Astronomers discover one of the brightest galaxies known – Phys.org – Phys.Org

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July 14, 2017 The multiple images of the discovered galaxy are indicated by white arrows (bottom right shows the scale of the image in seconds of arc). Credit: Hubble Space Telescope (HST)

Thanks to an amplified image produced by a gravitational lens, and the Gran Telescopio CANARIAS a team of scientists from the Polytechnic University of Cartagena and the Instituto de Astrofsica de Canarias have discovered one of the brightest galaxies known from the epoch when the universe had 20 percent of its present age.

According to Einstein's theory of General Relativity when a ray of light passes close to a very massive object, the gravity of the object attracts the photons and deviates them from their intial path. This phenomenon, known as gravitational lensing, is comparable to that produced by lenses on light rays, and acts as a sort of magnifier, changing the size and intensity of the apparent image of the original object.

Using this effect, a team of scientists from the Instituto de Astrofisica de Canarias (IAC) led by researcher Anastasio Daz-Snches of the Polytechnic University of Cartagena (UPT) has discovered a very distant galaxy, some 10 thousand million light years away, about a thousand times brighter than the Milky Way. It is the brightest of the submillimetre galaxies, called this because of their very strong emissionin the far infrared. To measure it they used the Gran Telescopio Canarias (GTC) at the Roque de los Muchachos Observatory (Garafa, La Palma).

"Thanks to the gravitational lens" notes Anastasio Daz Snchez, a researcher at the UPCT and first author of the article " produced by a cluster of galaxies between ourselves and the source, which acts as if it was a telescope, the galaxy appears 11 times bigger and brighter than it really is, and appears as several images on an arc centred on the densest part of the cluster, which is known as an "Einstein Ring". The advantage of this kind of amplification is that it does not distort the spectral properties of the light, which can be studied for these very distant objects as if they were much nearer".

To find this galaxies, whose discovery was recently published in an article in the Astrophysical Journal Letters, a search of the whole sky was carried out, combining the data bases of the satellites WISE (NASA) and Planck (ESA) in order to identify the brightest submillimetre galaxies. Its light, amplified by a much nearer galaxy cluster acting as a lens, forms an image which appears much bigger than it should, and thanks to this effect they could characterize its nature and properties spectroscopically using the GTC.

Forming stars at high velocity

The galaxy is notable for having a high rate of star formation. It is forming stars at a rate of 1000 solar masses per year, compared to the Milky Way which is forming stars at a rate of some twice a solar mass per year. Susana Iglesias-Groth, an IAC astrophysicist and a co-author of the article, adds. "This type of objects harbour the most powerful star forming regions known in the universe. The next step will be to study their molecular content".

The fact that the galaxy is so bright, its light is gravitationally amplifed, and has multiple images allows us to look into its internal properties, which would otherwise not be possible with such distant galaxies.

"In the future we will be able to make more detailed studies of its star formation using interferometers such ast the Northern Extended Millimeter Array (NOEMA/IRAM),in France, and the Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA), in Chile" concludes IAC researcher Helmut Dannerbauer, who is another contributor to this discovery.

Explore further: New 'Einstein ring' is discovered

More information: A. Daz-Snchez et al, Discovery of a Lensed Ultrabright Submillimeter Galaxy at z = 2.0439, The Astrophysical Journal (2017). DOI: 10.3847/2041-8213/aa79ef

Journal reference: Astrophysical Journal Letters Astrophysical Journal

Provided by: Instituto de Astrofsica de Canarias (IAC)

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Astronomers discover one of the brightest galaxies known - Phys.org - Phys.Org

Now is your chance to fund a groundbreaking SETI project – Astronomy Magazine

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The projects initial goal is to raise $100,000 for the installation of and operation of two cameras in a single observatory. Although this wont achieve full-sky coverage, it will cover a more limited portion of sky while proving the system can work. The projects fundraising goal is also expandable; with $510,000, Laser SETI can establish and run its first two fully equipped observatories.

The campaign is up and running now, with a month left for backers to contribute to this groundbreaking SETI project.

Following the projects initial deployment, the program aims to have at least six (and ideally 14) observatories in strategic locations to ensure no part of the sky is missed at any time due to factors such as weather. Just as important, they would overlap in such a way that they would co-observe events. This provides not only more statistical confidence in a single tiny flash, but physical confirmation as well, since the two sites would see the same point on the sky at different angles and observe a slight but measurable delay in the arrival times of the signal. This is very much like how the LIGO observatories produced compelling evidence of gravitational waves.

Why Laser SETI? Scanning the whole sky all the time is no simple task. Before now, SETI searches have generally been able to achieve one of those things, but not the other. Facilities can either cover large chunks of the sky, spending a short time (less than a minute) looking at each patch, or observe smaller portions of the sky continuously, sacrificing broader spatial coverage in the hopes of catching a signal from a specific direction.

SETI searches have also typically operated on a vital assumption: Any extraterrestrial civilization that wants to get our attention will be broadcasting some kind of signal continuously. All we have to do is reach the right point in the sky as we scan through space in our surveys, and the signal will be there.

But what if its not the case? According to engineer Eliot Gillum, a Laser SETI project scientist and director of the Optical SETI program, Whatever ET is doing, if its bright but intermittent, all previous and current searches very likely wont find it.

After all, why should aliens necessarily keep their signals powered up all the time, just so we can find them? Why should those signals repeat so we have a greater chance of hearing them? What if the signals theyre sending out arent actually meant to make contact with other worlds? Case in point: Despite the fact that humans have been broadcasting radio waves into space for a century, those signals arent specifically meant to reach other species. And although we have sent signals with such intent into space, theyve been very few, short, discrete messages not continuous ones, because those are expensive in both time and equipment.

But theres also another option. Projects like Breakthrough Starshot, which uses laser light as a form of propulsion, will send out brief, powerful flashes. Its purpose is to send a spacecraft to our nearest neighboring extrasolar planets, but the beam would be so bright it would be visible at much farther distances. Those laser flashes could serve as messengers of our presence to other civilizations. And if alien worlds are pursuing similar beamed energy propulsion technologies, their laser flashes might reach us. But signals like those pulses will be short, intermittent, and may not repeat for long stretches of time (if ever).

This is why Laser SETI is so vital. It can produce convincing evidence for pulses ranging from nanoseconds to minutes, and Gillum says it doesnt require an alien civilization to know were here or repeatedly try to contact us. Laser SETI will instead scan the entire sky continually so that when a signal reaches us, whether its intentionally been sent our way or passes Earth by pure chance, well receive it, and well know it for what it is: proof of life elsewhere in the universe.

You can visit the Laser SETI Indiegogo campaign page to find out more, including the nifty swag you could get if youre interested in contributing to the project.

Special thanks to Eliot Gillum for his contributions to this story.

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Now is your chance to fund a groundbreaking SETI project - Astronomy Magazine

Faith and the cosmos: An astrophysicist fields the big questions … – Salt Lake Tribune

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This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

How often do people ask you religious questions?

I get these kinds of questions all the time. Some are antagonistic. But most people are genuinely curious.

I have my own personal rule, which is I never, ever tell people what to believe. And I never, ever tell people they're wrong. I share with them what I know and how I know it. If someone says, "Well, I think the Earth is a lot younger," I say, "OK, fair enough. But give me the chance to explain why I think the universe is 13.8 billion years old."

There's a century of very difficult work that went into giving that answer and I think that how we got there is far more interesting than the actual number itself. I love the chance to explain that process.

What do you say when someone wants to know how science dovetails with their faith?

These kinds of questions are a lot harder than those coming from people whose faith conflicts with science. Of course I have my own personal beliefs. But when I'm in front of the public I'm not Paul Sutter the human being with complex beliefs. I'm Paul Sutter the astrophysicist. So I'm only going to share what I know from science.

If someone says, "Help me understand the nature of divinity or this section from the Bible," I honestly can't help them. They might want to talk to a theologian or a philosopher. I'm in the astronomy department.

But when you tell people you can't help them with their faith questions because you're a scientist, aren't you sending a message that there's an incompatibility between faith and science?

I personally believe that there is only a conflict between science and religion if you want there to be one. People ask if scientists are religious. I tell them that I personally know many scientists who are atheists, and many scientists who are very devout Catholics, and Muslims and Jews and Hindus and they all seem to sleep at night and they all are able to get work done and they all are able to pray, if they're the praying kind. And we all get along.

I bet you often get asked about your own religious beliefs or perhaps lack of beliefs.

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Odds of Complex Life On TRAPPIST-1 Planets in Habitable Zone–"It … – The Daily Galaxy (blog)

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The concept of a habitable zone is based on planets being in orbits where liquid water could exist, said Manasvi Lingam, a Harvard researcher with the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. This is only one factor, however, in determining whether a planet is hospitable for life.

The TRAPPIST-1 star, a red dwarf, is much fainter and less massive than the Sun. It is rapidly spinning and generates energetic flares of ultraviolet (UV) radiation.

Two separate teams of scientists from theHarvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics have identified major challenges for the development of life in TRAPPIST-1. The TRAPPIST-1 system, depicted here in an artists conception, contains seven roughly Earth-sized planets orbiting a red dwarf, which is a faint, low-mass star. This star spins rapidly and generates energetic flares of ultraviolet radiation and a strong wind of particles. The research teams say the behavior of this red dwarf makes it much less likely than generally thought that the three planets orbiting well within the habitable zone could support life. (Image courtesy NASA/JPL-Caltech/R. Hurt)

The first team, a pair of CfA theorists, considered many factors that could affect conditions on the surfaces of planets orbiting red dwarfs. For the TRAPPIST-1 system they looked at how temperature could have an impact on ecology and evolution, plus whether ultraviolet radiation from the central star might erode atmospheres around the seven planets surrounding it. These planets are all much closer to the star than the Earth is to the Sun, and three of them are located well within the habitable zone.

Lingam and his co-author, Harvard professor Avi Loeb, found that planets in the TRAPPIST-1 system would be barraged by UV radiation with an intensity far greater than experienced by Earth.

Because of the onslaught by the stars radiation, our results suggest the atmosphere on planets in the TRAPPIST-1 system would largely be destroyed, said Loeb. This would hurt the chances of life forming or persisting.

Lingam and Loeb estimate that the chance of complex life existing on any of the three TRAPPIST-1 planets in the habitable zone is less than 1% of that for life existing on Earth.

In a separate study, another research team from the CfA and the University of Massachusetts in Lowell found that the star in TRAPPIST-1 poses another threat to life on planets surrounding it. Like the Sun, the red dwarf in TRAPPIST-1 is sending a stream of particles outwards into space. However, the pressure applied by the wind from TRAPPIST-1s star on its planets is 1,000 to 100,000 times greater than what the solar wind exerts on the Earth.

The authors argue that the stars magnetic field will connect to the magnetic fields of any planets in orbit around it, allowing particles from the stars wind to directly flow onto the planets atmosphere. If this flow of particles is strong enough, it could strip the planets atmosphere and perhaps evaporate it entirely.

The Earths magnetic field acts like a shield against the potentially damaging effects of the solar wind, said Cecilia Garraffo of the CfA, who led the new study. If Earth were much closer to the Sun and subjected to the onslaught of particles like the TRAPPIST-1 star delivers, our planetary shield would fail pretty quickly.

While these two studies suggest that the likelihood of life may be lower than previously thought, it does not mean the TRAPPIST-1 system or others with red dwarf stars are devoid of life.

Were definitely not saying people should give up searching for life around red dwarf stars, said Garraffos co-author Jeremy Drake, also from CfA. But our work and the work of our colleagues shows we should also target as many stars as possible that are more like the Sun.

The Daily Glaxy via Harvard-Smithonian CfA https://www.cfa.harvard.edu/news/2017-20

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Artificial Intelligence ushers in the era of superhuman doctors – New Scientist

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By Kayt Sukel

THE doctors eyes flit from your face to her notes. How long would you say thats been going on? You think back: a few weeks, maybe longer? She marks it down. Is it worse at certain times of day? Tough to say it comes and goes. She asks more questions before prodding you, listening to your heart, shining a light in your eyes. Minutes later, you have a diagnosis and a prescription. Only later do you remember that fall you had last month should you have mentioned it? Oops.

One in 10 medical diagnoses is wrong, according to the US Institute of Medicine. In primary care, one in 20 patients will get a wrong diagnosis. Such errors contribute to as many as 80,000 unnecessary deaths each year in the US alone.

These are worrying figures, driven by the complex nature of diagnosis, which can encompass incomplete information from patients, missed hand-offs between care providers, biases that cloud doctors judgement, overworked staff, overbooked systems, and more. The process is riddled with opportunities for human error. This is why many want to use the constant and unflappable power of artificial intelligence to achieve more accurate diagnosis, prompt care and greater efficiency.

AI-driven diagnostic apps are already available. And its not just Silicon Valley types swapping clinic visits for diagnosis via smartphone. The UK National Health Service (NHS) is trialling an AI-assisted app to see if it performs better than the existing telephone triage line. In the US and

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Artificial Intelligence ushers in the era of superhuman doctors - New Scientist

What an Artificial Intelligence Researcher Fears About AI – Scientific … – Scientific American

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The following essay is reprinted with permission fromThe Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research.

As an artificial intelligence researcher, I often come across the idea that many people are afraid of what AI might bring. Its perhaps unsurprising, given both history and the entertainment industry, that we might be afraid of a cybernetic takeover that forces us to live locked away, Matrix-like, as some sort of human battery.

And yet it is hard for me to look up from the evolutionary computer models I use to develop AI, to think about how the innocent virtual creatures on my screen might become the monsters of the future. Might I become the destroyer of worlds, as Oppenheimer lamented after spearheading the construction of the first nuclear bomb?

I would take the fame, I suppose, but perhaps the critics are right. Maybe I shouldnt avoid asking: As an AI expert, what do I fear about artificial intelligence?

The HAL 9000 computer, dreamed up by science fiction author Arthur C. Clarke and brought to life by movie director Stanley Kubrick in 2001: A Space Odyssey, is a good example of a system that fails because of unintended consequences. In many complex systems the RMS Titanic, NASAs space shuttle, the Chernobyl nuclear power plant engineers layer many different components together. The designers may have known well how each element worked individually, but didnt know enough about how they all worked together.

That resulted in systems that could never be completely understood, and could fail in unpredictable ways. In each disaster sinking a ship, blowing up two shuttles and spreading radioactive contamination across Europe and Asia a set of relatively small failures combined together to create a catastrophe.

I can see how we could fall into the same trap in AI research. We look at the latest research from cognitive science, translate that into an algorithm and add it to an existing system. We try to engineer AI without understanding intelligence or cognition first.

Systems like IBMs Watson and Googles Alpha equip artificial neural networks with enormous computing power, and accomplish impressive feats. But if these machines make mistakes, they lose on Jeopardy! or dont defeat a Go master. These are not world-changing consequences; indeed, the worst that might happen to a regular person as a result is losing some money betting on their success.

But as AI designs get even more complex and computer processors even faster, their skills will improve. That will lead us to give them more responsibility, even as the risk of unintended consequences rises. We know that to err is human, so it is likely impossible for us to create a truly safe system.

Im not very concerned about unintended consequences in the types of AI I am developing, using an approach called neuroevolution. I create virtual environments and evolve digital creatures and their brains to solve increasingly complex tasks. The creatures performance is evaluated; those that perform the best are selected to reproduce, making the next generation. Over many generations these machine-creatures evolve cognitive abilities.

Right now we are taking baby steps to evolve machines that can do simple navigation tasks, make simple decisions, or remember a couple of bits. But soon we will evolve machines that can execute more complex tasks and have much better general intelligence. Ultimately we hope to create human-level intelligence.

Along the way, we will find and eliminate errors and problems through the process of evolution. With each generation, the machines get better at handling the errors that occurred in previous generations. That increases the chances that well find unintended consequences in simulation, which can be eliminated before they ever enter the real world.

Another possibility thats farther down the line is using evolution to influence the ethics of artificial intelligence systems. Its likely that human ethics and morals, such as trustworthiness and altruism, are a result of our evolution and factor in its continuation. We could set up our virtual environments to give evolutionary advantages to machines that demonstrate kindness, honesty and empathy. This might be a way to ensure that we develop more obedient servants or trustworthy companions and fewer ruthless killer robots.

While neuroevolution might reduce the likelihood of unintended consequences, it doesnt prevent misuse. But that is a moral question, not a scientific one. As a scientist, I must follow my obligation to the truth, reporting what I find in my experiments, whether I like the results or not. My focus is not on determining whether I like or approve of something; it matters only that I can unveil it.

Being a scientist doesnt absolve me of my humanity, though. I must, at some level, reconnect with my hopes and fears. As a moral and political being, I have to consider the potential implications of my work and its potential effects on society.

As researchers, and as a society, we have not yet come up with a clear idea of what we want AI to do or become. In part, of course, this is because we dont yet know what its capable of. But we do need to decide what the desired outcome of advanced AI is.

One big area people are paying attention to is employment. Robots are already doing physical work like welding car parts together. One day soon they may also do cognitive tasks we once thought were uniquely human. Self-driving cars could replace taxi drivers; self-flying planes could replace pilots.

Instead of getting medical aid in an emergency room staffed by potentially overtired doctors, patients could get an examination and diagnosis from an expert system with instant access to all medical knowledge ever collected and get surgery performed by a tireless robot with a perfectly steady hand. Legal advice could come from an all-knowing legal database; investment advice could come from a market-prediction system.

Perhaps one day, all human jobs will be done by machines. Even my own job could be done faster, by a large number of machines tirelessly researching how to make even smarter machines.

In our current society, automation pushes people out of jobs, making the people who own the machines richer and everyone else poorer. That is not a scientific issue; it is a political and socioeconomic problem that we as a society must solve. My research will not change that, though my political self together with the rest of humanity may be able to create circumstances in which AI becomes broadly beneficial instead of increasing the discrepancy between the one percent and the rest of us.

There is one last fear, embodied by HAL 9000, the Terminator and any number of other fictional superintelligences: If AI keeps improving until it surpasses human intelligence, will a superintelligence system (or more than one of them) find it no longer needs humans? How will we justify our existence in the face of a superintelligence that can do things humans could never do? Can we avoid being wiped off the face of the Earth by machines we helped create?

The key question in this scenario is: Why should a superintelligence keep us around?

I would argue that I am a good person who might have even helped to bring about the superintelligence itself. I would appeal to the compassion and empathy that the superintelligence has to keep me, a compassionate and empathetic person, alive. I would also argue that diversity has a value all in itself, and that the universe is so ridiculously large that humankinds existence in it probably doesnt matter at all.

But I do not speak for all humankind, and I find it hard to make a compelling argument for all of us. When I take a sharp look at us all together, there is a lot wrong: We hate each other. We wage war on each other. We do not distribute food, knowledge or medical aid equally. We pollute the planet. There are many good things in the world, but all the bad weakens our argument for being allowed to exist.

Fortunately, we need not justify our existence quite yet. We have some time somewhere between 50 and 250 years, depending on how fast AI develops. As a species we can come together and come up with a good answer for why a superintelligence shouldnt just wipe us out. But that will be hard: Saying we embrace diversity and actually doing it are two different things as are saying we want to save the planet and successfully doing so.

We all, individually and as a society, need to prepare for that nightmare scenario, using the time we have left to demonstrate why our creations should let us continue to exist. Or we can decide to believe that it will never happen, and stop worrying altogether. But regardless of the physical threats superintelligences may present, they also pose a political and economic danger. If we dont find a way to distribute our wealth better, we will have fueled capitalism with artificial intelligence laborers serving only very few who possess all the means of production.

This article was originally published onThe Conversation. Read the original article.

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What an Artificial Intelligence Researcher Fears About AI - Scientific ... - Scientific American

Artificial intelligence can make America’s public sector great again – Recode

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Senator Maria Cantwell, D-Wash., just drafted forward-looking legislation that aims to establish a select committee of experts to advise agencies across the government on the economic impact of federal artificial intelligence.

AI meant for U.S. government use should be defined as a network of complementary technologies built with the ability to autonomously conduct, support or manage public sector activity across disciplines.

The move is an early step toward formalizing the exploration of AI in a government context. But it could ultimately contribute to jump-starting AI-focused programs that help stimulate the United States economy, benefit citizens, uphold data security and privacy, and eventually ensure America is successful during the initial introduction of this important technology to U.S. consumers.

The presence of legislation could also lend legitimacy to the prospect of near-term government investment in AI innovation something that may even sway Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin and others away from their belief that the impact of AI wont be felt for years to come.

Indeed, other than a few economic impact and policy reports conducted by the Obama Administration led by former U.S. Chief Data Scientist DJ Patil and other tech-minded government leaders this is the first policy effort toward moving the U.S. public sector past acknowledging its significance, and toward fully embracing AI technology.

Its a tall order, one that requires Sen. Cantwell and her colleagues in the Senate to define AI for the federal government, and focus on policies that govern very diverse applications of the technology.

As an emerging technology, the term artificial intelligence means different things to different people. That's why I believe it's essential for the U.S. government to take the first step in defining what AI means in legislation.

AI meant for U.S. government use should be defined as a network of complementary technologies built with the ability to autonomously conduct, support or manage public sector activity across disciplines. All AI-driven government technology should secure and advance the countrys interests. AI should not be formalized as a replacement or stopgap for standard government operations or personnel.

This is important because a central task of the committee will be to look at if AI has displaced more jobs than it has created with this definition, they will be able to make an accurate assessment.

Should the select committee succeed in establishing a federal policy, this will provide a useful benchmark to the private sector on the way that AI should be built and deployed hopefully adopting ethical standards from the start. This should include everything from the diversity of the people building the AI to the data it learns from. Adding value from the beginning, the technology and the people engaging with it need to be held accountable for outcomes of work. This will take collaboration and employee-citizen engagement.

Public-sector AI use offers an opportunity for agencies to better serve Americas diverse citizen population. AI could open up opportunities for citizens to work and engage with government processes and policies in a way that has never been possible before. New AI tools that include voice-activated processes could make areas of government accessible to people with learning, hearing and sight impairments that previously wouldnt have had the opportunity in the past.

The myriad applications of AI-driven technology offers completely different benefits to departments throughout the government, from Homeland Security to the Office of Personnel Management to the Department of Transportation.

Once the government has a handle on AI and legislation is in place, it could eventually offer government agencies opportunities way beyond those in technology

AI could open up opportunities for citizens to work and engage with government processes and policies in a way that has never been possible before.

Filling talent and personnel gaps with technology that can perform and automate specific tasks, revamp citizen engagement through new communication portals and synthesize vital health, economic and public data securely. So, while the introduction of AI will inevitably lead to a situation where some jobs will be replaced by technology, it will also foster a new sector and create jobs in its wake.

For now, businesses, entrepreneurs, and developers around the world will continue to pioneer new AI-driven platforms, technologies and tools for use both in the home and the office from live chat support software to voice-driven technology powering self-driving cars. The private sector is firmly driving the AI revolution with Amazon, Apple, Facebook, IBM, Microsoft and other American companies leading the way. However, it is clear that there is definitely room for the public sector to complement this innovation and for the government to provide the guide rails.

Personally, Ive spent my career developing AI and bot technology. My first bot brought me candy from a tech-company cafe. My last will hopefully help save the world to some extent. I think Sen. Cantwells initiative will set Americas public sector on a similarly ambitious path to bring AI that helps people into the fold and elevate the U.S. as an important contributor to the technologys global development.

Kriti Sharma is the vice president of bots and AI at Sage Group, a global integrated accounting, payroll and payment systems provider. She is the creator of Pegg, the worlds first accounting chatbot, with users in 135 countries. Sharma is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, a Google Grace Hopper Scholar and a Government of India Young Leader in Science. She was recently named to Forbes 30 Under 30 list. Reach her @sharma_kriti.

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Artificial intelligence can make America's public sector great again - Recode

Esri, Microsoft Collaborate on Artificial Intelligence Initiative – Government Technology

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(TNS) -- Redlands tech company is a part of a huge artificial intelligence initiative announced this week by Microsoft.

Esri and Microsoft are collaborating on grants to make their resources available to conservationists to process data from wetlands and other endangered locations, according to a news release.

Esri is wrapping up its annual User Conference in San Diego, which attracts leading tech companies from around the world, especially those that deal with mapping. Esris specialty is geographic information systems, finding ways to combine data and maps to reveal trends to planners in government, business and nonprofits.

AI can do that on the fly, Lucas Jaffa, lead research scientist for Microsoft, told thousands of User Conference attendees.

Humans and computers working together though increasingly intelligent algorithms can dramatically change the way that we as a society respond to some of our greatest challenges.

Jaffa said that for a year Microsoft, Esri and the Chesapeake Conservancy have been training computers to create land cover maps of the Chesapeake watershed.

The real power of this approach is that we can use the same algorithm to classify land cover in places that its never seen before.

Jaffas Esri presentation preceded a Microsoft media event on Wednesday in London, at which it announced a program called AI for Earth, which builds on Microsofts commitment to use AI technology to amplify human ingenuity and advance sustainability around the globe.

Microsoft also announced the formation of an incubation hub called Microsoft Research AI on Wednesday at a media event. It will have a team of 100 scientists and engineers.

2017 The Press-Enterprise (Riverside, Calif.) Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

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Esri, Microsoft Collaborate on Artificial Intelligence Initiative - Government Technology

The big problem with artificial intelligence – Axios

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Note: These are only the big-ticket items that Trump initially promised to complete or must complete by 2018.

Repealing and replacing the Affordable Care Act has been Trump's top priority, and from the beginning he's insisted that his administration tackle health care before moving on to tax reform (#2 on his list). But the GOP health bill has taken much longer than the administration initially anticipated, and has prevented other policy initiatives from moving forward.

Ideal due date: Trump initially wanted to pass a health bill before Easter recess, but the GOP's first try collapsed in March.

Status: The Senate hopes to vote on the GOP's second attempt at repeal and replace next week, but first they have to do a procedural motion to start the debate. If that fails, then it's back to the drawing board.

Following Trump's election, the stock market surged on the optimism that Trump would slash corporate taxes. But that initial enthusiasm has since waned as months continue to roll by with no real plan in store (though stocks keep hitting new highs). Economic advisor Gary Cohn has told associates that if tax reform doesn't get done this year, it's probably never going to happen. Other WH officials argue that it must be done before the 2018 midterm elections, since Democrats will never support it, or it won't be done at all.

Ideal due date: The initial tentative deadline was this August, set by Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin. But last month, both Paul Ryan and Vice President Mike Pence said the GOP is aiming to pass tax reform by the end of the year.

Status: Cohn has said the administration won't have a bill on the floor of Congress until first two weeks of September.

Trump has said he wanted to start building a wall along the U.S. southern border this year, but as of now there's little to show for it. That's largely a result of the bipartisan backlash that the administration has faced on what the wall should look like, and how much money should be devoted to it, which ultimately ended in a budget proposal that did not include funding for the wall.

Ideal due date: The WH wanted to get funding for the wall this year, but that didn't happen.

Status: Negotiations are currently underway for the FY 2018 spending bills

The administration released their proposed budget in May, but it was sharply criticized by economists for relying on overly optimistic growth estimates. It's also been hit for using questionable math and offering few details on what Trump's tax plan will entail. And Democrats fiercely oppose the budget's plan to squeeze billions out of welfare and entitlement programs while simultaneously ramping up defense spending.

Firm due date: The deadline for when spending bills must be passed is the end of the 2018 fiscal year, or September 30, 2017.

Status: Congress has started committee work on spending bills. Action by the full House should happen before the August recess, according to a Republican aide involved in the process. The Senate has been moving slower, which may mean temporary spending bills are needed in the fall to fund the government.

Congress needs to pass a bill that will raise the debt ceiling and allow the government to borrow more money so that it can pay its bills. Failure to act could lead to a default for the first time in U.S. history. The Trump administration wants a "clean" debt ceiling hike without spending cuts, but that option has struggled to receive bipartisan support, putting House Speaker Paul Ryan in an uncomfortable position.

Firm due date: By the end of September, according to Mnuchin, in order to fulfill the government's debt obligations. But Mnuchin has urged Congress to raise the ceiling "sooner rather than later."

Status: Unclear, but Ryan has repeatedly assured they'll reach the deadline, and that Congress is open to considering all options.

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The big problem with artificial intelligence - Axios

Apple’s Privacy Pledge Complicates Its Push Into Artificial … – Wired – WIRED

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Apple's Privacy Pledge Complicates Its Push Into Artificial ... - Wired - WIRED

Beware the dark side of artificial intelligence – Toronto Star

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"Sophia," an artificially intelligent human-like robot developed by Hong Kong-based humanoid robotics company Hanson Robotics is pictured during the "AI for Good" Global Summit in Geneva. ( AFP/GETTY IMAGES )

By R. Michael Warren

Fri., July 14, 2017

Im with Bill Gates, Stephen Hawking and Elon Musk. Artificial intelligence (A.I.) promises great benefits. But it also has a dark side. And those rushing to create robots smarter than humans seem oblivious to the consequences.

Ray Kurzweil, director of engineering at Google, predicts that by 2029 computers will be able to outsmart even the most intelligent humans. They will understand multiple languages and learn from experience.

Once they can do that, we face two serious issues.

First, how do we teach these creatures to tell right from wrong in our own self defence?

Second, robots will self-improve faster than we slow evolving humans. That means outstripping us intellectually with unpredictable outcomes.

Kurzweil talks about a conference in 1999 of A.I. experts where a poll was taken about when they thought the Turing test (when computers pass humans in intelligence) would be achieved. The consensus was 100 years. And a good contingent thought it would never be done. Today, Kurzweil thinks were at the tipping point toward intellectually superior computers.

A.I. brings together a combination of mainstream technologies that are already having an impact on our everyday lives. Computer games are a bigger industry than Hollywood. Health-care diagnosis and targeted treatments, machine learning, public safety and security and driverless transportation are a few of the current applications.

But, what about the longer term implications?

Physicist Stephen Hawking warns, ... the development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race. Once humans develop full A.I., it will take off on its own and redesign itself at an ever-increasing rate Humans, who are limited by slow biological evolution, couldnt compete and would be superseded.

Speaking at an MIT symposium last year Tesla CEO, Elon Musk said, I think we should be very careful about A.I. If I were to guess what our greatest existential threat is, Id say its probably that. With artificial intelligence we are summoning the demon.

Bill Gates wrote recently, I am in the camp that is concerned about super intelligence. Initially, he thinks machines will do a lot of work for us thats not super challenging. A few decades later their intelligence will evolve to the point of real concern.

They are joined by Stuart Armstrong of the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford University. He believes machines will work at speeds inconceivable for humans. They will eventually stop communicating with us and take control of our economy, financial markets, health care and much more. He warns that robots will eventually make us redundant and could take over from their creators.

Last year, Musk, Hawking, Armstrong and other scientist and entrepreneurs signed an open letter. It acknowledges the great potential of A.I., but warns that research into the rewards has to be matched with an effort to avoid its potential for serious damage.

There are those who hold less pessimistic views. Many of them are creators of advanced A.I. technology.

Rollo Carpenter, CEO of Cleverbot, is typical. His technology learns from past conversations. It scores high in the Turing test because it fools a large proportion of people into believing theyre talking to a human. Carpenter thinks we are a long way from full A.I. and there is time to address the challenges.

Meanwhile, whats being done to teach robots right from wrong, before its too late? Quite a lot, actually. Many who teach machines to think agree that the more freedom given to machines the more they will need moral standards.

The virtual school, Good AI, is a prime example. Its mission is to train artificial intelligence in the art of ethics: how to think, reason and act. The students are hard drives. Theyre being taught to apply their knowledge to situations theyve never faced before. A digital mentor is used to police the acquisition of values.

Other institutions are teaching robots how to behave on the battlefield. Some scientists argue robot soldiers can be made ethically superior to humans. Meaning they cannot rape, pillage or burn down villages in anger.

Despite these precautions, its clear artificial intelligence applications are advancing at a faster rate than our moral preparedness. If this naive condition persists the consequences could be catastrophic.

R. Michael Warren is a former corporate director, Ontario deputy minister, TTC chief general manager and Canada Post CEO. r.michael.warren@gmail.com

The Toronto Star and thestar.com, each property of Toronto Star Newspapers Limited, One Yonge Street, 4th Floor, Toronto, ON, M5E1E6. You can unsubscribe at any time. Please contact us or see our privacy policy for more information.

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Beware the dark side of artificial intelligence - Toronto Star

Aerospace Education Summer Camp offered at Edwards Air Force Base – Tehachapi News

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The California Wing Civil Air Patrol will be sponsoring an Aerospace Education Summer Camp from July 30 through Aug. 5, at Edwards Air Force Base.

Cadets ages 12 through 18 will take part in a variety of aerospace activities in science, technology, engineering, and math, which include model rocketry, robotics, drones, flight simulators and STEM-related career seminars. A few of the other special activities are tours of the Test Pilot School, F-22, F-35, Global Hawk, rocket facility, TRACON and the new control tower.

Also on the AESC schedule is a special KC-135 flight and on Wednesday, Aug. 2, cadet orientation flights on CAP Cessna aircraft, which will depart early morning from the Aero Club at south base.

Major Roger Dunn is the CAWG-CAP aerospace education director and the AESC program organizer. Dunn is coordinating the event with Capt. Rhett Spongberg, and Lt. Col. Endrizzi, as the cadet and senior member project officers. Also, Lt. Col. Richard Radvanyi, the Edwards AFB Composite Squadron 84, commander, is the event logistics officer.

For more information, contact Dunn at Roger.Dunn@cawgcap.org, or Radvanyi at Richard.Radvanyi@cawgcap.org. Visit the website at cawgcadets.org.

Major Gail Harper, CAP, is the public affairs officer for Edwards Air Force Base Composite Squadron 84.

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Aerospace Education Summer Camp offered at Edwards Air Force Base - Tehachapi News

The future of aerospace manufacturing is digital – Information Age

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Adapting the traditional supply chain, and embracing the latest digital manufacturing and prototyping services, will support the expansion in aerospace predicted over the next decade and beyond

At the Paris Air Show recently, a host of aircraft deals were announced which are set to contribute a massive 35 billion to the global economy, and 3.3 billion to the UK alone.

This is positive news for the aerospace industry, which has already undergone significant growth, with analysts forecasting further global growth of 5.1% over the next decade.

The sector has had to make cutbacks in recent years however, which have raised concerns over whether aerospace manufacturing businesses are ready and able to make the most of this upturn in demand.

>See also:Aerospace fuel efficiency software

By way of example, recent studies have shown that the aerospace sector is currently experiencing a shortage of skilled manpower.

There is concern that the average age of workers in the sector has dramatically increased whilst, at the same time, the education system is not producing the next generation of skilled workers. To compound this, there is less excitement or desire today to work in aerospace engineering which was once perceived as a high-profile, showcase industry.

According to a recent report, three in five employers (59%) in the aerospace industry are concerned that a scarcity of skilled engineers could pose a threat to their business in the future.

The report also revealed that a third of engineering vacancies (32%) are considered hard to fill; around twice the national average. In addition, almost half of engineering businesses (48.3%) suggested that issues around recruitment had caused delays in developing new products, and had increased operating costs.

>See also:Smart factories to add $500BN to global economy in next 5 years

The tangible effects of this skills shortage are likely to be felt well into the future if the deep-rooted-issues around engineering education arent addressed, with Engineering UKs annual report suggesting that 56,000 engineering technicians will be required every year until 2024, just to keep up with demand.

The advent of Industry 4.0 has seen significant modernisation across the manufacturing sector as a whole, as businesses introduce a range of digital manufacturing processes. While the move towards digitisation may not be the overarching solution to the manpower challenges faced by the industry, the demand for more software and hardware engineers to operate these processes may certainly help to attract more talent into the industry.

3D printing, for example, is a particularly exciting technology which, even three decades into its existence, still continues to evolve. Product developers across a range of industries are utilising 3D printing to rapidly produce high-quality prototypes suitable for presentations and assembly tests.

In the automotive industry, for example, entire cars can be produced using the technique. However, while 3D printing can also be used to build production-ready parts, only a small number of companies are taking advantage of this method of production at present.

>See also:Innovation in niche industries

For the aerospace industry, where the requirements fluctuate significantly from business to business, 3D printing can assist by enabling the production of single components through to production-ready parts. Whats more, this capability can reduce the amount of administration previously experienced in aerospace R&D and increase the effectiveness of a manufacturer.

Advancements in 3D printing are already delivering tangible benefits to aeronautical manufacturers as a means of reducing material and labour costs, enabling them to test small parts and components such as those critical to the construction of engines and landing gear.

Achieving the projected growth will require an increased focus on innovations that allow for greater customisation, as well as improved longevity and cost reduction, without having to compromise on comfort or safety. Businesses face a need to find new means of reducing weight, cutting down on emissions, and increasing cargo and cabin capacity.

Whats more, the entire industry is being shaped by customer demand, with an increasing expectation for rapidly produced parts to be made readily available within a matter of days.

To support its complex supply chain, the aerospace industry can utilise digital manufacturing processes to benefit from acceleration in production processes, including increased efficiencies, and greater cost savings.

>See also:The enemy within: data thieves lurk within an organisations ranks

Advancements in rapid prototyping and on-demand production capabilities have revolutionised the mind-set of product developers. The ability to quickly and cheaply deliver the necessary parts has made the development cycle significantly smoother, for example. Being able to physically hold production-quality parts faster than ever before has proven to be a catalyst for certification and testing processes.

Many businesses within the aeronautical industry are already considering new manufacturing techniques and technologies that will help them meet demands for greater efficiency and innovation while, at the same time, work within ever tighter budgets.

Ultimately, the latest developments in on-demand production capabilities, coupled with a range of advanced manufacturing technologies, offer aerospace manufacturers the time and budget saving options they need.

Adapting the traditional supply chain, and embracing the latest digital manufacturing and prototyping services, will support the expansion in aerospace predicted over the next decade and beyond.

Sourced byStephen Dyson, head of Industry 4.0, Proto Labs

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The future of aerospace manufacturing is digital - Information Age

What to Look Out For When Honeywell International Reports Earnings – Madison.com

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Honeywell International's (NYSE: HON) second quarter is shaping up to be a very interesting one for investors. In short, the company faces a mix of earnings headwinds and tailwinds, and it's hard to predict whether the net result will be a raising of the company's full-year guidance. Let's take a look at three key things to look out for when CEO Darius Adamczyk discusses current trading and outlook.

After a first quarter in which, according to Adamczyk, Honeywell "met or in most cases exceeded" management's guidance ranges across its segments, it was somewhat puzzling that the full-year guidance range was only raised by $0.05 at the bottom end, to between $6.90 and $7.10.

One of the reasons for such conservatism was management's caution regarding its short-cycle business, which is 60% of its total revenue, and typically exposed to current business sentiment. However, as you can see below, business-cycle indicators remain in growth mode, and there is no reason to expect weakness in the short-cycle business within the home and building technologies, safety and productivity solutions, and performance materials and technologies segments.

While the anecdotal evidence is positive for Honeywell's short-cycle businesses, there are question marks on parts of its aerospace businesses. For example, one-time merger candidate United Technologies Corporation (NYSE: UTX) gave a presentation on its aerospace businesses during the recent Paris Air Show.

In a nutshell, Dave Gitlin, president of United Technologies's aerospace systems segment, claimed his company continues to face sales headwinds with wide-body jets, business jets, regional jets, and helicopters. It's a message echoed by Honeywell's CFO Tom Szlosek at an investor conference in June, and it wouldn't be surprising to see Honeywell report continued weakness in these areas.

It matters because Honeywell has significant exposure to business and general aviation. The aerospace segment contributed nearly 38% of total company sales in 2016, with commercial aerospace (original equipment and aftermarket) contributing around half of aerospace sales. In turn, business jets (original equipment and aftermarket) contribute around a third of commercial aerospace -- or around 6.5% of total company sales.

Simply put, Honeywell could do with some signs of improvement in business and regional jet build rates; management's commentary is worth looking out for.

Will Honeywell International's earnings tailwinds outweigh its headwinds in the second quarter? Image source: Getty Images.

Honeywell has faced significant earnings headwinds in the last year or so, due to original-equipment aerospace incentives granted to win out on new aircraft platforms. While they are necessary to insure long-term recurring revenue from positioning on the new aircraft, they have significantly held back profitability in the segment.

On the last earnings call, Szlosek argued the incentives would prove a $25 million headwind in the first half, but would turn into a $70 million tailwind in the second half -- the second half of 2016 was incentive-heavy for Honeywell. It's worth keeping an eye on whether these numbers are confirmed in the results presentations.

It's especially important because Honeywell's aerospace incentives were more than expected in 2016, and part of the reason why the company missed its original revenue guidance that year.

All told, it's hard to know what the net impact will be. There are reasons to believe management is being conservative with its short-cycle businesses (within its non-aerospace segments), but the company could face continued headwinds in aerospace. If aerospace disappoints, then management could face renewed pressure from activist investors to spin off the segment.

As ever, the market will focus on the near-term impact on full-year earnings guidance, and investors will be hoping for a positive surprise from Adamczyk in July.

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What to Look Out For When Honeywell International Reports Earnings - Madison.com

How America Lost the War on Drugs – Rolling Stone

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1. After Pablo

On the day of his death, December 2nd, 1993, the Colombian billionaire drug kingpin Pablo Escobar was on the run and living in a small, tiled-roof house in a middle-class neighborhood of Medelln, close to the soccer stadium. He died, theatrically, ridiculously, gunned down by a Colombian police manhunt squad while he tried to flee across the barrio's rooftops, a fat, bearded man who had kicked off his flip-flops to try to outrun the bullets. The first thing the American drug agents who arrived on the scene wanted to do was to make sure that the corpse was actually Escobar's. The second thing was to check his house.

The last time Escobar had hastily fled one of his residences la Catedral, the luxurious private prison he built for himself to avoid extradition to the United States he had left behind bizarre, enchanting detritus, the raw stuff of what would become his own myth: the photos of himself dressed up as a Capone-era gangster with a Tommy gun, the odd collection of novels ranging from Graham Greene to the Austrian modernist Stefan Zweig. Agents from the Drug Enforcement Administration, arriving after the kingpin had fled, found neat shelves lined with loose-leaf binders, carefully organized by content. They were, says John Coleman, then the DEA's assistant administrator for operations, "filled with DEA reports" internal documents that laid out, in extraordinary detail, the agency's repeated attempts to capture Escobar.

This article appeared in the December 13, 2007 issue of Rolling Stone. The issue is available in the online archive.

"He had shelves and shelves and shelves of these things," Coleman tells me. "It was stunning. A lot of the informants we had, he'd figured out who they were. All the agents we had chasing him who we trusted in the Colombian police it was right there. He knew so much more about what we were doing than we knew about what he was doing."

Coleman and other agents began to work deductively, backward. "We had always wondered why his guys, when we caught them, would always go to trial and risk lots of jail time, even when they would have saved themselves a lot of time if they'd just plead guilty," he says. "What we realized when we saw those binders was that they were doing a job. Their job was to stay on trial and have their lawyers use discovery to get all the information on DEA operations they could. Then they'd send copies back to Medelln, and Escobar would put it all together and figure out who we had tracking him."

Inside the War on Drugs: Interview With Rolling Stone Contributing Editor Ben Wallace-Wells

The loose-leaf binders crammed in Escobar's office on the ground floor gave Coleman and his agents a sense of triumph: The whole mysterious drug trade had an organization, a structure and a brain, and they'd just removed it. In the thrill of the moment, clinking champagne glasses with officials from the Colombian police and taking congratulatory calls from Washington, the agents in Medelln believed the War on Drugs could finally be won. "We had an endgame," Coleman says. "We were literally making the greatest plans."

At the headquarters of the Office of National Drug Control Policy in Washington, staffers tacked up a poster with photographs of sixteen of its most wanted men, cartel leaders from across the Andes. Solemnly, ceremoniously, a staffer took a red magic marker and drew an X over Escobar's portrait. "We felt like it was one down, fifteen to go," recalls John Carnevale, the longtime budget director of the drug-control office. "There was this feeling that if we got all sixteen, it's not like the whole thing would be over, but that was a big part of how we would go about winning the War on Drugs."

MarijuanAmerica: Inside America's Last Growth Industry

Man by man, sixteen red X's eventually went up over the faces of the cartel leaders: killed. extradited. killed. Jos Santacruz Londoo, a leading drug trafficker, was gunned down by Colombian police in a shootout. The Rodrguez Orejuela brothers, the heads of the Cali cartel, were extradited after they got greedy and tried to keep running their organization from prison. Some U.S. drug warriors believed that the busts were largely public-relations events, a showy way for the Colombian government to look tough on the drug trade, but most were less cynical. The crack epidemic was over. Drug-related murders were in decline. Winning the War on Drugs didn't seem such a quixotic and open-ended mission, like the War on Poverty, but rather something tangible, a fat guy with a big organization and binders full of internal DEA reports, sixteen faces on a poster, a piata you could reach out and smack. Richard Caas, a veteran DEA official who headed counternarcotics efforts on the National Security Council under both George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton, can still recall the euphoria of those days. "We were moving," he says, "from success to success."

This is the story of how that momentary success turned into one of the most sustained and costly defeats the United States has ever suffered. It is the story of how the most powerful country on Earth, sensing a piata, swung to hit it and missed.

The Stoner Arms Dealers

2. The Making of a Tragedy

For Caas and other drug warriors, the death of Escobar had the feel of a real pivot, the end of one kind of battle against drugs and the beginning of another. The war itself had begun during the Nixon administration, when the White House began to get reports that a generation of soldiers was about to come back from Vietnam stoned, with habits weaned on the cheap marijuana and heroin of Southeast Asia and hothoused in the twitchy-fingered freakout of a jungle guerrilla war. For those in Washington, the problem of drugs was still so strange and new in the early Seventies that Nixon officials grappled with ideas that, by the standards of the later debate among politicians, were unthinkably radical: They appointed a panel that recommended the decriminalization of casual marijuana use and even considered buying up the world's entire supply of opium to prevent it from being converted into heroin. But Nixon was a law-and-order politician, an operator who understood very well the panic many Americans felt about the cities, the hippies and crime. Calling narcotics "public enemy number one in the United States," he used the issue to escalate the culture war that pitted Middle Americans against the radicals and the hippies, strengthening penalties for drug dealers and devoting federal funds to bolster prosecutions. In 1973, Nixon gave the job of policing these get-tough laws to the newly formed Drug Enforcement Administration.

By the mid-1980s, as crack leeched out from New York, Miami and Los Angeles into the American interior, the devastations inflicted by the drug were becoming more vivid and frightening. The Reagan White House seemed to capture the current of the moment: Nancy Reagan's plaintive urging to "just say no," and her husband's decision to hand police and prosecutors even greater powers to lock up street dealers, and to devote more resources to stop cocaine's production at the source, in the Andes. In 1986, trying to cope with crack's corrosive effects, Congress adopted mandatory-minimum laws, which hit inner-city crack users with penalties as severe as those levied on Wall Street brokers possessing 100 times more powder cocaine. Over the next two decades, hundreds of thousands of Americans would be locked up for drug offenses.

The War on Drugs became an actual war during the first Bush administration, when the bombastic conservative intellectual Bill Bennett was appointed drug czar. "Two words sum up my entire approach," Bennett declared, "consequences and confrontation." Bush and Bennett doubled annual spending on the drug war to $12 billion, devoting much of the money to expensive weaponry: fighter jets to take on the Colombian trafficking cartels, Navy submarines to chase cocaine-smuggling boats in the Caribbean. If narcotics were the enemy, America would vanquish its foe with torpedoes and F-16s and throw an entire generation of drug users in jail.

Though many on the left suspected that things had gone seriously awry, drug policy under Reagan and Bush was largely conducted in a fog of ignorance. The kinds of long-term studies that policy-makers needed those that would show what measures would actually reduce drug use and dampen its consequences did not yet exist. When it came to research, there was "absolutely nothing" that examined "how each program was or wasn't working," says Peter Reuter, a drug scholar who founded the Drug Policy Research Center at the RAND Corp.

But after Escobar was killed in 1993 and after U.S. drug agents began systematically busting up the Colombian cartels doubt was replaced with hard data. Thanks to new research, U.S. policy-makers knew with increasing certainty what would work and what wouldn't. The tragedy of the War on Drugs is that this knowledge hasn't been heeded. We continue to treat marijuana as a major threat to public health, even though we know it isn't. We continue to lock up generations of teenage drug dealers, even though we know imprisonment does little to reduce the amount of drugs sold on the street. And we continue to spend billions to fight drugs abroad, even though we know that military efforts are an ineffective way to cut the supply of narcotics in America or raise the price.

All told, the United States has spent an estimated $500 billion to fight drugs with very little to show for it. Cocaine is now as cheap as it was when Escobar died and more heavily used. Methamphetamine, barely a presence in 1993, is now used by 1.5 million Americans and may be more addictive than crack. We have nearly 500,000 people behind bars for drug crimes a twelvefold increase since 1980 with no discernible effect on the drug traffic. Virtually the only success the government can claim is the decline in the number of Americans who smoke marijuana and even on that count, it is not clear that federal prevention programs are responsible. In the course of fighting this war, we have allowed our military to become pawns in a civil war in Colombia and our drug agents to be used by the cartels for their own ends. Those we are paying to wage the drug war have been accused of human-rights abuses in Peru, Bolivia and Colombia. In Mexico, we are now repeating many of the same mistakes we have made in the Andes.

"What we learned was that in drug work, nothing ever stands still," says Coleman, the former DEA official and current president of Drug Watch International, a law-and-order advocacy group. For every move the drug warriors made, the traffickers adapted. "The other guys were learning just as we were learning," Coleman says. "We had this hubris."

3. Brainiacs & Cold Warriors

"At the beginning of the Clinton administration," Caas tells me, "the War on Drugs was like the War on Terror is now." It was, he means, an orienting fight, the next in a sequence of abstract, generational struggles that the country launched itself into after finding no one willing to actually square up and face it on a battlefield. After the Cold War, in the flush and optimism of victory, it felt to drug warriors and the American public that abstractions could be beaten. "It was really a pivot point," recalls Rand Beers, who served on the National Security Council for four different presidents. "We started to look carefully at our drug policies and ask if everything we were doing really made sense." The man Clinton appointed to manage this new era was Lee Brown.

Brown had been a cop for almost thirty years when Clinton tapped him to be the nation's drug czar in 1993. He had started out working narcotics in San Jose, California, just as the Sixties began to swell, and ended up leading the New York Police Department when the city was the symbolic center of the crack epidemic, with kids being killed by stray bullets that barreled through locked doors. A big, shy man in his fifties, Brown had made his reputation with a simple insight: Cops can't do much without the trust of people in their communities, who are needed to turn in offenders and serve as witnesses at trial. Being a good cop meant understanding the everyday act of police work not as chasing crooks but as meeting people and making allies.

"When I worked as an undercover narcotics officer, I was living the life of an addict so I could make buys and make busts of the dealers," Brown tells me. "When you're in that position, you see very quickly that you can't arrest your way out of this. You see the cycle over and over again of people using drugs, getting into trouble, going to prison, getting out and getting into drugs again. At some point I stepped back and asked myself, 'What impact is all of this having on the drug problem? There has to be a better way.'"

In the aftermath of the Rodney King beating, this philosophy known as community policing had made Brown a national phenomenon. The Clinton administration asked him to take the drug-czar post, and though Brown was skeptical, he agreed on the condition that the White House make it a Cabinet-level position. Brown stacked his small office with liberals who had spent the long Democratic exile doing drug-policy work for Congress and swearing they would improve things when they retook power. "There were basic assumptions that Republicans had been making for fifteen years that had never been challenged," says Carol Bergman, a congressional staffer who became Brown's legislative liaison. "The way Lee Brown looked at it, the drug war was focused on locking kids up for increasing amounts of time, and there wasn't enough emphasis on treatment. He really wanted to take a different tactic."

Brown's staff became intrigued by a new study on drug policy from the RAND Corp., the Strangelove-esque think tank that during the Cold War had employed mathematicians to crank out analyses for the Pentagon. Like Lockheed Martin, the jet manufacturer that had turned to managing welfare reform after the Cold War ended, RAND was scouting for other government projects that might need its brains. It found the drug war. The think tank assigned Susan Everingham, a young expert in mathematical modeling, to help run the group's signature project: dividing up the federal government's annual drug budget of $13 billion into its component parts and deciding what worked and what didn't when it came to fighting cocaine.

Everingham and her team sorted the drug war into two categories. There were supply-side programs, like the radar and ships in the Caribbean and the efforts to arrest traffickers in Colombia and Mexico, which were designed to make it more expensive for traffickers to bring their product to market. There were also demand-side programs, like drug treatment, which were designed to reduce the market for drugs in the United States. To evaluate the cost-effectiveness of each approach, the mathematicians set up a series of formulas to calculate precisely how much additional money would have to be spent on supply programs and demand programs to reduce cocaine consumption by one percent nationwide.

"If you had asked me at the outset," Everingham says, "my guess would have been that the best use of taxpayer money was in the source countries in South America" that it would be possible to stop cocaine before it reached the U.S. But what the study found surprised her. Overseas military efforts were the least effective way to decrease drug use, and imprisoning addicts was prohibitively expensive. The only cost-effective way to put a dent in the market, it turned out, was drug treatment. "It's not a magic bullet," says Reuter, the RAND scholar who helped supervise the study, "but it works." The study ultimately ushered RAND, this vaguely creepy Cold War relic, into a position as the permanent, pragmatic left wing of American drug policy, the most consistent force for innovating and reinventing our national conception of the War on Drugs.

When Everingham's team looked more closely at drug treatment, they found that thirteen percent of hardcore cocaine users who receive help substantially reduced their use or kicked the habit completely. They also found that a larger and larger portion of illegal drugs in the U.S. were being used by a comparatively small group of hardcore addicts. There was, the study concluded, a fundamental imbalance: The crack epidemic was basically a domestic problem, but we had been fighting it more aggressively overseas. "What we began to realize," says Jonathan Caulkins, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University who studied drug policy for RAND, "was that even if you only get a percentage of this small group of heavy drug users to abstain forever, it's still a really great deal."

Thirteen years later, the study remains the gold standard on drug policy. "It's still the consensus recommendation supplied by the scholarship," says Reuter. "Yet as well as it's stood up, it's never really been tried."

To Brown, RAND's conclusions seemed exactly right. "I saw how little we were doing to help addicts, and I thought, 'This is crazy,'" he recalls. "'This is how we should be breaking the cycle of addiction and crime, and we're just doing nothing.'"

The federal budget that Brown's office submitted in 1994 remains a kind of fetish object for certain liberals in the field, the moment when their own ideas came close to making it into law. The budget sought to cut overseas interdiction, beef up community policing, funnel low-level drug criminals into treatment programs instead of prison, and devote $355 million to treating hardcore addicts, the drug users responsible for much of the illegal-drug market and most of the crime associated with it. White House political handlers, wary of appearing soft on crime, were skeptical of even this limited commitment, but Brown persuaded the president to offer his support, and the plan stayed.

Still, the politics of the issue were difficult. Convincing Congress to dramatically alter the direction of America's drug war required a brilliant sales job. "And Lee Brown," says Bergman, his former legislative liaison, "was not an effective salesman." With a kind of loving earnestness, the drug czar arranged tours of treatment centers for congressmen to show them the kinds of programs whose funding his bill would increase. Few legislators came. Most politicians were skeptical about such a radical departure from the mainstream consensus on crime. Congress rewrote the budget, slashing the $355 million for treatment programs by more than eighty percent. "There were too many of us who had a strong law-and-order focus," says Sen. Chuck Grassley, a Republican who opposed the reform bill and serves as co-chair of the Senate's drug-policy caucus.

For some veteran drug warriors, Brown's tenure as drug czar still lingers as the last moment when federal drug policy really made sense. "Lee Brown came the closest of anyone to really getting it," says Carnevale, the longtime budget director of the drug-control office. "But the bottom line was, the drug issue and Lee Brown were largely ignored by the Clinton administration." When Brown tried to repeat his treatment-centered initiative in 1995, it was poorly timed: Newt Gingrich and the Republicans had seized control of the House after portraying Clinton as soft on crime. The authority to oversee the War on Drugs passed from Rep. John Conyers, the Detroit liberal, to a retired wrestling coach from Illinois who was tired of drugs in the schools a rising Republican star named Dennis Hastert. Reeling from the defeat at the polls, Clinton decided to give up on drug reform and get tough on crime. "The feeling was that the drug czar's office was one of the weak areas when it came to the administration's efforts to confront crime," recalls Leon Panetta, then Clinton's chief of staff.

4. The Young Guns

The administration was not doing much better in its efforts to stop the flow of drugs at the source. Before Clinton had even taken office, Caas who headed drug policy at the National Security Council had been summoned to brief the new president's choice for national security adviser, Anthony Lake, on the nation's narcotics policy in Latin America. "I figured, what the hell, I'm going back to DEA anyway, I'll tell him what I really think," Caas recalls.

The Bush administration, he told Lake, had been sending the military after the wrong target. In the 1970s, drugs were run up to the United States through the Caribbean by a bunch of "swashbuckling entrepreneurs" with small planes "guys who wouldn't have looked out of place at a Jimmy Buffett concert." In 1989, in the nationwide panic over crack, Defense Secretary Dick Cheney had managed to secure a budget of $450 million to chase these Caribbean smugglers. (Years later, when a longtime drug official asked Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld why Cheney had pushed the program, Rumsfeld grinned and said, "Cheney thought he was running for president.") The U.S. military loved the new mission, because it gave them a reason to ask for more equipment in the wake of the Cold War. And the Bush White House loved the idea of sending the military after the drug traffickers for its symbolism and swagger and the way it proved that the administration was taking drugs seriously.

The problem, Caas told Lake, was that the cocaine traffic had professionalized and was now moving its product through Mexico. With Caribbean smugglers out of the game, the military program no longer made sense. The new national security adviser grinned at Caas, pleased. "That's what we think as well," Lake said. "How would you like to stay on and help make that happen?"

Taking a new approach, the Clinton administration shifted most military assets out of the Caribbean and into the Andes, where the coca leaf was being grown and processed. "Our idea was, Stop messing around in the transit countries and go to the source," Caas tells me. The administration spent millions of extra dollars to equip police in Bolivia and Colombia to bust the crop's growers and processors. The cops were not polite Human Rights Watch condemned the murders of Bolivian farmers, blaming "the heavy hand of U.S. drug enforcement" but they were effective, and by 1996, coca production in Bolivia had begun a dramatic decline.

After Escobar fell, the American drug agents who had been chasing him did not expect the cocaine industry to dry up overnight they had girded for the fallout from the drug lord's death. What they had not expected was the ways in which the unintended consequences of his downfall would permanently change the drug traffic. "What ended up happening and maybe we should have predicted this would happen was that the whole structure shattered into these smaller groups," says Coleman, the veteran DEA agent. "You suddenly had all these new guys controlling a small aspect of the traffic."

Among them was a hired gun known as Don Berna, who had served as a bodyguard for Escobar. Double-crossed by his boss, Berna broke with the Medelln cartel and struck out on his own. For him, the disruption caused by the new front in America's drug war presented a business opportunity. But with the DEA's shift from the Caribbean into Bolivia and Colombia, Berna and other new traffickers had a production problem. So some of the "microcartels," as they became known, decided to move their operations someplace where they could control it: They opened negotiations with the FARC, a down-at-the-heels rebel army based in the jungles of Colombia. In return for cash, the FARC agreed to put coca production under its protection and keep the Colombian army away from the coca crop.

Berna and the younger kingpins also had a transportation problem: Mexican traffickers, who had been paid a set fee by the cartels to smuggle product across the U.S. border, wanted a larger piece of the business. The Mexican upstarts had a certain economic logic on their side. A kilo of cocaine produced in Colombia is worth about $2,500. In Mexico, a kilo gets $5,000. But smuggle that kilo across the border and the price goes up to $17,500. "What the Mexican groups started saying was, 'Why are we working for these guys? Why don't we just buy it from the Colombians directly and keep the profits ourselves?'" says Tony Ayala, a retired DEA agent and former Mexico country attache.

The remaining leaders of the weakened Cali cartel, DEA agents say, traveled up to Guadalajara for a series of meetings with Mexican traffickers. By 1996, the Colombians had decided to hand over more control of the cocaine trade to the Mexicans. The Cali cartel would now ship cocaine to Guadalajara, sell the drugs to the Mexican groups and then be done with it. "This wasn't just happenstance," says Jerome McArdle, then a DEA assistant agent for special operations. "This was the Colombians saying they were willing to reduce their profits in exchange for reducing their risk and exposure, and handing it over to the Mexicans. The whole nature of the supply chain changed."

Around the same time, DEA agents found themselves picking up Mexican distributors, rather than Colombians, on the streets of New York. Immigration and customs officials on the border were meanwhile overwhelmed by the sheer number of tractor-trailers many of them loaded with drugs suddenly pouring across the Mexican border as a consequence of NAFTA, which had been enacted in 1994. "A thousand trucks coming across in a four-hour period," says Steve Robertson, a DEA special agent assigned to southern Texas at the time. "There's no way we're going to catch everything."

Power followed the money, and Mexican traffickers soon had a style, and reach, that had previously belonged only to the Colombians. In the border town of Ciudad Jurez, the cocaine trafficker Amado Carrillo Fuentes developed a new kind of smuggling operation. "He brought in middle-class people for the first time lawyers, accountants and he developed a transportation division, an acquisitions division, even a human-resources operation, just like a modern corporation," says Tony Payan, a political scientist at the University of Texas-El Paso who has studied the drug trade on the border. Before long, Carrillo Fuentes had a fleet of Boeing 727s, which he used to fly cocaine, up to fifteen tons at a time, up from Colombia to Mexico. The newspapers called him El Seor de los Cielos, the Lord of the Skies.

The Mexican cartels were also getting more imaginative. "Think of it like a business, which is how these guys thought of it," says Guy Hargreaves, a top DEA agent during the 1990s. "Why pay for the widgets when you can make the widgets yourselves?" Since the climate and geography of Mexico aren't right for making cocaine, the cartels did the logical thing: They introduced a new product. As Hargreaves recalls, the Mexicans slipped the new drug into their cocaine shipments in Southern California and told coke dealers, "Here, try some of this stuff it's a similar effect."

The product the Mexican cartels came up with, the new widget they could make themselves, was methamphetamine. The man who mastered the market was a midlevel cocaine trafficker, then in his late twenties, named Jess Amezcua. In 1994, when U.S. Customs officials at the Dallas airport seized an airplane filled with barrels of ephedrine, a chemical precursor for meth, and traced it back to Amezcua, the startling new shift in the drug traffic became clear to a handful of insiders. "Cartels were no longer production organizations, whose business is wrapped up in a single drug," says Tony Ayala, the senior DEA agent in Mexico at the time. "They became trafficking organizations and they will smuggle whatever they can make the most profit from."

5. The Lobbyists & the Mad Professor

It is only in retrospect that these moments the barrels of ephedrine seized in Dallas, the quiet suggestion that meth had worked its way into the cocaine supply chain take on a looming character, the historic weight of a change made manifest. Up until methamphetamine, the War on Drugs had targeted three enemies. First there were the hippie drugs marijuana, LSD that posed little threat to the general public. Then there was heroin, a horrible drug but one that was largely concentrated in New York City. And, finally, there was crack. What meth proved was that even if the DEA could wipe out every last millionaire cocaine goon in Colombia, burn every coca field in Bolivia and Peru, and build an impenetrable wall along the entire length of the Mexican border even then, we wouldn't have won the War on Drugs, because there would still be methamphetamine, and after that, something else.

Gene Haislip, who served for years as one of the DEA's top-ranking administrators, believes there was a moment when meth could have been shut down, long before it spiraled into a nationwide epidemic. Haislip, who spent nearly two decades leading a small group at the agency dedicated to chemical control, is his own kind of legend; he is still known around the DEA as the man who beat quaaludes, perhaps the only drug that the U.S. has ever been able to declare total victory over. He did it with gumshoe methodicalness: by identifying every country in the world that produced the drug's active ingredient, a prescription medication called methaqualone, and convincing them to tighten regulations. Haislip believes he was present the moment when the United States lost the war on methamphetamine, way back in 1986, when meth was still a crude biker drug confined to a few valleys in Northern California a decade before the Mexican drug lords turned it into the most problematic drug in America. "The thing is, methamphetamine should never have gotten to that point," Haislip says. And it never would have, he believes, if it hadn't been for the lobbyists.

Haislip was known around the DEA as precise-minded and verbal. His impulse, in combatting meth, was the same one that had pushed the drug warriors after Escobar: the quixotic faith that if you could just stop the stuff at the source, you could get rid of all the social problems at once. Assembling a coalition of legislators, Haislip convinced them that the small, growing population of speed freaks in Northern California was enough of a concern that Congress should pass a law to regulate the drug's precursor chemicals, ephedrine and pseudoephedrine, legal drugs that were used in cold medicine and produced in fewer than a dozen factories in the world. "We were starting to get reports of hijacking of ephedrine, armed robbery of ephedrine, things that had never happened before," Haislip tells me. "You could see we were on the verge of something if we didn't get a handle on it."

All that was left was to convince the Reagan administration. One day in late 1986, Haislip went to meet with top officials in the Indian Treaty Room, a vast, imposing space in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building: arches, tiled floors, the kind of room designed to house history being made. Haislip noticed several men in suits sitting quietly in the back of the room. They were lobbyists from the pharmaceutical industry, but Haislip didn't pay them much attention. "I wasn't concerned with them," he recalls.

When Haislip launched into his presentation, an official from the Commerce Department cut him off. "Look, you're way ahead of us," the official said. "We don't have anything to suggest or add." Haislip left the meeting thinking he had won: The bill he proposed was submitted to Congress, requiring companies to keep records on the import and sale of ephedrine and pseudoephedrine.

But what Haislip didn't know was that the men in suits had already gone to work to rig the bill in their favor. "Quite frankly," Allan Rexinger, one of the lobbyists present at the meeting later told reporters, "we appealed to a higher authority." The pharmaceutical industry needed pseudoephedrine to make profitable cold medications. The result, to Haislip's dismay, was a new law that monitored sales of ephedrine and pseudoephedrine in bulk powder but created an exemption for selling the chemicals in tablet form a loophole that protected the pharmaceutical industry's profits.

The law, drug agents say, sparked two changes in the market for illegal meth. First, the supply of ephedrine simply moved overseas: The Mexican cartels, quick to recognize an emerging market, evaded the restrictions by importing powder from China, India and Europe and then smuggling it across the border to the biker groups that had traditionally distributed the drug. "We actually had meetings where we planned for a turf war between the Mexicans and the Hells Angels over methamphetamine," says retired DEA agent Mike Heald, who headed the San Francisco meth task force, "but it turned out they realized they'd make more money by working together." Second, responding to a dramatic uptick in demand from the illegal market, chemical-supply companies began moving huge amounts of ephedrine and pseudoephedrine out to the West Coast in the form of pills, which were then converted into meth. Rather than stemming the tide of meth before it started, the Reagan administration had unwittingly helped accelerate a new epidemic: Between 1992 and 1994, the number of meth addicts entering rehab facilities doubled, and the drug's purity on the street rose by twenty-seven percent.

Haislip resolved to have another go at Congress, but the issue ended up in a dispiriting cycle. The resistance, he says bitterly, "was always coming from the same lobbying group." In 1993, when he persuaded lawmakers to regulate the sale of ephedrine in tablet form, the pharmaceutical industry won an exception for pseudoephedrine. Drug agents began to intercept shipments of pseudoephedrine pills in barrels. Three years later, when lawmakers finally regulated tablets of pseudoephedrine, they created an exception for pills sold in blister packs. "Congress thought there was no way that meth freaks would buy this stuff and pop the pills out of blister packs, one by one," says Heald. "But we're not dealing with normal people we're dealing with meth freaks. They'll stay up all night picking their toes."

By the time Haislip retired, in 1997, the methamphetamine problem was really two problems. There were the mom-and-pop cooks, who were punching pills out of blister packs and making small batches of drugs for themselves. Then there were the industrial-scale Mexican cartels, which were responsible for eighty percent of the meth in the United States. It took until 2005 for Congress to finally regulate over-the-counter blister packs, which caused the number of labs to plummet. But once again, the Mexican groups were a step ahead of the law. In October 2006, police in Guadalajara arrested an American chemist named Frederick Wells, who had moved to Mexico after losing his job at Idaho State University. An academic troublemaker who drove around campus with signs on the back of his pickup truck raging at the college administration, Wells had allegedly used his university lab to investigate new ways that Mexican traffickers could use completely legal reagents to engineer meth precursors from scratch. "Very complicated numerical modeling," says his academic colleague Jeff Rosentreter. By the time Wells was arrested, the State Department had only just succeeded at pressuring Mexico to restrict the flow of pseudoephedrine, even though Wells had apparently been hard at work for years creating alternatives to that chemical. The lobbying by the pharmaceutical industry, Haislip says, "cost us eight or nine years."

For some in the drug war, it was a lesson that even the most promising efforts to restrict the supply of drugs at the source those that rely on legal methods to regulate legally produced drugs remained nearly impossible, outflanked by both drug traffickers and industry lobbyists. The tragedy of the fight against methamphetamine is that it repeated the ways in which the government tried to fight the cocaine problem, and failed racing from source to source, trying to eliminate a coca field or an ephedrine manufacturer and then racing to the next one. "We used to call it the Pillsbury Doughboy stick your finger in one part of the problem, and the Doughboy's stomach just pops out somewhere else," says Rand Beers. "The lesson of U.S. drug policy is that this world runs on unintended consequences. No matter how noble your intentions, there's a good chance that in solving one problem, you'll screw something else up."

6. The General & the Adman

Within the Clinton White House, the reform effort spearheaded by Lee Brown had created a political dilemma. Republicans, having taken control of Congress in 1994, were attacking the administration for being soft on drugs, and the White House decided that it was time to look tougher. "A lot of people didn't think Brown was a strong leader," Panetta tells me. As senior figures within the administration cast about for a replacement, they started by thinking about who would be the opposite of Brown. "We wanted to get someone who was much stronger, much tougher, and could come across that way symbolically," Panetta says.

During the planning for a possible invasion of Haiti, Panetta and others had discovered a rising star at the Pentagon, a charismatic, bullying four-star general named Barry McCaffrey, who had annoyed many in the Pentagon's establishment. In 1996, halfway into his State of the Union address, Clinton looked up at McCaffrey, a lean, stern-seeming military man in the balcony, and informed the nation that the general would be his next drug czar. "To succeed, he needs a force far larger than he has ever commanded before," Clinton said. "He needs all of us. Every one of us has a role to play on this team." McCaffrey, the bars on his epaulets shimmering, saluted. It was one of the president's biggest applause lines of the night.

For the drug warriors in McCaffrey's office, "the General" was everything the languid, considered, academic Lee Brown had not been. "It was clear from the outset that here was a guy who would take advantage of the bully pulpit and who, unlike Brown, would probably be able to get things done," says Bergman, Brown's former liaison. "One thing that surprised us all was how thoughtful he was he wasn't a knee-jerk, law-enforcement guy. He understood there needed to be money for treatment. He prided himself on being very sensitive to the racial issues, and he was sensitive to the impact of sentencing laws on African-American men." McCaffrey imported his own staff from the Southern Command mostly men, all military. They lent the White House's drug operation previously a slow place the kinetic energy of a forward operating base. "We went to a twenty-four-hour clock, so we'd schedule meetings for 1500," one longtime staffer recalls. "His people sat down with senior staff and told us what size paper the General wanted his memos on, this kind of report would have green tabs, this would have blue tabs."

The General's genius was for publicity. "He was great at getting visibility," Carnevale says. McCaffrey held grandstanding events everywhere from Mexico to Maine, telling reporters that the decades-long narrative of impending doom around the drug war was out of date and that if Congress would really dedicate itself to the mission, the country had a winnable fight on its hands. Drug-use numbers were edging downward; even cocaine seemed to be declining in popularity. "We are in an optimistic situation," McCaffrey declared.

For the first time ever, McCaffrey had the drug czar's office develop a strategy for an endgame to the drug war, a plan for finishing the whole thing. The federal government needed to reduce the amount of money it was spending on law enforcement and interdiction. But McCaffrey believed this was only possible once it could guarantee that drug use would continue to decline. "The data suggested very strongly that those who never tried any drugs before they were eighteen were very likely to remain abstinent for their whole lives, but that those who even smoked marijuana when they were teenagers had much worse outcomes," says McCaffrey's deputy Don Vereen. So the General decided to focus the government's attention on keeping kids from trying pot.

The "gateway theory," as it became known, had a natural appeal. Because most people who used hard drugs had also smoked marijuana, and because kids often tried marijuana several years before they started trying harder drugs, it seemed that keeping them off pot might prevent them from ever getting to cocaine and heroin. The only trouble is, the theory is wrong. When McCaffrey's office commissioned the Institute of Medicine to study the idea, researchers concluded that marijuana "does not appear to be a gateway drug." RAND, after examining a decade of data, also found that the gateway theory is "not the best explanation" of the link between marijuana use and hard drugs. But McCaffrey continued to devote more and more of the government's resources to going after kids. "We have already clearly committed ourselves," he declared, "to a number-one focus on youth."

"That decision," Bergman says, "was where you could see McCaffrey begin to lose credibility."

In 1996, less than a year into his term, the new drug czar met Jim Burke, a smooth-talking, silver-haired executive who chaired the Partnership for a Drug-Free America the advertising organization best known for the slogan "This is your brain on drugs." "Burke personally was very hard to resist," one of his former colleagues tells me. "I've seen him sell many conservative members of Congress and also liberals like Mario Cuomo."

Burke told McCaffrey a simple story. In the late 1980s, he said, the major television networks had voluntarily given airtime to the Partnership to run anti-drug ads aimed at teenagers. The number of teenagers who used drugs especially marijuana declined during that period. But in the early 1990s, Burke said, the rise of cable TV cut into the profits of the networks, which became stingier with the time they dedicated to anti-drug advertising. The result, the adman told the General, was that the number of teenagers who used drugs was climbing sharply to the outrage of Dennis Hastert and other conservative members of Congress. As a clincher, Burke handed McCaffrey a graph that showed the declining amount of airtime dedicated to anti-drug advertising on one axis and the declining perception among teenagers of the risks associated with drugs on the other. "I'm ninety-nine percent sure," one staffer at the Partnership tells me, "that it was that conversation that sold McCaffrey."

The General mobilized his office, lobbying Congress to allocate enough money to put anti-drug advertising on the air whenever teenagers watched television. His staff was skeptical. For all of McCaffrey's conviction and charisma, he didn't have much in the way of facts. "That was all we had no data, just this one chart and we had to go and sell Congress," Carnevale recalls. But Congress proved to be a pushover. Conservatives, who held a majority, were thrilled that soft-on-pot liberals in the Clinton administration finally wanted to do something about the drug problem. "At some point, you have to draw a line and say that some things are right and some things are wrong," says Sen. Grassley, explaining his support of the measure. "And using any drugs is just flat-out wrong." To the Partnership's delight, Congress allocated $1 billion to buy network time for anti-drug spots aimed at teenagers.

The General was also starting to make friends beyond the Clinton administration. The drug czar had found a natural ally in Hastert, who had become the GOP's de facto leader on drug policy. The former wrestling coach struck few as charismatic his joyless and drudging style, his form like settled gelatin but his experiences in high schools had left him with the feeling that the drug issue, in the words of his longtime aide Bobby Charles, "had become extremely poignant." Hastert wasn't quite Lee Brown; he believed that the prime focus of the drug war should be to increase funding for military operations in Colombia. But he and his staff had grown frustrated with the exclusively punitive character of drug policy and wanted the Republicans to take a more compassionate stance. His staff had studied the RAND reports and largely agreed with their conclusions. "We felt if you didn't get at the nub of the problem, which was prevention and treatment, you weren't going to do any good," says John Bridgeland, a congressional aide who helped coordinate Republican drug policy. Hastert eventually won $450 million to be used, in part, to expand a faith-based program discovered by Bridgeland: Developed by a former evangelical minister, it brought together preachers, parents and drug counselors to fight the problem of "apathy" through "parent training" and "messages from the pulpit."

But with McCaffrey's emphasis on kids came another, almost fanatical focus: going after citizens who used pot for medical purposes. If he was fighting marijuana, the General was going to fight it everywhere, in all its forms. He threatened to have doctors who prescribed pot brought up on federal charges, and dismissed the science behind medical marijuana as a "Cheech and Chong show." In 1997, voters in Oregon introduced an initiative to legalize medical marijuana in the state. "I'll never forget the senior-staff meeting the morning after the Oregon initiative was announced," Bergman says. "McCaffrey was furious. It was like this personal affront to him. He couldn't believe they'd gotten away with it. He wanted to have this research done on the groups behind it and completely trash them in the press." As the General traveled to the initiative states, stumping against medical marijuana, his aides sneered that the initiatives were "all being mostly bankrolled by one man, George Soros," the billionaire investor who favored decriminalizing drugs.

Even for those who shared McCaffrey's philosophy, the theatrics seemed strange: There he was, on evening newscasts, effectively insisting that grandmothers dying of cancer were corrupting America's youth. His office pushed arguments that, at best, stretched the available research: Marijuana is a gateway drug that leads inexorably to the abuse of harder drugs; marijuana is thirty times more potent now than it was a generation ago. "It didn't track with the conclusions our researchers came to," says Bergman. "It felt like he was trying to manipulate the data."

McCaffrey had taken the drug war in a new direction, one that had little obvious connection with preventing drug abuse. For the first time, the full force of the federal government was being brought to bear on patients dying from terminal diseases. Even the General's allies in Congress were appalled. "I can't tell you how many times I went to the Hill with him and sat in on closed-doors meetings," Bergman recalls. "Members said to him, 'What in the world are you doing? We have real drug problems in the country with meth and cocaine. What the hell are you doing with medical marijuana? We get no calls from our constituents about that. Nobody cares about that.' McCaffrey was just mystified by their response, because he truly believed marijuana was a gateway drug. He truly believed in what he was doing."

7. The Harvard Man

For the cops on the front lines of the War on Drugs, the federal government's fixation with marijuana was deeply perplexing. As they saw it, the problem wasn't pot but the drug-related violence that accompanied cocaine and other hard drugs. After the crack epidemic in the late 1980s, police commissioners around the country, like Lee Brown in Houston, began adding more officers and developing computer mapping to target neighborhoods where crime was on the rise. The crime rate dropped. But by the mid-1990s, police in some cities were beginning to realize there was a certain level that they couldn't get crime below. Mass jailings weren't doing the trick: Only fifteen percent of those convicted of federal drug crimes were actual traffickers; the rest were nothing but street-level dealers and mules, who could always be replaced.

Police in Boston, concerned about violence between youth drug gangs, turned for assistance to a group of academics. Among them was a Harvard criminologist named David Kennedy. Working together, the academics and members of the department's anti-gang unit came up with what Kennedy calls a "quirky" strategy and convinced senior police commanders to give it a try. The result, which began in 1995, was the Boston Gun Project, a collaborative effort among ministers and community leaders and the police to try to break the link between the drug trade and violent crime. First, the project tracked a particular drug-dealing gang, mapping out its membership and operations in detail. Then, in an effort called Operation Ceasefire, the dealers were called into a meeting with preachers and parents and social-service providers, and offered a deal: Stop the violence, or the police will crack down with a vengeance. "We know the seventeen guys you run with," the gangbangers were told. "If anyone in your group shoots somebody, we'll arrest every last one of you." The project also extended drug treatment and other assistance to anyone who wanted it.

The effort worked: The rates of homicide and violence among young men in Boston dropped by two-thirds. Drug dealing didn't stop "people continued what they were doing," Kennedy concedes, "but they put their guns down." As Kennedy reflected on the success of the Boston project, which ran for five years, he wondered if he had discovered a deeper truth about drug-related violence. If the murders weren't a necessary component of the drug trade if it was possible to separate the two perhaps cities could find a way to reduce the violence, even if they could do nothing about the drugs.

In 2001, Kennedy got a call from the mayor of San Francisco that gave him a chance to examine his theories in a new setting. The city had experienced a recent spike in its murder rate, much of it caused by an ongoing feud between two drug-dealing gangs Big Block and West Mob that had resulted in dozens of murders over the years. Could Kennedy, the mayor asked, help police figure out how to stop the killings?

Kennedy flew out to San Francisco and met with police. But as he researched the history of the violence, it seemed to confirm his findings in Boston. Though both Big Block and West Mob were involved in dealing drugs, the shootings were not really drug-related the two groups occupied different territories and were not battling over turf. "The feud had started over who would perform next at a neighborhood rap event," says Kennedy, now a professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. "They had been killing each other ever since."

Such evidence suggested that drug enforcement needed to focus more narrowly on those responsible for the violence. "Seventy percent of the violence in these hot neighborhoods comes back to drugs," Kennedy says. "But one of the profound myths is that these homicides are about the drug trade. The violence is driven by these crews but they're not killing each other over business." The real spark igniting the murders, he realized, was peer pressure, a kind of primordial male goad that drove young gang members to kill each other even in instances when they weren't sure they wanted to.

Given that police departments had already locked up every drug dealer in sight and were still having problems with violence, Kennedy thought a new approach was worth a try. "There's a difference between saying, 'I'm watching this, and you should stop,' and putting someone in federal lockup," he says. "The violence is not about the drug business but that's a very hard thing for people to understand."

But in the early days of the Bush administration, police departments were in no hurry to experiment with an approach that focused on drug-related murders and mostly ignored users who weren't committing violence. Kennedy's efforts proved to be yet another missed opportunity in the War on Drugs an experience that made clear how difficult it is for science to influence the nation's drug policy.

"If ten years ago the medical community had figured out a way to reduce the deaths from breast cancer by two-thirds, every cancer clinic in the country would have been using those techniques a year later," Kennedy says. "But when it comes to drugs and violence, there's been nothing like that."

8. Helicopters & Coca

Instead of pursuing the Boston Gun Project and other innovative approaches to fighting drug violence, the federal government decided to escalate its military response in Colombia. For the past decade and a half, cooperation from officials in Bogot had been halfhearted, sporadic and deeply corrupt. But by 1999, the country, it seemed, was on the verge of collapsing into civil war. The drug money that had flowed into Colombia had found its way into the hands of the rebel militia the FARC which had been laying siege to the Colombian government. The Clinton foreign-policy team, having spent the previous few years dealing with the consequences of failed states in Somalia and the Balkans, was deeply concerned about the possibility of a failed narcostate in America's own back yard.

One afternoon in June 1999, a dozen senior Clinton officials filed into the National Security Council's situation room, summoned by Sandy Berger, the president's national security adviser. Even though Bogot had ceded control of vast swaths of the country to the left-wing rebels, they were told, recent peace talks had collapsed. "The FARC had basically always been jungle campesinos they were a pretty austere bunch," says Brian Sheridan, who was in charge of the Pentagon's counternarcotics effort at the time and attended the meeting. "All of a sudden, they were leveling these attacks that had gotten more and more audacious." When FARC rebels had emerged from the jungle for a round of peace talks the previous fall, they had brandished brand-new AK-47s and Dragunovs, as if on military parade. One U.S. official observed at the time that the weaponry was "far beyond" what the Colombian army had in a pitched battle, the Clinton administration worried, the Colombian government could plausibly collapse.

The White House advisers weren't the only officials in Washington concerned about Colombia. Earlier that day, two men who attended the briefing Rand Beers of the State Department and Charlie Wilhelm of the Defense Department had gotten a call from the Republican caucus on the Hill. Dennis Hastert, who had been elevated to Speaker of the House six months earlier, wanted to see them right away. "It was kind of unusual," Beers recalls but when Hastert called, you came.

When Beers and Wilhelm arrived, Rep. Porter Goss, then the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, handed them a piece of paper. It was a copy of a supplemental spending authorization that the Republicans planned to offer immediately. Crafted by Bobby Charles, Hastert's longtime aide, the bill would have more than doubled military aid to Colombia to take on the rebels and narcotraffickers to a staggering $1.2 billion a year. But it was the politics of the situation that worried Beers as much as the money. "It occurred to me that if the administration was going to do anything on Colombia, it better do it soon," he says now, "or the Republicans would once again outflank what they perceived as the I-never-inhaled Clinton administration." Beers told the Republicans he would take a look, and then hurried to Berger's meeting.

Throughout much of the Clinton administration, the hope had been that the United States would be able to reduce its military aid to the Andes as the cocaine epidemic waned. Now, as Berger's group heard from intelligence agents, that hope seemed to be fading. Narcotraffickers were paying off the FARC so they could grow coca in the jungles of Colombia. The FARC were then turning around and using the money to buy weapons to stage attacks on the Colombian government.

Berger decided to act. Rather than oppose the Republican plan, he agreed to negotiate on an assistance package to bail out the Colombian government. The result was Plan Colombia nearly $1.6 billion to escalate the War on Drugs in the Andes. The new program would arm the military and police in their fight against the FARC, launch an ambitious effort to spray herbicide on coca crops from the air and provide economic assistance to poor farmers in rural villages. The initial aid, officials decided, would be heavily concentrated in Putumayo, a rebel-run province in the jungle.

No one is sure what convinced President Clinton to approve such an ambitious escalation in the War on Drugs. But some observers at the time speculated that the critical factor was a conversation with Sen. Christopher Dodd, the Connecticut Democrat, whose state is home to the helicopter manufacturer Sikorsky Aircraft. In early 2000, Clinton unveiled Plan Colombia and Sikorksy promptly received an order for eighteen of its Blackhawk helicopters at a cost of $15 million each. "Much has been made of the notion that this was Dodd looking to sell Blackhawks to Colombia," Beers tells me. He pauses before adding, "I am not in a position to tell you it didn't happen."

Plan Colombia would be the Clinton administration's primary and most costly contribution to the War on Drugs, the major counternarcotics program it bequeathed to the Bush administration. But as with so many other aspects of American drug policy, the plan had an unintended consequence: As it evolved, the emphasis on supplying arms to the Colombian government ended up having less to do with drugs and more to do with helping Bogot fight its enemies. Colombia used the military aid to target the left-wing FARC even though many believed that right-wing paramilitaries, who were allies of the government, were more directly involved in narcotrafficking. "It wasn't really first and foremost a counternarcotics program at all," says a senior Pentagon official involved in the creation of Plan Colombia. "It was mostly a political stabilization program."

9. The Temple of Hope

Link:

How America Lost the War on Drugs - Rolling Stone

A Small-Town Police Officer’s War on Drugs – New York Times

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Those years spent guarding prisoners, and later kicking down doors, changed Adamss thinking. So many of the drug users he saw had made one bad decision and then became chained to it, Adams realized. Or they had begun on a valid prescription for pain medication, after an injury, and then grew addicted. When refills grew scarce, they turned to alternatives. Many were no longer even using to get high, only to avoid the agony of withdrawal. They were teenaged, middle-aged and elderly; they were students, bankers and grocery clerks. They were businesswomen with six-figure salaries and homeless men with shopping carts. Arresting a person like this did no good, because there was always another to replace him or her and regardless, any jail sentence had limits. Afterward, Adams saw, everyone landed right back where they started.

Were not getting anywhere, he told his chief, Christopher Adams (the two men are not related), and his lieutenant. It turned out that they had already reached a similar conclusion. Until recently, Christopher Adams told me, he couldnt recall ever hearing of a heroin case. Now its every day, he said. Its a majority. Not just in Laconia. Its all over. He and his lieutenant sat down to consider what their department might do. It seemed that there were three conceivable approaches to a drug problem: prevention, enforcement and treatment. To accomplish all three would mean regarding drug users, and misusers, as not only criminals. They were also customers who were being targeted and sold to; they were also victims who needed medical treatment. To coordinate all those approaches would require a particular sort of officer.

In September 2014, Eric Adams became the first person in New England to his knowledge, the only person in the country whose job title is prevention, enforcement and treatment coordinator. I never thought Id be doing something like this, he told me. I learned fast. The department printed him new business cards: The Laconia Police Department recognizes that substance misuse is a disease, they read. We understand you cant fight this alone. On the reverse, Adamss cellphone number and email address were listed. He distributed these to every officer on patrol and answered his phone any time it rang, seven days a week. Strangers called him at 3 a.m., and Adams spoke with them for hours.

The department assigned him an unmarked Crown Victoria, and in it he followed the blips and squawks of a police scanner, driving to the scene of any overdose it reported and introducing himself to the victim, as well as any friends or family he could locate. Residents like these often shrank from the police or stiffened defensively. But when Adams told them that they werent under arrest, that he had only come to help, they seemed to sag in relief.

People who work with addicts generally agree that this moment, immediately after an overdose, offers the greatest chance to sway an addict, when he or she feels most vulnerable. Youre at a crossroads right then and there, a local paramedic told me. If an addict agreed to Adamss help, Adams drove him to a treatment facility, sat beside him in waiting rooms, ferried his parents or siblings to visit him there or at the jail or hospital. He added the names of everyone he encountered to a spreadsheet, and he kept in touch even with those who relapsed. Were they feeling safe? Attending support meetings? Did they have a job? A place to sleep?

In the nearly three years since, as overdose rates have climbed across New Hampshire, those in Laconia have fallen. In 2014, the year Adams began, the town had 10 opioid fatalities. In 2016, the number was five. Fifty-one of its residents volunteered for treatment last year, up from 46 a year before and 14 a year before that. The county as a whole, Belknap, had fewer opioid-related emergency-room visits than any other New Hampshire county but one. Of the 204 addicts Adams has crossed paths with, 123 of them, or 60 percent, have agreed to keep in touch with him. Adams calls them at least weekly. Ninety-two have entered clinical treatment. Eighty-four, or just over 40 percent of all those he has met, are in recovery, having kept sober for two months or longer. Zero have died.

On most mornings, Adams arrives at his office well before 9 to answer email. By then, his phone is already chiming. I thought when I got this position: Monday through Friday, day shifts, weekends off. Im going to see my kids and wife more, Adams said, laughing. Thats not the case. Pinned to the walls of his office, a windowless room on the second floor of the department, are pamphlets and resource guides for homelessness, peer-support groups and addiction hotlines, as well as a dry-erase board listing drug-treatment centers statewide. In December, when I visited one morning, the floor was cluttered with toys for local families in preparation for Christmas: doll sets, wireless headphones, a pillow the color of sorbet.

As soon as he began the job, Adams researched what social-service organizations the region had to offer and drove to their offices to introduce himself. A few employees at places like these knew one another from previous referrals, but many didnt, so Adams went about acquainting them. At health conferences, he arrived to the quizzical frowns of social workers and realized that, of some 200 attendees, he was the only police officer. A network gradually sprouted around him. One morning in December, his first call was from Daisy Pierce, the director of a nonprofit organization whose doors opened two weeks earlier; Adams is its chairman. Might Adams help her get a teenager into the Farnum Center, a treatment facility in Manchester, an hour south? Adams dialed a pastor he knew, who phoned a recovery coach. For the first year and a half, I was the only transportation around here, he told me when he hung up. I would drive people down to Farnum all the time.

Next, Adams turned to a matter unresolved from the day before: a woman the county prosecutor had phoned about, asking if Adams could find her housing. Until recently, the woman had been staying at a homeless shelter, but that stay had ended and, because she was on probation, with nowhere else to sleep, Adamss fellow officers had taken her to jail, though they could hold her for only one night. She would be released that day, still with nowhere else to stay. The next 48 hours would be critical, Adams felt. Here was a person who wanted to get sober but for whom the local authorities had little to offer.

From his desk, he dialed a treatment center, then various landlords and nonprofit directors he knew. Hi, this is Eric Adams over at the Laconia Police Department. Im calling to see if you have anything. ... Then he tried calling back the county prosecutor, tapping his fingers impatiently as the phone rang. When no one answered, he pulled a cellphone from his pocket and looked through it for numbers to dial on his office phone, while scribbling notes on two different legal pads. A cup from Dunkin Donuts sat on his desk, but he hadnt had time to sip from it. After a half-dozen calls, he hung up the phone and sighed. This is the biggest problem in the area, he said. Its housing. There are only a handful of landlords that own so many properties. Adams tried to be up front with landlords, and he didnt blame them for sometimes rebuffing him, because they had to look out for their other tenants. But it meant limited options for a woman like the one he was trying to help.

He swiveled toward his computer and began scrolling through notes. Finding nothing, he rubbed his eyes with frustration, propped his elbows onto his desk and rested his chin on his hands to think. Oh! Let me try I havent talked with her in a while. He dialed another number. Hi, this is Eric Adams over at the Laconia Police Department. ... A moment later, he hung up. All right, this is the last one I can think of. He dialed again. I was wondering if you had any rentals available for a female. Oh, really? Thatd be great. He recited his email address. Thank you!

Good news?

Adams shook his head. Not for a couple weeks. He stood, pushing back his chair, and cursed. Out of the office he strode to make a lap around the building to clear his head, then returned and looked at the clock 9:40 a.m. He had a meeting at 10 at the local branch of the Bank of New Hampshire to help Pierce, the nonprofit director, apply for a new line of credit for their organization. Halfway to the door, he backtracked to pluck the Dunkin Donuts cup from his desk and sipped. My coffees cold.

On a glass table in the bank lobby lay that mornings copy of The Laconia Daily Sun. Drug Sweep in Laconia Results in 17 Arrests, its front page read. Headlines like that had become increasingly common, especially as the drugs themselves changed first to opiates, then to opioids. They werent the same thing, Adams had learned. Opiates are derived from nature, and there are only so many, drugs like morphine, heroin and codeine. By contrast, opioids though the word is now often used as an umbrella term for all these substances technically means synthetic drugs like Vicodin, Percocet, fentanyl and OxyContin, all of which were invented in a laboratory. This is why detectives sometimes encountered new opioids that were 20, 50, 100 times as potent as heroin. In a lab, you can do nearly anything. A dealer, even if he or she knows the difference, rarely bothers labeling, so a dose of so-called heroin might include fractions of nearly anything meaning, of course, that the potency might be nearly anything. Overdoses happen not just when a person knowingly ingests a large dose but also when he or she ingests a dose of unknown composition.

After the meeting at the bank, Adamss phone rang, and he vanished briefly. The call was from a woman whose son was arrested on charges of dealing meth. She wanted an intervention and hoped Adams might help. Steering toward the Belknap County jail, past homes spangled with Christmas lights, Adams admitted that he felt wary. He had already met this young man, who wanted nothing to do with him. Still, Adams would try. He never knew when an addict might begin saying yes to him. Sometimes this happened quickly: Adamss phone would ring, and it was someone he met the previous day. Im exhausted, the person would confess. Others waited a year or longer. All that time, they had hung onto his card. I think Im ready now, they said. Occasionally an addict used similar words even in rebuffing him I dont think Im ready yet a phrase that implicitly acknowledged a problem even as he or she denied one. It was the kind of sign Adams kept on the lookout for. Possibly this moment had come for the young man in jail.

When we arrived, Adams hustled through the drably carpeted lobby, hardly slowing before a receptionist and a guard waved him inside. A half-hour later, he returned, his face tight with frustration, and strode past me to the car without speaking. He doesnt have a problem, he told me. Thats what he said. He doesnt have a problem.

Inside, he told me, guards had brought the young man from his cell into a windowed conference room, where he recognized Adams, as Adams predicted. You know why Im here, Adams began gently.

Youre trying to be nosy, the man replied.

If you want to think of it that way, thats fine. Adams glanced at the young mans file and explained that the mans mother had called. So I wanted to talk to you a little bit. This is an opportunity for you to get some help. The young man went silent. I mean, you got arrested, Adams added, gesturing toward the file.

The man told him that he didnt do the stuff, just sold it. He didnt need help.

O.K., Adams told him, crossing his arms and leaning forward. Was the young man on any weight-loss program, then? Because when I saw you before, to now, youve lost a lot of weight. He nodded toward the young man, who was twitching uncomfortably in his chair. And youre all over the place, just sitting there.

When the man told Adams he was innocent, Adams reminded him that he was always available and slid him another one of his cards. Adams wished him well, then he asked guards to briefly fetch the woman they were holding overnight the one for whom Adams was searching for housing to check in and promise that he was trying.

Even as Adams nosed the Crown Vic out of the parking lot, he couldnt get the episode out of his head. Why wont you just say, I need this? he asked aloud, thinking of the young man. Your life is going this way. Youve been arrested. Youre homeless. Its all drug-related. He sighed. The thing I had the hardest time learning was youre not going to save everyone. That was very hard for me to accept. A common sentiment among the police was that officers interacted with just 5 percent or so of the residents they served. In certain communities, that fraction was smaller. Laconia wasnt a large town. You think, mathematically, Adams began, before pausing, why cant I? Why cant I fix this?

For several miles he steered quietly, past muddied snowbanks. It bothers me, but Ive done what I can do right now. I cant force him to want help. He turned into the lot of the department and slowed into a parking spot.

Is there such a thing as an addict you have no sympathy for? I wondered.

Adams considered this, letting the engine idle, and dropped his hands into his lap. Eleven seconds passed in silence. I dont think so, he said finally. There are reasons they are the way they are.

Adams could list, from memory, addicts who had opened their lives to him, had volunteered for treatment, had wept in relief and gratitude. Already I had met two young adults who were newly in recovery and partly credited Adams for the lives they had regained. But those werent the names that tormented him.

Inside his office, he noticed two new voice-mail messages. The first was from a woman who read of Adams in the newspaper. If you could tell me what to do? Im more than willing to do whatever I need. Adams scribbled something on a legal pad, then played the second voice mail. The same voice filled the room again, but now it broke into tears. Could Adams please tell her what to do?

Adams jotted another note, then checked his watch. Just past noon. Because he knew the work schedule of the mother of the young man he visited in jail, he knew she would be off soon and expecting his call. Shes not going to be happy, he said, mostly to himself. Rubbing his forehead, he sat down and dialed.

In so many towns all across the country, it is difficult to talk about an issue like heroin, not only because there is a stigma or because people worry about sounding impolite, but because everyone calibrates differently, based on neighbors and co-workers they see all day, how much of a problem it is or whether it is a problem at all. There were towns near Laconia diplomatically, Adams declined to name them that denied they had any drug crisis, even as the numbers they had showed otherwise. When presented with those numbers, some officials found alternative explanations. Those were residents from other towns who just happened to cross the border, they argued. This reasoning just contributed to the problem, Adams said. Between 2004 and 2013, the number of New Hampshire residents receiving state-funded treatment for heroin addiction climbed by 90 percent. The number receiving treatment for prescription-opiate abuse climbed by 500 percent. But in terms of availability of beds, New Hampshire ranks second to last in New England in access to drug-treatment programs, ahead of only Vermont. The number who still need treatment is probably much higher. In October 2014, New Hampshire became the second-to-last state in the country to begin a prescription-drug-monitoring program, leaving only Missouri without one.

Not everyone saw things Adamss way. In his office in City Hall, I met Laconias mayor, Edward Engler. Engler, who was cautious and businesslike, with slicked hair and a graying goatee, had been mayor for three years, though he had lived in Laconia for almost 17 and owned The Laconia Daily Sun. Over his dress shirt he wore a fleece vest embroidered with the papers logo. Engler referred to what was happening in Laconia as this so-called heroin epidemic, his tone melodramatic, raising his hands defensively above his head. Were the county seat, Engler told me. Were also the home of the regional hospital. Towns in New Hampshire are extremely close together. I think we tend to get credit for more things than are directly attributable to our residents. Though he thought highly of Eric Adams, he also felt skeptical that heroin deserved to be considered an epidemic, regardless of the statistics. When I go to a Rotary Club meeting, I dont hear people sitting around talking about, Woe is us, everybodys dying of heroin.

Might that be because, in a setting like the Rotary Club, heroin was not a topic of polite conversation?

There could be something to that, Engler admitted. Still, an overdose death was an overdose death it would appear in the news that way, and Engler would have heard of it. I dont believe there has been a huge, communitywide reaction to this. Theres not 100 people showing up at City Council meetings saying: You have to do something about this. This is terrible. The papers arent full of letters to the editor. Not at all. And I think theres a reason for that. The reason for that is Engler paused and crossed his arms since we have been in the so-called heroin epidemic in New Hampshire, I dont believe there has been an instance in the Lakes Region, in Belknap County, where we have had a tragic story involving the son or daughter of someone from a prominent family. All it takes is one, usually. Somebody in Londonderry, some girl who was valedictorian of her class, her dad was a doctor or a lawyer or something like that, overdoses and dies, and suddenly its a crisis to everyone in town.

That very week, I told Engler, while tagging along with Adams for a meeting at the high school, Id heard teachers mention a current student, a well-liked senior athlete, a team captain, whose sister had struggled with addiction and who had been open about the experience. Another member of the same graduating class, a girl whose grades ranked her in the top 10, had been walking with a friend in 2012 when a local mother, high while driving to pick up her own child from the middle school, swerved and struck them on the sidewalk. The girl survived. Her friend was killed.

The mayor was unmoved. That was oxycodone, Engler said dismissively. Here, locally, the heroin epidemic, whatever you want to call it, has not crossed over in any obvious way from the underclass to the middle, middle-upper class.

Later that week, another prospective client phoned Adams. Im at wits end, the man said. For the woman who needed housing, Adams helped track down a relative, at whose home she could stay until an apartment opened. On Friday evening, two more residents overdosed. Adams intended to visit them. Whether either one would accept Adamss card, would call him, would enter treatment, would achieve recovery, would some day relapse, Adams couldnt predict. There were no guarantees in this sort of work.

Early in his tenure, Adams made a presentation to some prominent people in the community he didnt want to name anyone and afterward, as much of the room applauded, a man approached to shake Adamss hand. As he reached out, the man said: Its a really good job youre doing. I think its great. But my opinion is, if they stick a needle in their arm, they should die.

Im sorry you feel that way, Adams said, startled. Id hope you would feel differently if it was your own family member.

But the man shook his head. That will never happen.

This sort of thing happened all the time when Adams began. Today it happened far less frequently. So many others had grown into Adamss approach: fellow officers, downtown business owners, the captain at the Belknap County jail. Police officers from around New England and even farther away had phoned or traveled to Laconia to learn what Adams was doing, and whether the model could be replicated. Other towns, independently, had been pressed by the crisis to conceive approaches of their own. Manchester had turned its firehouses into safe stations. Gloucester, across the border in Massachusetts, had a network of community volunteers. A city as large as Philadelphia or Boston could sensibly implement a PET approach too, Adamss supervisors argued; a community like that would simply need more than one officer, with each assigned to a geographical area. But the shift this required would be profound, asking departments that for so long had thought mainly of enforcement to think differently. In Adamss daily work, it was unavoidable that certain values competed. A client might divulge a crime to him, and he would be forced to interrupt her to give a Miranda warning. If there is a crime, that individual needs to be held accountable, he said. But this is where our prosecutor, our judges, come into play. Some attorneys had expressed discomfort with him and had insisted on being present when he met their clients. Im totally fine with that, he said, because its an opportunity for me to educate the attorney, to let them know what I do, how I do it, what the processes are. In a role so complicated, with so much at stake, clearly it was vital that the right officer held the job.

In an empty conference room on the first floor of the department, I met a young man named Chadwick Boucher, an early client of Adamss. The two men hugged when they saw each other, and then Adams disappeared upstairs to make calls while Boucher and I spoke. He was 27, though he had the calm demeanor of someone two or three times as old. As early as middle school, Boucher began sneaking his parents liquor, partly to fit in with older boys he admired, he told me. Soon he added marijuana. He played hockey then, and played well invitations came from showcases in Boston and scouts from Division I colleges, including the University of New Hampshire, a national power. Instead, Boucher quit. It was too much pressure. He finished high school and moved in with a friend, who introduced him to OxyContin.

What followed was difficult to align into a neat chronology. He bounced from one friends apartment to another, from Oxy to Percocet and finally, when pills grew scarce, to heroin. There was a criminal distribution charge, probation, two treatment programs that he abandoned, feeling as though he didnt belong. There were short-term jobs tending bar or waiting tables, collecting paychecks before inevitably being fired. Suddenly he was high behind the wheel of his fathers Cutlass not in the road, but in a driveway startling awake to the police rapping on his window. Then he was at the Laconia police station, in a room with a plainclothes officer named Eric Adams.

He opened his arms to me, Boucher recalled. It had felt bizarre, sharing the truth with a cop. But things had changed so quickly. Most of his family had stopped returning his calls, and all his friends had vanished. The only people around him now were strangers who shared his addiction, and he didnt like or trust them. The difference in meeting someone like Adams was obvious. He cares about my well-being, Boucher said. I needed that.

Adams wanted him to call every day, so Boucher called every day. Then every week. He entered another treatment program, and this time he graduated. He was now nearing a year sober. He owned a business and was caught up on his bills. He lived up the road in an apartment and had friends again, some of whom were in recovery, too. They made a point to talk openly about it, to keep an eye out for one another. Some he referred to Adams. He knew that recovery demanded his full attention, that it probably always would. If he lost anything else in his life an apartment, a business he lost that one thing only and could do without it. If he lost his recovery, he would lose everything, all at once.

I asked Boucher how he preferred to be named in this article by only Chad? Or would he prefer anonymity? But he shook his head. It was important to him to be honest about who he was. He hoped this would send a message to other addicts and to those who encountered them. Its important that people know theres a way out. Recovery from addiction was an achievable thing and, having discovered this fact, having discovered Eric Adams, Boucher intended to share it. The news might save lives. He knew it was possible that a business client might discover his unflattering past, that he might lose an account or two. Ive come way too far for that, he said.

Benjamin Rachlin is the author of the forthcoming nonfiction book Ghost of the Innocent Man: A True Story of Trial and Redemption. This is his first article for the magazine.

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A version of this article appears in print on July 16, 2017, on Page MM22 of the Sunday Magazine with the headline: You Know Why Im Here.

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A Small-Town Police Officer's War on Drugs - New York Times

Malaysia, Thailand vow closer cooperation in war on drugs – The Sun Daily

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CHIANG RAI: Malaysia has expressed its appreciation for Thailand's prompt action in arresting Malaysians suspected of being involved with drug syndicates, as the two neighbouring countries vowed closer cooperation in their war on drugs.

Bukit Aman Narcotics CID director, Datuk Seri Mohd Mokhtar Mohd Shariff said Malaysia too had managed to derail attempts to smuggle 55 tonnes of kratom or ketum (recreational drug derived from the Mitragyna speciosa Korth tree) and 22 kg of cocaine into Thailand in recent years.

"Drugs is a global problem and to wage successful war on drugs, we need to have cooperation and exchange of intelligence information," he told the media after attending the 38th Malaysia-Thailand Meeting on Narcotics Law Enforcement Cooperation, here, today.

The Thai delegation to the meeting was led by the Office of Narcotics Control Board (ONCB) secretary-general, Sirinya Sitdichai.

Mokhtar who is due to retire soon, said the arrest of suspected Malaysian drug traffickers by Thai authorities showed the efficiency, transparency and sincerity of its enforcement agencies.

He said the Malaysian authorities, meanwhile, would not let the country be turned into a place to import, export or produce drugs.

The Thai authorities made two significant arrests last April when it nabbed two Malaysians suspected to be responsible for several successful attempts to bring hundreds of kilogrammes of drugs into Malaysia.

The two men, Johor-born "Mr T" or "Malaysian Iceman" as the Malaysian media referred him and "Mr G" from Penang were arrested at Hatyai Airport and Bangkok's Suvarnabhumi Airport after extensive surveillance by the Thai authorities.

Meanwhile, Sirinya thanked the Malaysian authorities for their effort in foiling attempts to smuggle 55 tonnes of kratom and 22 kg of cocaine into Thailand.

Thailand, according to him, had requested assistance from Malaysia on the latter's expertise in fighting kratom, as it had more experience in dealing with the problem.

He said both countries faced problems related to drug smuggling and needed closer cooperation to ensure the success of their drug-fighting efforts.

This year's meeting was purposely held in Chiang Rai, situated in northern Thailand and which sits on the edge of the "Golden Triangle", a famous drug-producing region. Bernama

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Malaysia, Thailand vow closer cooperation in war on drugs - The Sun Daily

Reviving war on drugs could carry big costs in Michigan – Petoskey News-Review

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In an era when it seems Democrats and Republicans can agree on hardly anything, many agree on the need for corrections reform. Its expensive to keep people in prison, and prison itself can have corrosive, lasting effects that are disproportionate to a productive post-prison life, the thinking goes.

So for a while now, at the local, state and national levels, policy makers have taken tentative steps toward imprisoning nonviolent and other low-risk offenders for shorter terms in hopes of lowering costs and improving outcomes without compromising public safety. Michigans state population peaked at over 51,000 in 2007; the following year, a report by the Citizens Research Council of Michigan noted that spending on corrections took 20 percent of the states general fund and employed nearly a third of its workforce, and that the inmate population grew through a period when the crime rate fell by more than 42 percent.

Today, the state prison population is around 43,000, and while the debate on how to control corrections spending continues, bipartisan discussion continues to seek consensus on how these expensive institutions can be safely downsized.

That trend is now being challenged, at least in the federal system, by U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions. In a directive to U.S. attorneys in May, Sessions reversed a course laid in 2013 by his predecessor Eric Holder, which directed U.S. attorneys to refine their charging practices, so as not to trigger mandatory minimum sentences for low-level, nonviolent federal drug offenders.

Sessions move restored the previous policy, which required federal prosecutors to charge the most serious, readily provable offense, many of which trigger long sentences.

The U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics reports that roughly half of all federal prisoners are drug offenders, and Sessions move to reverse the Obama-era policy was widely seen as restarting the governments so-called war on drugs. Sessions, in announcing the change, said drugs and crime go hand-in-hand and drug trafficking is an inherently violent business, where debts are collected by the barrel of a gun. The reversion to previous policy was a key part of President Trumps promise to keep America safe.

In his statement, Sessions told U.S. attorneys they deserve to be unhandcuffed and not micro-managed from Washington. ...It is simply the right and moral thing to do.

A return to the war on drugs, if mimicked here in Michigan, could have wide-reaching impact on the state prison system, and on the taxpayers who pay for it.

Roughly 2.3 million people are behind bars in the U.S., spread among local jails, juvenile and immigration detention, and military, state or federal prisons, according to the Prison Policy Initiative, which advocates against mass incarceration.

In Michigan, the most recent available data, from 2015, reports that about one-third of the states 40,000 prison inmates are incarcerated on drug charges. At a per-capita cost of $35,000, that works out to $116 million per year (though its worth noting that most imprisoned on drug charges have at least another conviction, anything from violent assault to a less-serious property crime).

So what is likely to happen as a result of this new wind blowing through Washington? Whats the result if its duplicated in Michigan?

Maybe not much

Think of the war on drugs as a long train speeding down the track. Holders directive had the effect of pulling back on the throttle, but a train takes a long time to slow down, let alone stop, and the new policy was in place for only about three years.

The language he is using was the language that was in place for all U.S. attorneys offices prior to the Holder policy, said Blanche Cook, a Wayne State University Law School professor and former U.S. Attorney. It not as if this is new. Its not a radical notion.

The most serious, readily provable offense is language that U.S. Attorneys have been following for decades, and federal mandatory minimum sentences go with that, Cook said.

Theyre called mandatory for a reason.

However, she said, federal prosecutors have discretion in how they craft and pursue cases. But they also all know they serve at the pleasure of the president, and no one wants to lose a job because they werent carrying out the chief executives judicial policy to the presidents liking.

You have a lot of latitude, but you dont want to get on the presidents radar for the wrong reason, Cook said.

A spokesman for the Department of Justice in Washington declined comment for this story.

A setback for reformers

Kevin Ring, president of Families Against Mandatory Minimums, a national advocacy group, said he was disappointed with the Sessions reversal. He said its clear tough sentencing doesnt reduce crime.

The group was part of the effort to repeal Michigans 650-lifer law, which Ring called one of the worst in the country. The statute, passed in 1973, imposed a mandatory life sentence on individuals arrested with 650 grams or more roughly 1.5 pounds of heroin or cocaine. By the time it was repealed 25 years later, it had snared such high-profile defendants as White Boy Rick Wershe, the focus of clemency efforts for years, and Tim Allen, the actor who today is the voice of the Pure Michigan tourism ad campaign. (Both men cooperated with law enforcement, but Wershe remains behind bars, while Allen served two years in federal prison before being paroled.)

Charging decisions that trigger mandatory minimums are counterproductive to their stated aim, Ring said.

They were (supposed to) reduce crime and drug use. But no study shows it reduces crime; its swiftness and surety of prosecution, not sentences, that does that, Ring said. Michigan and other states, including New York and Rhode Island, have reformed these policies, and crime rates continued to fall.

That question is that rare issue where many on both the left and right are in agreement. None other than the conservative American Legislative Exchange Council has come out against mandatory minimums, along with more traditionally liberal groups like the ACLU.

Which brings up the question of how states are handling the same problem.

Tough on crime, and (probably) running for governor

In Michigan, as divided along partisan lines as any state, corrections reform is a bipartisan issue, or was. In 2015, a bill sponsored by Republican Rep. Kurt Heise of Plymouth sought to institute presumptive parole, where low-risk inmates in the state prison system would be paroled at their first available date.

Groups from the Mackinac Center for Public Policy (on the right) and the ACLU (on the left) agreed it was a sensible reform that would ease the burden on corrections by releasing inmates at an earlier date than they might be under the old system.

It died in the Senate, after being opposed by Michigan prosecutors and state Attorney General Bill Schuette, who has made a tough-on-crime stance part of his growing public profile. Lately, Schuette has also focused on opioid-related criminal activity, announcing the formation of a new Opioid Trafficking and Interdiction unit that will focus on illegal traffic in legal opioid painkillers, as well as heroin.

And while affairs at the state level are not connected with Sessions reversal, Heise, now supervisor of Plymouth Township, said they are the same problem in a different place.

Whats happening at the federal level is the disconnect we have in Michigan: A tough-on-crime attorney general against a legislature trying to pay the bills, and finding out that increased incarceration doesnt pay off, Heise told Bridge.

Look at the cost of corrections, (and ask) what are we really getting out of increased incarceration? The feds will come to the same conclusion we came to in Michigan, Heise said. Within the party, we will see the same debate and discussion in the Trump Administration.

A Michigan House Fiscal Agency analysis of the bill stated it would save the state money, eventually, by slowing prison population growth over a number of years, roughly 1,300 prison beds, a savings of roughly $30 million annually.

Legalized pot up in smoke?

Marijuana remains illegal under federal law. Under the Obama administration, a 2009 guidance memo allowed states where voters or legislators chose to legalize it to do so without federal interference. That was one factor enabling marijuana laws to spread to 29 states, either as medicine or a strictly recreational drug.

Sessions memo said nothing about marijuana, but hes said plenty about it in other settings, most notably that good people dont smoke marijuana, and that allowing people to use it in a medical context in lieu of opiates, for example, amounts to trading one life-wrecking dependency for another.

And a letter released in mid-June reveals Sessions is gunning for weed, too, asking Congress to overturn the Rohrabacher-Farr amendment, a 2014 law that officially keeps the federal government out of state affairs on this issue.

Sessions argues that the Justice Department needs the authority to combat an historic drug epidemic and potentially long-term uptick in violent crime.

In Michigan, a drive to fully legalize recreational marijuana is in its early stages, aiming for a ballot initiative in November 2018. (An earlier effort failed to reach the ballot due to a dispute over the age of some signatures on petitions.)

Josh Hovey, spokesman for the Coalition to Regulate Marijuana Like Alcohol, formed to help pass the Michigan ballot measure, said he isnt worried.

The bottom line is, were paying close attention (to the issue), and think theres strong momentum across the country for more responsible marijuana laws, Hovey said. Were hopeful the momentum will carry through to the Administration, and they will think twice before they overturn (state laws).

Polling suggest strong support for fully taxed, legal marijuana in the state, with 58 percent of likely voters saying theyd approve it in one recent poll.

Fuller prisons

Todd Perkins is a criminal defense attorney in Detroit who has seen many clients go through the federal courts both under the old system and after the Holder memo. He sees the change by Sessions as hostile to people of color.

The war on drugs has not been successful, Perkins said. It was predicated on race, and has punished, unfairly, various sectors of society, predominantly African Americans and other minorities.

Besides studies showing sharp racial disparities in drug prosecution, and differences in sentences (since mitigated) for those possessing or selling crack or powder cocaine, Perkins contention is backed up by at least one key admission.

John Ehrlichman was President Nixons domestic policy adviser and a key player in launching the presidents war on drugs, declared in 1971 when Nixon called drug abuse Americas public enemy number one.

In an interview given in the early 90s, but not published until 2016, 17 years after his death, Ehrlichman is quoted as saying the war on drugs was intended to demonize the antiwar left and black people.

After the Holder-led policy change in 2013, Perkins said, his clients in the federal courts who were lower-level, nonviolent offenders still got prison time, but less of it, he said.

Some punishment has to occur, Perkins said. But at the end of the day, we dont need to lock people up for long stretches if they dont deserve it.

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Reviving war on drugs could carry big costs in Michigan - Petoskey News-Review

Opioid Crisis vs. the War on Drugs: A Double Standard? – WDET

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Left: Keith Humphreys, Right:EkowYankah

Opioid addiction and related deaths disproportionately affect both poor, rural white communities and middle class, suburban white communities. Also, many addicts are introduced to opioids through prescription drugs, which seem to be more socially acceptable than say, crack cocain. Despite the similarities between the spread of opioid addiction and that of crack in the 80s and early 90s, public opinion and public policy in response to the two have been profoundlydifferent.

Todays mostly white opioid addicts are considered part of a public health crisis, and maybe rightly so. But black cocaine addicts in urban ghettos were met with an all out War on Drugs, which is still being waged today with huge social consequences. What is at the root of this double standard, and how does it color our own perceptions ofaddiction?

Detroit Today host Stephen Henderson talks with Keith Humphreys, psychiatry professor at Stanford University and former policy advisor at the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy. He also speaks withEkow Yankah, law professor at the Cardozo School of Lawat Yeshiva University, who says that how we respond to addiction is based on our perceptions of theaddict.

Our intuitions and our empathy in the drug wars is too often tied up with who we imagine the addicted are and what race we imagine them to be, says Yankah. Time will tell if this kind of rhetoric is combined with more humane and more thoughtful drug policy or if we just tie our drug policy ever finer to punishing those we always want to punishanyway.

By those Yankah means marginalized populations who are often associated with drug crimes and abuse. Humphreys echos thissentiment.

If you look at American history, he says, weve had repeated examples where some group that is the target of prejudice has substance use problems and society really cracks down The cultural narrative when its in those groups is that they deserve these problems because theyre immoral, theyre weak, theyre pleasure seeking, and therefore the response of government should be punitive. And we havent seen that with this much more white epidemicWe wouldve repudiated all of them if they were minorities, but because theyre not, people arecompassionate.

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Opioid Crisis vs. the War on Drugs: A Double Standard? - WDET

Saturday’s best TV: Museum of the Year; Secret War on Drugs – The Guardian

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Worthy winner? the National Horseracing Museum. Photograph: Marc Atkins/Marc Atkins / Art Fund 2017

Earlier this year, Tristram Hunt swapped life as an MP for the cushier gig of director of the V&A. Wed speculate that hes rarely regretted his choice; tonight he presents coverage of the 2017 museum of the year ceremony. The finalists are Londons Tate Modern and Sir John Soanes Museum, the Newmarket Heritage Centre for Horseracing and Sporting Art, Birminghams Lapworth Museum of Geology and the Hepworth Gallery in Wakefield. Phil Harrison

While Only Connect fans might turn up their noses at it, this revived gameshow is shamelessly traditional and infectiously watchable. Stephen Mulhern hosts as ever, bidding three contestants to guess the familiar phrases concealed in brightly animated clues. The fun is in the sheer frenzy the players work themselves into as the answers dance on the tips of their tongues and 50,000 is up for grabs in the Super Catchphrase round. David Stubbs

What a world it is when pop goddess Kelis and over-enthusiastic music teacher type Gareth Malone coexist on a Saturday night TV show, critiquing the vocal tones of various bouncy choirs. Its like Glee has graduated, found its questionable aunties stash of speed and necked the lot. Now its the fourth heat, where choirs including the Bristol Suspensions, Over the Water and the Savannahs riff for their lives. Guest Seal joins the judges. Hannah Verdier

The blind audition rounds may now be a distant memory, but the under-15s fight for a 30,000 musical bursary (plus a trip to Disneyland Paris) intensifies as the remaining competitors approach a harmonic Hunger Games in the first battle round. The contenders are split into groups of three, each facing further forays on to the stage. Only one singer from each trio can triumph; which young Voicettes will break first? The round concludes on Sunday. Mark Gibbings-Jones

Like live-action Tinder, but with the added humiliation of doing it all in front of a baying studio audience, Paul OGrady invites a new crop of singletons on to the telly for some public matchmaking. Looking for some conscious coupling this week are Manchester-based recruitment consultant Antoni, and Alice, who is seeking a girlfriend who might be willing to look past her obsessive Cline Dion super-fandom in the pursuit of potential romance. Its a big ask, love. Ben Arnold

Hes the Palme dOr winner whos been banned from Cannes; a cackling, self-mythologising put-on merchant, whose divisive films have been accused of misogyny or perhaps should be regarded more, as Nymphomaniac actor Stacy Martin breezily says in this mini-profile, as a premise to conversation. However, collaborator Jean-Marc Barr sums the trickster-provocateur up best when he describes Von Trier as simply a showman. Ali Catterall

Debut of a new series chronicling arguably the most counter-productive conflict of all time the war on drugs, which has cost billions, immiserated millions, and does not appear to have stopped anybody taking drugs. This episode reflects on various shabby attempts by the US government to co-opt the drugs trade for its own purposes. Interesting enough, but the usual US documentary caveats, about annoying soundtrack and pompous voiceover, apply. Andrew Mueller

West (Christian Schwochow, 2014), Saturday, 1.30am, BBC2 This subtly gripping, atmospheric cold war drama about refugees from East Germany has a very contemporary resonance. Based on Julia Francks novel Lagerfeuer, its the story of young mother Nelli (Jrdis Triebel) who, after a humiliating interrogation, is allowed to leave with her son for West Berlin. They are detained in a holding camp, where Nelli finds herself dealing with suspicious officials not so different from the Stasi she left behind. Its an engrossing tale, reminiscent of Florian Henckel von Donnersmarcks more celebrated The Lives of Others. Paul Howlett

Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, (Chris Columbus, 2002), 10.20am, ITV

The second entry in the Potter archive is like the first, but darker, with Daniel Radcliffe and pals encountering massive spiders, a flying Ford Anglia, a little comic hero in Dobby the house elf and Kenneth Branagh as dark arts master Gilderoy Lockhart. Plus theres the poignant farewell of Richard Harris as Dumbledore. Paul Howlett

Mea Culpa, (Fred Cavay, 2014), 9pm, BBC4 A fast and furious French policier with stubbly cops in leather jackets, from the director of Point Blank. The stars of those two films are reunited here: when ex-detective Vincent Lindons son is menaced by a gang of violent Serbian drug dealers, he teams up with old partner Gilles Lellouche to deal with them like in the old days. Traditional mayhem ensues on the atmospherically lit streets of Toulon. Paul Howlett

2001: A Space Odyssey, (Stanley Kubrick, 1968), 11.15pm, BBC2 Kubricks coruscating space saga boosted science fiction into a new orbit, the special effects setting the standard for the Star Wars generation. The enigmatic story has an alien monolith overseeing humanitys evolution from ape to star-child, with Keir Dullea the astronaut taking another great leap for mankind. Hal the calculating computer gives the most memorable performance, with menace in its smooth, ever-so-reasonable voice. Paul Howlett

Rugby Union: New Zealand v British & Irish Lions The third and final game from Auckland, with the three-match series tied at one-all. 7.30am, Sky Sports 1

Test Cricket: England v South Africa Day three of the opening game of the series from Lords. 10am, Sky Sports 2

Tennis: Wimbledon The latest mens and womens singles third-round matches. 2017 11am, BBC2

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Saturday's best TV: Museum of the Year; Secret War on Drugs - The Guardian