Schedule 1, alongside heroin. Stay tuned for more disturbing history. We'll be back after these messages. And there it remains to this day, classified as more dangerous than cocaine, methamphetamine, and fentanyl, all of which are scheduled

two. This wasn't based on science. This wasn't based on the recommendations of Nixon's own experts. This was a political decision made to justify the continued criminalization of a drug associated with groups Nixon wanted to control, but the marijuana scheduling wasn't the only way Nixon ignored his own experts. He also commissioned a study on heroin treatment, hoping to find support for a purely law enforcement approach. Instead, the researchers, led by Dr. Jerome Jaffe, recommended methadone maintenance treatment. Methadone, a synthetic opioid, could stabilize heroin addicts, reduce cravings, and allow them to function in society. To Nickyton, Nixon's credit, or perhaps to his political calculation given the number of addicted veterans

returning from Vietnam, he did initially expand methadone treatment programs. This represents one of the few moments in the war on drugs when evidence-based treatment received serious federal support. But even this proved temporary. As the political winds shifted, treatment funding declined while enforcement funding skyrocketed. Nixon also created the Special Action Office for drug abuse prevention, which coordinated treatment and prevention efforts. For a brief moment, there was at least a pretense of balance between treatment and enforcement. But Nixon's real priorities were always clear.

The DEA got the resources. The prisons got the people. And then, there was Operation Intercept. In September 1969, Nixon ordered a near-complete shutdown of the U.S.-Mexico border to stop marijuana smuggling. Every vehicle crossing the border was subjected to a three-minute inspection. The resulting traffic jams stretched for miles. The Mexican economy was severely disrupted.

American border towns lost business. The operation lasted less than three weeks. It was a diplomatic disaster and accomplished virtually nothing in terms of drug interdiction. But it established a template that would be repeated again and again. Dramatic, highly visible enforcement actions that produced great, political theater while failing to address the underlying problem. Nixon also pioneered the use of drug enforcement for political espionage. The White House Plumbers Unit, which would later become infamous for Watergate, was originally created to stop leaks related to the Pentagon Papers.

But these operatives also engaged in illegal activities targeting anti-war activists, often using drug charges as pretexts for raids and surveillance. When Nixon resigned in disgrace in 177, The War on Drugs continued. Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter maintained the basic structure Nixon had created, though Carter did flirt with marijuana decriminalization. Carter told Congress in 1977 that penalties for possession of a drug should not be more damaging to an individual than the use of the drug itself. He recommended decriminalizing possession of up to an ounce of marijuana.

This reform died in the backlash against the perceived excesses of the 60s and 60s. 70s. By the time Reagan took office, the pendulum had swung hard in the other direction. If Nixon started the war on drugs, Ronald Reagan turned it into a full-scale assault on American communities. Reagan came into office in 1981 promising to get tough on crime, and he delivered. Under Reagan, federal spending on drug enforcement more than tripled. The FBI's drug enforcement budget increased from $8 million to $95 million. The Department of Defense got involved in drug interdiction for the first time, but the real escalation came with crack cocaine. Crack appeared in American cities in the early 1980s. It was cheap, potent, and

immediately addictive, and it hit black urban communities with devastating force. The crack epidemic was real. It destroyed lives and neighborhoods. That part of the story is true. But what happened next was not a public health response. It was a war. In 1986, Congress passed the Anti-Drug Abuse Act, one of the most consequential pieces of legislation in American history. This law created mandatory minimum sentences for drug offenses, and it created a disparity that would shape American criminal justice for decades to come. Under the 1986 law, possession of five grams of crack cocaine, about the weight of two sugar packets, triggered a mandatory minimum sentence of five years in federal prison. To trigger the same five-year

sentence for powder cocaine, you needed to possess 500 grams. That's a ratio of 100 to 1, the same drug, the same chemical compound, but with wildly different penalties based on its form. Now who used crack, predominantly black Americans in urban areas, who used powder cocaine, predominantly white Americans, including, we would later learn. plenty of people on Wall Street and in Hollywood. This wasn't an accident, and it wasn't based on any scientific difference between the two forms of cocaine.

The claimed rationale was that crack was more addictive and more dangerous. But pharmacologically, crack and powder cocaine are identical. The only difference is the root of administration. The disparity was a policy choice, and its effects were predictable. By 1990, black Americans made up 12% of the population, but 60% of those in prison for drug offenses. By 2000, one in three black men between the ages of 20 and 29

were under some form of criminal supervision, whether prison, probation, or parole. The incarceration rate for black men in America became the highest in human history for any population in any country at any time. This was mass incarceration, and it was by design. The numbers are staggering when you really let them sink in. In 1980, there were approximately 40,000 people in state and federal prisons for drug offenses.

By 2000, that number had exploded to over 450,000. The prison population as a whole quintupled. The United States went from incarcerating roughly 300,000 people in 1980 to over 2 million by the early 2000s. America became the world leader in incarceration. With about 5% of the world's population, the United States held 25% of the world's prisoners. No country in history had ever imprisoned such a large proportion of its population. And this wasn't evenly distributed. When you look at who was being locked up, the pattern is unmistakable. Black men from urban areas, predominantly poor, predominantly young, were swept into the system at rates that defy explanation outside

of targeted policy. Consider what happened to Washington, D.C., the nation's capital. By 1997, half of all black men between the ages of 18 and 35 in the district were either in prison, on probation, on parole, out on bond, or being sought on a warrant. Half. In the capital of the supposed land of the free, Baltimore saw similar numbers. Chicago, Detroit, Philadelphia. In city after city, an entire generation of young black men was being systematically removed from their communities. And it wasn't just the people in prison who suffered. Families were torn apart.

Children grew up without fathers, without mothers. Communities lost their most productive years. The years when young people should be working, raising families, building businesses, contributing to society. Sociologists have documented the cascading effects of mass incarceration on black communities. Higher rates of single-parent households. Reduced marriage rates. economic devastation as potential earners are removed reduced civic participation as felons lose voting rights

the concentration of released prisoners in already disadvantaged neighborhoods the stigma that follows anyone with a criminal record making employment nearly impossible this was not an unintended consequence this was the system working as designed let me introduce you to lee atwater Atwater was a Republican political strategist who worked for Reagan and later became chairman of the Republican National Committee. In 1981, he gave an interview where he explained the evolution of Republican racial politics. The audio of this interview was later obtained by journalists. Here's what Atwater said. You start out in 1954 by saying, N-word, N-word, N-word.

By 1968, you can't say N-word. That hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced buzzing, states' rights, and all that stuff, and you're getting so abstract. Now, you're talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you're talking about are totally economic things, and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites, and subconsciously maybe that is part of it. Atwater was describing the Southern strategy, the Republican approach to winning white voters in the South by appealing to racial resentment without using explicitly racist land. language, and the war on drugs fit perfectly into this strategy. You couldn't say you were targeting

black Americans, but you could say you were getting tough on crime. You could say you were fighting drugs, and the result was the same. Nancy Reagan launched the Just Say No campaign, which became the public face of the anti-drug effort. It was simple, catchy, and completely ineffective. Studies later showed that the Just Say No campaign and similar programs like Dare had no measurable impact on drug use. In some studies, kids who went through DARE were actually more likely to use drugs later. But effectiveness wasn't really the point. The point was political messaging. The point was demonstrating that you were tough on crime, tough on drugs, tough on those people who were supposedly ruining America. The media played a crucial role in all of this. Network news coverage

of crack cocaine was relentless and sensational. Stories about crack babies warned of a generation of permanently damaged children. Studies later showed that the crack baby phenomenon was largely a myth. Prenatal exposure to cocaine produces effects similar to tobacco, and most children exposed in the womb developed normally with proper care. But the damage to public perception was done. Coverage of crack was distinctly racialized. When the network showed crack users, they showed black faces.

When they discussed the cocaine that Wall Street, traders snorted at parties, the coverage was different, almost glamorous by comparison. The language used by politicians and media alike dehumanized drug users. They weren't sick people needing help. They were predators, thugs, animals. This language made it easier to support policies that would have seemed monstrous if applied to real Americans. And the war continued under Democratic presidents as well. This was a bipartisan and project. Bill Clinton, campaigning in 1992, made a point of executing Ricky Ray Rector, a mentally impaired black man on death row in Arkansas, to demonstrate his tough-on-crime credentials.

During the campaign, Clinton also attacked the hip-hop artist Sister Soldier to distance himself from Jesse Jackson and prove he wasn't beholden to black voters. Once in office, Clinton signed the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994, one of the most people. punitive crime bills in American history. The bill provided funding for 100,000 new police officers. It expanded the federal death penalty to 60 new offenses. It eliminated Pell Grants for prisoners, making education behind bars nearly impossible. It included a three-strikes provision that mandated life sentences for repeat offenders. The 1994 crime bill accelerated mass incarceration. It provided federal funding to states that adopted truth in sentencing laws requiring prisoners to serve

at least 85% of their sentences. This led to longer sentences and more overcrowded prisons. Hillary Clinton, as First Lady, actively promoted the bill. In a 1996 speech, she used language that would later haunt her political career. Speaking of gang members, she said, they are not just gangs of kids anymore. They are often the kinds of kids that are called super predators. No conscience, no empathy. The super predator theory, promoted by political scientist John Di Julio, predicted a wave of violent juvenile crime that never materialized. Youth crime actually declined through the 90s.

But the theory was used to justify treating juveniles as adults and sentencing children to life in prison. Diulio himself later recanted. In 2001, he wrote that his predictions had been wrong and called for a fundamental rethinking of juvenile judge. But by then, thousands of young people, predominantly black and brown, were serving decades-long sentences for crimes committed as teenagers. The Drug-Free Schools and Communities Act pushed zero-tolerance policies into schools. Children were suspended or expelled for minor infractions.

The school-to-prison pipeline was constructed, funneling disadvantaged youth out of classrooms and into juvenile detention facilities. None of this was evidence-based. None of it was shown to run. None of it was shown to reduce crime or drug use, but it was politically effective. Being tough on crime, won elections. And so the system grew. Now let's follow the money. Because whenever you want to understand a government policy that doesn't seem to make sense, you should always ask, who's getting paid?

In 1984, a company called Corrections Corporation of America opened the first private prison in Tennessee. For the first time in American history, corporations could profit direct. from incarceration. They were paid per prisoner, per day. The more prisoners they housed, the longer those prisoners stayed, the more money they made. This was a new industry, and it needed customers. Guess what the war on drugs provided? By the year 2000, private prison companies were operating over 100 facilities across the country. Their stock prices were tied directly to incarceration rates. Stay tuned for more disturbing history. We'll be back after these messages. Their investors profited from every drug arrest, every conviction, every year added to a sentence.

These companies didn't just sit back and wait for prisoners to arrive. They lobbied. According to the Justice Policy Institute, the three largest private prison companies spent nearly $45 million on lobbying and campaign contributions between 2000 and 2010. They pushed for tougher sentencing laws. They pushed for more enforcement. They pushed for policies that would fill their facilities. The GEO group, one of the largest private prison companies, spent millions lobbying for Arizona's SB 1070 in 2010,

the controversial immigration enforcement law. Why would a prison company care about immigration policy? Because immigration detention meant more prisoners, more contracts, more profit. But the prison industrial complex extends far beyond private, prisons. Public prisons are embedded in local economies. In rural communities across America, prisons became employers of last resort. When factories closed and farms consolidated, prisons moved in. Town economies became dependent on incarceration. And then there are all the companies that service prisons. Phone companies that charge incarcerated people dollars per minute for calls to

family members. Food service companies that provide meals at minimal cost, and minimal nutritional value. Medical companies that provide health care, often inadequate health care, at premium prices. Commissary companies that mark up basic necessities by hundreds of percent. A report from Prison Policy Initiative

found that families of incarcerated people spend nearly $3 billion per year just on commissary items, phone calls, and money transfer fees. That's $3 billion extracted from some of the poorest communities in America. flowing to corporations that profit from human cages. And let's not forget the bail bond industry,

the electronic monitoring companies, the drug testing companies, the probation and parole supervision companies. All of these entities have financial incentives to keep the system going, to keep the arrests flowing, to keep people trapped in the criminal justice system. This is what President Eisenhower warned about

with the military industrial complex, applied to domestic policy. Once you create an industry that profits from a particular government activity, that industry will fight to perpetuate that activity forever. The war on drugs created exactly such an industry, and that industry has spent decades ensuring that the war never ends. Let me give you a specific example of how this works. In 2011, the Corrections Officers Union in California,

the California Correctional Peace Officers Association, spent over $8 million on political campaigns. This union has consistently opposed sentencing reform, bail reform, and any measure that might reduce the prison population. Why? Because fewer prisoners means fewer correctional officers, means fewer union members, means less union power. This same union contributed heavily to the campaign of Governor Gray Davis,

who signed legislation eliminating parole for thousands of inmates and increasing sentences. The union's influence is so significant that it has been called the most powerful union in California politics. Law enforcement unions across the country have opposed marijuana legalization, even as public opinion has shifted dramatically.

They've opposed civil asset forfeiture reform. They've opposed any measure that might reduce arrests, convictions, and incarceration. Drug testing companies represent another entrenched interest. The drug testing companies represent another entrenched interest. The drug testing industry generates over $3 billion annually. These companies have lobbied for expanded drug testing requirements in schools, workplaces,

and as a condition of receiving public benefits. Every expansion of drug testing is more profit for them. The bail bond industry profits from the current system. Cash bail traps poor defendants in jail before trial. Not because they're dangerous or flight risks, but because they can't afford a few hundred dollars. Bail bondsmen have lobbied aggressively against bail reform efforts in states across the country. Electronic monitoring companies profit from alternatives to incarceration. Ankle monitors, GPS tracking, and other surveillance technologies have become a multi-billion dollar industry.

People on home confinement often have to pay for their own monitoring, sometimes hundreds of dollars per month. This creates a two-tiered system, those who can afford to be monitored at home, and those who can't and remain. locked up. Even telephone companies profit from incarceration. Prison phone calls have historically cost dollars per minute, vastly more than regular phone rates. A 15-minute call might cost $11. This extracts money from some of the poorest families in America while making it harder for incarcerated people to maintain connections with their loved ones. All of these industries have one thing in common. They profit when more people are ensnared in the criminal justice system.

They have financial incentives to oppose reform, and they spend millions lobbying to keep the system exactly as it is. Now we need to talk about one of the most disturbing aspects of the war on drugs, and one of the most well documented. While the United States government was waging war on drugs domestically, it was simultaneously protecting and enabling drug trafficking internationally when it served other geopolitical interests. The story of the CIA and drugs begins in Southeast Asia during the Vietnam War. In the mountainous regions of Laos, the CIA supported an army of Hmong fighters against communist forces. The problem was that the region's primary cash crop was opium. The Hmong army was funded in significant part through the opium trade.

Alfred McCoy, a historian who later became a professor at the University of Wisconsin, documented this extensively in his 1972 book, The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia. McCoy found that CIA aircraft were transporting opium for its Hmong allies. He found that CIA assets were involved in the heroin trade that supplied American troops in Vietnam. The CIA tried to suppress his book before publication. McCoy's findings were later corroborated by numerous other investigations, including Senate hearings. The evidence was clear. The CIA had facilitated drug trafficking in Southeast Asia because it served Cold War objectives.

But the most explosive chapter of this story came in the 1980s during the Iran-Contra affair. In Nicaragua, the Reagan administration was supporting a rebel force called the Contras against the socialist Sandinista government. Congress had passed laws prohibiting the administration from providing military support to the Contras. So the administration got creative. They sold weapons to Iran, which was under an arms embargo, and used the proceeds to fund the Contras off the books. That's Iran-Contra in brief. But there's another part of this story that received less attention at the time. In 1985, the Associated Press published a story by reporters Robert Perry and Brian Barger.

They reported that Contra rebels had been trafficking cocaine into the United States to fund their operations, and that American officials were looking the other way. A Senate subcommittee chaired by Senator John Kerry investigated these allegations. The Kerry Committee's 1989 report concluded that senior U.S. policymakers were not combating drug trafficking. They were actually participating in it. The report documented case after case of contra-connected drug traffickers who received protection from U.S. law enforcement.

But the story that really blew this open came in 1996 when investigative journalist Gary Webb published a series called Dark Alliance in the San Jose Mercury News. Webb's investigation traced the crack cocaine epidemic in Los Angeles, directly to contra-connected traffickers. He documented how a dealer named Ricky Ross, who was one of the most prolific crack distributors in American history, had obtained his cocaine from Nicaraguan suppliers with ties to the Contras, and by extension, to the CIA. Webb's reporting was explosive. It suggested that the U.S. government had effectively introduced

crack cocaine to American cities while simultaneously waging a war against drugs that devastated those same communities. The major newspapers, the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and Washington Post attacked Webb's reporting. They picked apart details and questioned his conclusions. Webb was eventually forced out of his job at the Mercury News. In 2004, he was found dead with two gunshot wounds to the head. The death was ruled a suicide. Now, I want to be clear about this. Multiple gunshot suicides, while rare, are medically documented. The coroner's ruling was based on the forensic evidence,

but the circumstances surrounding Webb's death, coming after years of professional destruction and personal struggle, remain controversial to many observers. What's not controversial is what happened to Webb's career. The major newspapers didn't just critique his reporting. They conducted what can only be described as a coordinated demolition of his reputation. The attacks focused on nuances and qualifications rather than the core findings. They suggested Webb had claimed more than he actually had.

They quoted government officials denying wrongdoing without seriously investigating those denials. Los Angeles Times managing editor Narda Zakino later told documentary filmmakers that the paper's aggressive attack on Web was driven in part by embarrassment that they had missed the story themselves. The L.A. Times had reporters in Nicaragua during the Contra era. They could have broken this story. They didn't. In 2014, the movie Kill the Messenger, starring Jeremy Renner, brought Webb's story to a new audience. The film was based on Nick Scho's book of the same name, which documented both Webb's investigation and his subsequent destruction. But here's the thing. In 1998, the CIA's own Inspector General released two classified reports on

the allegations web had investigated. And those reports confirmed the essential elements of his story. They confirmed that the CIA had maintained relationships with known drug traffickers during the Contra period. They confirmed that the CIA had intervened to protect Contra-connected traffickers from law enforcement. They confirmed that the agency had received allegations of drug trafficking by its assets and had failed to investigate them. One of the most damning findings involved a pilot named Barry C.

Seal. Seal was one of the most prolific drug smugglers in American history, flying tons of cocaine into the United States. He was also a CIA asset. When the DEA began investigating Seal, the CIA intervened. Seal was eventually assassinated by Colombian hitmen in 1986, but not before he had smuggled hundreds of millions of dollars worth of cocaine into America. Manuel Noriega, the Panamanian dictator, was another CIA asset who was deeply involved. in drug trafficking. The agency knew about his involvement for years before the U.S. invasion of Panama in 1989, which was ostensibly about drugs, but was really about Noriega's failure to continue serving American interests. CIA

Inspector General Frederick Hitz testified before Congress that the CIA had been granted a waiver by the Department of Justice in 1982 that allowed it to not report drug trafficking by its agents and assets. In other words, while Nancy Reagan was telling kids to just say no, the administration had created a legal framework that allowed the CIA to work with drug traffickers without consequence. Let me repeat that because it's important. There was a formal written agreement between the CIA and the Department of Justice stating that the CIA did not have to report drug crimes by people it worked with. This agreement existed during the height of the crack epidemic. It was signed by Attorney General

William French Smith, a Reagan appointee. The agreement remained in effect until 1995 when it was quietly rescinded. For 13 years, the CIA operated with explicit permission to ignore drug trafficking by its collaborators. This isn't conspiracy theory. This is documented history, confirmed by congressional investigations and the CIA's own internal reviews. The U.S. government waged a war on drugs with one hand while facilitating the drug trade with the other. The Air America story from Vietnam was repeated in Central America. The carry committee documented how Contra supply networks were used to smuggle cocaine.

Aircraft that flew weapons south returned north with drugs. The same airstrips, the same pilots, the same logistics networks. A Costa Rican judicial investigation found that the Contra resupply operation at Ila Pango Air Base in El Salvador was being used for drug trafficking. John Hull, an American rancher in Costa Rica, who allowed his property to be used for contra operations, was indicted by Costa Rican authorities for drug trafficking. The U.S. government protected Hull from extradition. None of this exonerates the drug dealers who sold crack in American cities. They made choices. They did harm.

But we cannot understand the crack epidemic without understanding where all that cocaine came from and why enforcement agencies seemed unable or unwilling to stop it at the source. Let's talk about another tool of the war on drugs that has transformed American policing and raised fundamental questions about due process and property rights. Civil asset forfeiture. Civil asset forfeiture allows law enforcement to seize property, cash, cars, houses that they suspect is connected to criminal activity. Here's the disturbing part.

They can seize your property without ever charging you with a crime. The legal action is against the property itself, not against you. This leads to absurd legal case names like United States versus $12,700 in U.S. currency. Or United States verse one gold necklace. The property is the defendant, not a person. And property doesn't have constitutional rights. Stay tuned for more disturbing history. We'll be back after this.

messages. The Comprehensive Crime Control Act of 1984, passed during the Reagan administration, dramatically expanded federal forfeiture powers. It also created something called equitable sharing, which allowed state and local law enforcement to share in the proceeds of federal forfeitures. This created a direct financial incentive for police to seize property. If a local police department makes a forfeiture under federal law, they can receive up to 80% of the proceeds. That money often goes directly into their budget, supplementing or replacing appropriations

from local government. In some departments, forfeiture funds account for a substantial portion of their operating budget. The results have been predictable and disturbing. The Washington Post conducted an investigation in 2014 that examined highway interdiction. They found that since 2001,

police agencies had seized $2.5 billion in cash from people who were never charged with a crime. 55,000 of those seizures were of amounts under $8,161, the threshold above which banks must report cash deposits to the government. In other words, police were systematically targeting people carrying amounts of cash just below the reporting threshold, often seizing their life savings without any evidence of criminal activity. The Institute for Justice, a libertarian public interest law firm,

has documented thousands of cases of forfeiture abuse. There's the case of Mandrell Stewart, a black restaurant owner in Virginia who was stopped by police while driving to a car dealership to buy a new car for his restaurant. He was carrying $17,550 in cash. Police seized it, claiming the money smelled like marijuana. Stewart was never charged with any crime. But it took him over a year to get his money back, during which time his restaurant went out of business.

There's the case of an elderly couple in Philadelphia whose home was seized after police found their son with $40 worth of marijuana. The parents hadn't committed any crime, but they almost lost the house they had lived in for decades. There's the case of a motel in Massachusetts that was seized by the government because a handful of guests, out of the hundreds of thousands who had stayed there over the years, had been arrested for drug, offenses on the property. The motel owner hadn't committed any crime, but the government tried to take his livelihood. Between 1985 and 2014, the Department of Justice's asset forfeiture fund grew from $27 million to nearly $4.5 billion. That's not a typo. Billion with a B. And most of that money came from the war on drugs. In 2015, the Department of Justice Inspector

General reported that the DEA had seized over. $4 billion in cash from people since 2007. More than 80% of those seizures were never connected to any criminal charges. The incentives created by civil forfeiture have warped law enforcement priorities. In some departments, officers are explicitly evaluated, based on the amount of property they seize. Promotion and advancement depend on generating revenue through forfeitures. A report from the Texas Fair Defense Project found that some police departments used for forfeiture funds to pay for trips to conferences in Las Vegas and Hawaii. Some used the money for parties and catering.

Some used it to purchase equipment that wasn't necessary, but was desirable. In Georgia, a police department used forfeiture funds to buy a margarita machine. In Texas, a district attorney used forfeiture funds to take his office staff to Hawaii. These aren't isolated incidents. They're predictable results of a system with minimal oversight and maximum incentive. The highway interdiction phenomenon deserves special attention. Interstate highways have become hunting grounds for law enforcement looking for cash. Officers are trained to look for indicators of drug trafficking.

Out-of-state plates, air fresheners, energy drinks, religious symbols on the dashboard, fast food wrappers. These supposed indicators justify stops and searches. A ProPublica investigation found that black and Hispanic drivers were far more likely to be stopped in search, than white drivers, even though white drivers were more likely to be found with contraband when searched. The racial disparities in highway interdiction mirror the disparities in the broader war on drugs. Some jurisdictions have made forfeiture even more problematic through programs called equitable sharing that allow local law enforcement to circumvent state laws restricting forfeiture. If state law requires a criminal conviction before property can be forfeited,

local police can simply hand the case to federal authorities, who operate under more permissive rules, and then receive up to 80% of the proceeds back. This federal local collaboration has been used to evade reforms. When states pass laws to protect property rights, federal loopholes undermine them. The system is designed to perpetuate itself. Defenders of civil forfeiture argue that it's a necessary tool for fighting drug trafficking, that it allows law enforcement to seize the proceeds of crime and disrupt criminal organizations. But the evidence doesn't support this claim.

Most forfeitures are of small amounts that couldn't possibly represent drug trafficking proceeds, and the impact on major trafficking organizations is negligible. What forfeiture has accomplished is the enrichment of law enforcement agencies and the impoverishment of citizens who lack the resources to fight back. It has turned police into revenue collectors. It has created a system where your property is guilty until you prove it innocent. On May 5, 1988, Los Angeles Police Department officers rated four apartments on Dalton Avenue in south-central Los Angeles. What happened next would become one of the most notorious examples of police misconduct in American history.

The officers destroyed the apartments. They punched holes and walls. They smashed furniture. They poured bleach on clothes and food. They spray painted the walls with gang slogans and the initials of the LAPD. They beat the residents, including some who later turned out to have no connection to any criminal activity. When it was over, the city of Los Angeles paid over $4 million to settle the lawsuits. Several officers were disciplined, but the raid itself was possible because of a fundamental transformation in American policing that the war on drugs

had enabled. In 1970, there were only a handful of SWAT teams in the United States. By 2005, there were over 50,000 SWAT raids per year. Most of them were for drug searches. The 1981 military cooperation with law enforcement act broke down the barriers between the military and domestic police forces. For the first time, military equipment, training, and intelligence could be shared with local law enforcement for drug enforcement purposes. The Department of Defense's 1033 program, created in 1997, allowed surplus military equipment to be transferred to local police departments. By 2014, police departments across the country had received billions of dollars worth of military equipment, including armored vehicles,

grenade launchers, military aircraft, and assault rifles. When Black Lives Matter protesters in Ferguson, Missouri took to the streets in 2014 after the shooting of Michael Brown, They were met by police forces that looked like they were preparing for combat in Fallujah. Armored vehicles rolled through American streets. Officers and camouflage pointed assault rifles at unarmed civilians. This militarization was a direct product of the war on drugs. The equipment was obtained through programs created for drug enforcement. The tactics, the no-knock raids, the flashbang grenades, the dynamic entries,

were developed for drug enforcement. and these tactics have had fatal consequences. In 2014, a SWAT team in Georgia threw a flashbang grenade into a home during a drug raid. The grenade landed in a crib and severely injured a 19-month-old baby named Balcombe phone-savon. The baby suffered burns over his face and chest and had to be placed in a medically induced coma.

No drugs were found in the home. The target of the investigation wasn't even there. In 2020, Brianna Taylor was shot and killed in her own apartment during a late night no-knock raid in Louisville, Kentucky. Police were looking for a suspect who didn't live there and who was already in police custody. Taylor's boyfriend, believing intruders were breaking in, fired a shot. Police responded with 32 rounds, striking Taylor six times. She was an emergency room technician with no criminal record.

A New York Times investigation found that at least 81 civilians and 13 law enforcement officers died in no-knock raids between 2010 and 2016. Many of those deaths occurred during raids that found no drugs or only small amounts. The American Civil Liberties Union conducted a comprehensive study of SWAT deployments in 2014. They found that 62% of SWAT raids were for drug searches. The majority of people impacted were black or Latino. Drugs were found in only 35% of the cases they examined. The warlike tactics were being deployed overwhelmingly against people of color,

often for searches that turned up nothing. The study documented raids where flashbang grenades were thrown into rooms where children slept. It documented raids where family pets were killed, sometimes in front of children. It documented raids on wrong addresses, where entirely innocent families were terrorized. Consider the case of Chia Calvo, the mayor of Berwyn Heights, Maryland. In 2008, a SWAT team burst into his home, shot and killed his two Labrador retrievers, and handcuffed Calvo and his mother-in-law. Police had intercepted a package of marijuana addressed to Calvo's wife,

part of a scheme where drug dealers shipped packages to random addresses and then intercepted them before delivery. Calvo was innocent. The package had been addressed to his home without his knowledge, but his dogs were dead, his family traumatized. The Prince George's County Police admitted no wrongdoing. They said the raid was conducted properly according to their procedures. That's the point.

The procedures themselves are the problem. When standard operating procedure includes military-style raids on homes based on minimal evidence, when shooting family dogs is considered acceptable. When terrorizing innocent people is just collateral damage, something has gone fundamentally wrong. The equipment flowing to police departments through the tent. 1033 program includes items that have no plausible civilian law enforcement use. Mine-resistant ambush protected vehicles, designed to withstand IED attacks in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Bayonets. Grenade launchers. Camouflage uniforms designed for combat in war zones. Not policing American streets. A study by researchers at Indiana University found that police departments that received military equipment through the 1033 program were significantly more likely. to have violent interactions with civilians. The equipment changed behavior. When you give people hammers, everything looks like a nail. When you give police military weapons, every situation looks like a military operation.

After Ferguson, the Obama administration placed some restrictions on the 1033 program, limiting the transfer of certain equipment. The Trump administration reversed these restrictions, allowing the full range of military gear to flow to local departments once again. The militarization of police is inseparable from the war on drugs. The legal justifications, the funding streams, the equipment programs, the training paradigms, all of it stems from drug enforcement. The transformation of American police from peace officers into paramilitary forces happened because of drugs. And here's what's particularly disturbing. All

of this militarization has not made us safer. Crime rates have declined. since the 1990s, but that decline began before most of the military equipment was transferred to police. Drug use has not declined. Drug availability has not declined. The militarization has produced violence, trauma, and destroyed trust between police and communities without producing any measurable improvement in public safety. Let me tell you about Kimba Smith. Kimba was a college student at Hampton University in Virginia in the early 1990s. She was smart and ambitious. She had her whole life ahead of her. Then she fell in love with the wrong person. Her boyfriend, Peter Hall, was a major drug dealer in the Richmond area. Kimba was never

involved in selling drugs. She never handled drugs. But she was present in their shared apartment where Hall conducted business. She drove Hall to meetings without knowing what he was doing. She was in the eyes of the law, a co-conspirator. When Hall was killed by a rival in 1994, Kimba was pregnant with his child. She was also facing federal drug conspiracy charges. Under the federal sentencing guidelines, she was held responsible for the total amount of drugs in the conspiracy, over 250 kilograms of crack cocaine,

even though she had never personally handled any of it. Kimba Smith, a first-time non-violent offender who had never sold drugs, was sentenced to 24 and a half years in federal prison. Her case drew national attention. It became a symbol of everything wrong with the war on drugs, the mandatory minimums that strip judges of discretion, the conspiracy laws that held girlfriends responsible for their boyfriend's crimes, the racial disparities that filled prisons with young black men and women.

In 2000, President Clinton commuted Kimba's sentence. She had served six and a half years. She later earned a law degree and became an advocate for criminal justice reform. But Kimba Smith was one of the lucky ones. Most people caught in the gears of the drug war had no national spotlight. They served their full sentences. They lost years, decades, of their lives for nonviolent drug offenses. Stay tuned for more disturbing history.

We'll be back after these messages. Let me give you some numbers. According to the Drug Policy Alliance, over one million people are arrested for drug offenses in the United States every year. About 80% of those arrests are for possession only, not manufacturing, not trafficking, just possession for personal use. Over 45,000 people are serving life sentences for drug offenses. Some of them were sentenced under three strikes laws for nonviolent drug crimes. A study by Human Rights Watch found that black Americans are arrested for drug offenses at rates four to eight times higher than white Americans, despite using drugs at similar rates. In some states, the disparity is even higher.

The sentencing project found that one in three black men born today can expect to spend time in prison compared to one in 17 white men. Drug offenses are a major driver of this disparity, and then there are the collateral consequences. A drug conviction doesn't just mean prison time. It can mean the loss of federal student aid, making it harder to get an education. It can mean the loss of public housing, leaving families homeless.

It can mean the loss of food stamps, even for minor possession offenses. It can mean the loss of voting rights, sometimes permanently. It can mean the loss of professional licenses making it impossible to work in certain fields. In 1998, Congress passed the Higher Education Act Amendment that made students convicted of drug offenses ineligible for federal financial aid. This applied even to simple marijuana possession. A student could commit assault, robbery, or even murder, murder and remain eligible for aid. But a marijuana conviction meant automatic

disqualification. The law was eventually modified, but not before it had derailed the educations of hundreds of thousands of students, predominantly students of color from low-income backgrounds. The message was clear. One mistake with drugs, and your opportunity for higher education was gone. Housing policies were similarly punitive. The Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1988 authorized public housing agencies to evict entire families if any member or guest was found with drugs. This one-strike policy meant that a grandmother could be evicted because her grandson was caught with marijuana on the property, even if she had no knowledge of the offense.

The Supreme Court upheld this policy in 2002, in a case called Department of Housing and Urban Development v. Rucker. The court ruled that innocent tenants could be evicted based on the drug activity of family members or guests they didn't even know about. This decision left thousands of families homeless. Let me tell you about another person caught in this system. Weldon Angelus was a 24-year-old music producer in Utah who sold marijuana to a police informant on three occasions. During two of those sales, he had a gun in his possession, though he never brandished or used it. Under federal mandatory minimum laws, possessing a gun during a drug offense carried severe penalties.

The first offense was five years. The second offense was 25 years. These sentences had to run consecutively. Weldon Angeles was sentenced to 55 years in federal prison, for selling marijuana while having a gun he never used. The judge who sentenced him, Paul Cassell, a conservative appointed by George W. Bush, called the sentence unjust, cruel, and even irrational. But his hands were tied. The mandatory minimum left him no discretion.

Judge Cassell wrote that if Angelo's had been an aircraft hijacker, he would have received 24 years. If he had been a terrorist who detonated a bomb in a public place, he would have received 20 years. If he had been a child rapist, he would have received 11 years. But for selling marijuana with an unused gun nearby, He received 55 years. Weldon Angelus was finally released in 2016 after serving 13 years.

His sentence was eventually commuted. He is now an advocate for criminal justice reform. But for every Weldon Angelus whose case attracts attention, there are thousands whose cases don't. They serve their decades in anonymity. They grow old in prison for crimes that harmed no one. They die behind bars. A Pew Research Study found that over there,

Over 70 million Americans, nearly one in three adults, have some type of criminal record. Many of those records are for drug offenses, and those records follow people for life, limiting their opportunities, keeping them trapped in poverty, making it nearly impossible to rebuild their lives. The box-on-job applications that asks about criminal history has derailed millions of lives. Studies show that applicants with criminal records are far less likely to receive callbacks, even for entry-level positions. This is especially true for black applicants with records

who face compounded discrimination. The Ban the Box movement has pushed to remove criminal history questions from initial job applications, allowing candidates to be evaluated on their qualifications before their records are considered. Over 35 states and more than 150 cities and counties have adopted some form of ban the box policy. But the discrimination continues in subtler form.

The collateral consequences extend to housing, credit, insurance, child custody, immigration status, and virtually every aspect of life. A single drug conviction can follow someone for decades, making it nearly impossible to fully reintegrate into society. Now let's talk about the opioid epidemic, because nothing exposes the hypocrisy of the war on drugs more clearly than how America has responded to opioid addiction. In the 1990s, pharmaceutical companies began aggressively marketing opioid painkillers, particularly Oxycontin, manufactured by Purdue Pharma. These companies told doctors that their products were not addictive when used as prescribed. This was a lie. Purdue Pharma's own studies showed that OxyContin was highly addictive.

Internal documents later revealed that the company knew about widespread abuse of its product and actively concealed this information. They targeted doctors in regions with high rates of pain complaints. They funded pain societies that promoted aggressive opioid prescribing. They paid speakers to downplay addiction risks. The results were catastrophic. Between 1999 and 2019, nearly half a million Americans died from opioid overdoses. By 2017, opioid overdoses were killing more Americans each year than the entire Vietnam War.

And who was dying? Primarily white, rural Americans. The communities that had been politically untouchable. Now, notice the response. When crack cocaine devastated black urban communities in the 1980s, the response was law enforcement, more police, more prisons, mandatory minimums,

three strikes laws. The crack epidemic was treated as a crime problem. When opioids devastated white rural communities in the two, 2000s, the response was different. It was treated as a public health crisis. Politicians spoke of addiction as a disease. They called for treatment, not incarceration. They expressed compassion and understanding. In 2016, Congress passed the Comprehensive Addiction and Recovery Act, which emphasized treatment over punishment. In 2018, Congress passed the Support Act, which further expanded treatment options and funding for addiction services.

Where was this compassion in 1986? Where were the treatment programs for crack addicts in south central Los Angeles? Where was the public health response when black communities were being ravaged? The answer is that the war on drugs was never really about drugs. It was about who was using them. And here's the other part of this story. The pharmaceutical companies that created the opioid epidemic, the companies that lied about addiction, that paid doctors to overprescribe.

that knowingly continued selling their products as Americans died by the tens of thousands. What happened to them? Purdue Pharma eventually pleaded guilty to federal charges. The company paid $8 billion in penalties, but no executive went to prison for more than a token sentence. The Sackler family, which owned Purdue Pharma and made billions from OxyContin, was allowed to settle civil claims while maintaining much of their wealth. They remain among the richest families in America.

Compare this to the treatment of low-level drug dealers during the crack epidemic. People were sentenced to decades in prison for selling small amounts of a substance. The Sackler family helped flood the country with millions of pills that killed hundreds of thousands of people, and they're still billionaires. This is the two-tiered system of American drug enforcement. When corporations push addictive substances, they pay fines and negotiate settlements. When individuals sell addictive substances, They go to prison for life.

The pharmaceutical industry's role in the opioid epidemic deserves deeper examination because it exposes the fundamental dishonesty of the war on drugs. For decades, we were told that certain substances were so dangerous, so addictive, that they had to be prohibited entirely. Marijuana was classified as Schedule I, allegedly having no accepted medical use and a high potential for abuse.

The entire apparatus of enforcement the prisons, the raids, the billions of dollars, was justified by the need to protect Americans from dangerous drugs. But throughout this period, the pharmaceutical industry was manufacturing and distributing drugs far more dangerous and addictive than marijuana. And they were doing it legally, with government approval, making billions in profits.

Oxycontin was approved by the FDA in 1996. The approval was based in significant part on Purdue Pharma's claims that the drug's time release formulation made it less addictive than other opioids. This claim was false. Purdue knew it was false. Internal documents showed that the company was aware that OxyContin was being abused almost immediately after it hit the market. The company responded not by warning doctors and patients,

but by deploying an army of sales representatives to push even higher doses. They paid doctors to speak at conferences promoting OxyContin. They funded patient advocate. groups that pushed for more aggressive pain treatment. They created a web of financial relationships designed to maximize prescriptions. When whistleblowers tried to sound the alarm, they were ignored or silenced. State medical boards that tried to restrict prescribing were lobbied into submission. The DEA, which should have been monitoring the suspiciously large quantities of pills flowing to certain regions, was effectively captured by the industry it was

supposed to regulate. An investigation by the Washington Post and CBS News found that the pharmaceutical industry systematically undermined DEA enforcement efforts. Industry lobbyists pushed legislation through Congress that weakened the DEA's ability to go after suspicious pharmacies and distributors. The Ensuring Patient Access and Effective Drug Enforcement Act of 2016 passed with almost no opposition, effectively gutted the DEA's enforcement powers against pharmaceutical distributors. The primary sponsor of that bill, Representative Tom Marino, was later nominated by President Trump to be drug czar. He withdrew after the post-CBS investigation revealed his ties to the pharmaceutical industry. Consider the contrast. During the crack epidemic, Congress passed

laws mandating years in prison for possessing small amounts of a drug. During the opioid epidemic, Congress passed laws making it harder for the DEA to enforce existing regulations against pharmaceutical companies, flooding communities with pills. The racial and class dimensions of this disparity are impossible to ignore. Crack users were predominantly black and urban. Opioid users were predominantly white and rural. The black crack users went to prison. The white opioid users were victims of a health care crisis. Even the language was different. Crack users were crackheads, junkies, addicts. Opioid users were patients, victims, people struggling with substance use disorder.

The medicalization of addiction happened only when the addicts looked like the people who make policy. Now, to be clear, treating addiction as a medical condition rather than a moral failing is the correct approach. The compassion shown to opioid users should be praised. What should be condemned is the fact that this compassion, was denied to crack users a generation earlier. The right response to the opioid epidemic is not to criminalize it like we did crack. It's to recognize that we should have treated crack users with the same compassion from the beginning. The war on drugs has not been confined to American borders.

Its consequences have reverberated throughout the world, leaving a trail of violence, instability, and human rights abuses across the Americas. In Mexico, the drug war has killed over 300, 50,000 people since 2006, when President Felipe Calderon deployed the military against drug cartels with strong encouragement and funding from the United States. Some estimates put the total death toll even higher. Tens of thousands more have disappeared. The logic seemed simple. Attacked the cartels militarily and they would collapse. Instead, the attack shattered existing cartel structures into dozens of smaller, more violent organizations competing for territory.

The violence spiraled beyond anything Mexico had ever seen. The Marita Initiative launched in 2008, provided billions of dollars in military aid to Mexico. The United States trained Mexican security forces. It provided helicopters, surveillance equipment, and weapons. And the violence continued to escalate. In Colombia, the United States funded Planned Columbia beginning in 1999, a multi-billion-dollar program primarily focused on aerial fumigation of coca crops. American contractors sprayed millions of acres with glyphosate, the active ingredient in Roundup. Stay tuned for more disturbing history. We'll be back after these messages.

The program destroyed crops, poisoned water supplies, and displaced rural communities. COCA production briefly declined, then rebounded to higher levels than before. The fumigation programs also had severe health consequences. Studies documented increased rates of cancer, birth defects, and respiratory illness in communities exposed to the spraying. In 2015, Columbia suspended aerial fumigation after the World Health Organization classified glyphosate as a probable carcinogen. In Central America, the war on drugs destabilized entire country. countries. Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador became transit points for drugs moving from South America to the United States. Drug trafficking organizations corrupted governments,

police forces, and militaries. Violence soared. El Salvador's homicide rate reached 91 per 100,000 people in 2015, making it the murder capital of the world. Much of this violence was connected directly or indirectly to the drug trade and the enforcement efforts against it. And where did many of the desperate people fleeing this violence go? North to the United States border. The migration crises of the 2010s and 2020s can be traced in significant part to the destabilization caused by the war on drugs in Central America. In Afghanistan, the United States spent decades trying to eradicate poppy cultivation.

Afghanistan produces over 80% of the world's illicit opium. The United States spent nearly $9 billion on counter-narcotics programs there. The result. Afghan opium production reached record levels. The war on drugs created perverse incentives everywhere it was applied. When enforcement succeeded in one area, production shifted to another. When one trafficking route was disrupted, new routes emerged. When one organization was dismantled, rivals filled the vacuum, often with greater violence.

This phenomenon has a name, the balloon effect. Squeeze one part of the balloon, and it expands somewhere else. After decades and trillions of dollars, drugs remain just as available as ever. The only consistent result has been violence and human suffering on a massive scale. The human rights abuses committed in the name of the war on drugs around the world are staggering. In the Philippines, President Rodrigo Duterte launched an extrajudicial killing campaign that has claimed thousands, possibly tens of thousands of lives, since 2016. Police and vigilantes have executed suspected drug users and dealers without trial,

often based on nothing more than accusations from neighbors. Human Rights Watch documented children among the victims. The United States, which created the global framework for drug prohibition and pressured countries around the world to adopt it has been largely silent about these atrocities. In Thailand, a 2003 crackdown on drugs resulted in over 2,500 extrajudicial killings in just three months. Many of those killed had no connection to drug trafficking. In Indonesia, drug offenders face execution by firing squad. Dozens have been executed in recent years, including foreign nationals. Throughout Latin America, the war on drugs has empowered death squads, corrupted governments,

and destabilized entire societies. The violence in Mexico alone would qualify as a war by any reasonable definition, with more casualties than many actual wars. The United States has exported its drug war ideology to the world. Through treaties like the single convention on narcotic drugs of 1961, and the Convention Against Illicit Traffic and Narcotic, drugs and psychotropic substances of 1988, the U.S. has locked other countries into prohibition frameworks. Countries that try to reform their drug laws face American pressure. When Bolivia sought to protect traditional coca leaf use, which is distinct from cocaine, the U.S. pushed back. When Uruguay became the first country to fully legalize marijuana in 2013,

American officials expressed concern. The global drug control system is essentially an American creation, exported to the world and maintained by American pressure. And it has failed everywhere it has been tried. The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime has estimated that global drug use has increased by over 30% in the last decade. Despite all the enforcement, despite all the eradication, despite all the violence, more people are using more drugs than ever before. Meanwhile, the violence continues. The prisons fill. The family, shatter, and the profits flow to criminal organizations that grow more powerful and more brutal with each passing year. So if the war on drugs has failed to reduce drug use, failed to reduce

drug availability, failed to address addiction, what actually works? The evidence points to approaches that the United States has largely refused to embrace. Portugal provides perhaps the most dramatic example. In 2001, Portugal decriminalized personal possession of all drugs. Not just marijuana, all drugs, heroin, cocaine, methamphetamine, everything. People caught with small amounts of any drug are not arrested. They are referred to dissuasion commissions, panels that include social workers, medical professionals, and legal advisors. These commissions assess whether the person has an addiction problem, and if so, connect them to treatment services. The results have been remarkable.

Drug use in Portugal did not skyrocket as critics predicted. In fact, overall drug use remained relatively stable. What changed dramatically was drug-related harm. HIV infections among people who use drugs dropped from over 50% of new cases to just 4%. Drug-related deaths decreased by more than 80%. Incarceration for drug offenses plummeted. More people sought treatment because they no longer feared arrest. Portugal's approach treats drug use as a public health issue rather than a criminal issue,

and it works far better than prohibition. Switzerland provides another model. In the 1990s, Switzerland was facing a heroin epidemic. The country implemented harm reduction programs, including supervised injection sites, where people could use drugs under medical supervision, and heroin-assisted treatment, where people with severe addiction were prescribed pharmaceutical heroin. These programs dramatically reduced overdose deaths. They reduced HIV transmission.

They reduced crime associated with addiction. They connected people to social services in health care. Many participants eventually transitioned to other treatments or reduced their use. Similar programs in Canada, the Netherlands, and other countries have shown similar results. Supervised injection sites save lives. They don't increase drug use in surrounding areas as critics claim. They reduce the visibility of public drug use. They reduce the spread of infectious disease.

They provide a bridge to treatment for people who want it. In the United States, the evidence-based approach to opioid addiction is medication-assisted treatment using drugs like methadone and buprenorphin. These medications reduce cravings, prevent withdrawal symptoms, and allow people to stabilize their lives. Research shows that medication-assisted treatment reduces overdose deaths by more than and 50%. But access to these treatments remains limited. Methadone can only be dispensed from specially licensed clinics, and there are too few of them, particularly in rural areas. Many jails and prisons refuse to continue medication-assisted treatment for incarcerated people, even though

abruptly stopping these medications can be dangerous. The war on drugs created a system focused on punishment rather than treatment, and it has failed by every meaningful measure. countries that have embraced health-focused approaches have achieved what America has not, reductions in drug-related harm, reduce transmission of infectious disease, and better outcomes for people with addiction. Something is changing, slowly, fitfully, against tremendous resistance. The tide is beginning to turn. In 2012, Colorado and Washington became the first states to legalize recreational marijuana. Since then, 24 states and the district, of Columbia have followed. Cannabis is now legal for recreational use in states representing more

than half the American population. This legalization movement has happened despite federal prohibition. Marijuana remains a Schedule I controlled substance under federal law. The disconnect between state and federal law creates absurdities. Businesses operating legally under state law cannot access the banking system. People can buy cannabis at a dispensary in Denver and then be arrested for possession in Kansas. But legalization has demonstrated something important. The predicted catastrophes did not materialize. Teen marijuana used did not spike. Traffic fatalities did not soar. Society did not collapse. The sky did not fall. What did happen was that arrests plummeted. In Colorado, marijuana arrests dropped by 52% in the first year after legalization.

Black and white Coloradans now have similar arrests. arrest rates for marijuana offenses. That's a stark contrast to prohibition, where black people were arrested at vastly disproportionate rates, despite similar usage rates. Beyond marijuana, other reforms are taking hold. Voters in Oregon passed Measure 110 in 2020, decriminalizing personal possession of all drugs,

the first state to follow Portugal's model. Oregon's implementation has faced challenges, but the principle has been established. The crack-powder sentencing disparity, 100 to 1 for over two decades, was reduced to 18 to 1 by the Fair Sentencing Act of 2010. Still not equal, but progress. In 2021, the eliminating a quantifiably unjust application of the Law Act, the Equal Act, passed the House of Representatives. It would have eliminated the disparity entirely. It died in the Senate. Some prosecutors have stopped pursuing low-level drug cases

entirely. District attorneys in cities like Philadelphia, Los Angeles, and San Francisco have implemented policies declining to prosecute simple possession offenses. They argue correctly that these prosecutions waste resources, fill jails, and do nothing to address addiction. The federal government has taken tentative steps. The Biden administration rescheduled marijuana from Schedule 1 to Schedule 3 in 2024, acknowledging that the drug has accepted medical uses. This was a significant symbolic and practical shift, though it fell short of the legalization that polls show most American support. Federal funding for drug treatment has increased. The substance abuse and mental health services administration's budget has grown substantially.

Naloxone, the overdose reversal drug, has become more widely available. More people are surviving overdoses that would have killed them a decade ago. But let's be clear, the war on drugs is. not over. The federal government still spends tens of billions of dollars on drug enforcement. Hundreds of thousands of people remain incarcerated for drug offenses. The DEA continues to conduct raids. The military equipment continues to flow to police departments. The system remains largely intact, and there are powerful interests fighting to maintain that system. Private prison companies, law enforcement

unions, drug testing companies, the entire apparatus built up over 50 years, The turn is slow, incomplete, uncertain, but it is happening. So where does this leave us? For over 50 years, the United States has waged a war against its own people in the name of fighting drugs. It has spent over $1 trillion. It has incarcerated millions. It has destroyed families and communities. It has militarized the police.

It has empowered cartels. It has destabilized foreign countries. foreign countries. It has created a prison industrial complex that profits from human suffering. And after all of that, drugs are more available, more potent, and more deadly than ever. The war on drugs has not failed. Let me be clear about that. The war on drugs has not failed because it was never really designed to succeed at eliminating drug abuse. It has succeeded at what it was actually designed to do. It succeeded at disrupting communities that powerful interests wanted disrupted. It succeeded at removing millions of people, disproportionately black and brown

people, from their families and communities. It succeeded at creating a system of mass incarceration unprecedented in human history. It succeeded at generating profits for corporations, jobs for rural communities, budgets for law enforcement agencies. It succeeded at giving politicians something to run on, a way to appear tough, a way to appeal to fears without a addressing their causes. The war on drugs succeeded at everything except reducing drug abuse and addiction. But that was never really the point. The victims of this war deserve acknowledgement. The millions who served years in prison for nonviolent offenses. The families torn apart. The children who grew up without parents. The communities devastated by mass incarceration. The people in Mexico,

Colombia, Honduras, and countless other countries who died in violence fueled by American drug policy. And the victim still being created. Even now, as I record this, someone is being arrested for drug possession. Someone is being sentenced to years in prison for addiction. Someone is losing their housing, their job, their children, because of a drug conviction. The machinery of the war on drugs grinds on. The question is whether America will reckon with what it has done. Whether we will acknowledge that the war on drugs was never what it claimed to be. Whether we will embrace the evidence about what actually works, whether we will choose public health over punishment, treatment over incarceration, compassion over control. Some cities and states are leading the way. Reform is

happening at the margins. But the federal government, captured by decades of rhetoric and interests, move slowly, if at all. The people who designed this war knew what they were doing. John Ehrlich if that quote is accurate, admit it as much. Lee Atwater explained the strategy openly. The evidence has been available for anyone willing to look at it. The question now is, what we do with that knowledge? Do we continue a failed war because it's easier than admitting we were wrong? Do we continue to sacrifice lives to a policy we know doesn't work?

Do we allow the prison industrial complex to continue feeding on human beings? Or do we finally, after 50 years, choose a different path. History will judge us by the answer. This has been disturbing history. And until next time, remember, the most disturbing truths are often the ones hiding in plain sight. a taste for you

You're high I'm seeking Watch out I'm coming for you Ooh You better run now The moon is out now Oh, you're gonna hear my how.

Oh, ho, ho, ho. Blood skies, red eyes can't give enough for me. My dream is your nightmare. You'll see me come. for you I'm coming for you ooh

you better run now ooh the movie's out now ooh you're gonna hear my heart oh ho ho ho ho

Ooh, ho, ho, ho. Ooh, you better run down. Ooh, ooh, the morning's out now. Ooh, you're gonna hear my hell. Oh, oh, oh, oh. Thank you.