Monthly Archives: June 2017

In America's War on Drugs," beginning Sunday, History offers a four-part spin through the American government's complicated, often hypocritical, ultimately crazy relationship with narcotics over half a century its lofty motives, its ulterior motives. Fueled by the testimony of various scholars and journalists, reformed dealers, and former CIA and DEA officers whose agencies differently framed missions often put them into direct conflict, it's a thick, tortuous telling that runs some six hours with the commercials removed, exhausting but rarely dull.

The official declaration of the "War on Drugs" is seen as beginning with President Nixon's June 17, 1971, statement that "America's public enemy number one is drug abuse" a campaign that, we're told here, also served as legal cover for attacking the antiwar movement and black power movement. But the series runs back another decade to begin its story with the common cause made by the Mafia and the CIA in the early '60s attempt to rid Cuba of Castro, blurring lines that have stayed blurry since, and to the agencys accidental introduction of LSD into American society. (They had hoped to use it for mind control buying the worlds available supply from its manufacturer but it got out of their hands and something quite different happened.)

What's clear through this thicket of intersecting stories is that the American policy has often been made out of fear not necessarily manufactured, but often misplaced. Fear of communism, of terrorism, of crime in the streets.

Whether or not you believe that crack was a CIA plot to destroy the inner cities, "America's War on Drugs" indicates that the agency was not particularly concerned with the domestic upshot of deals it made with Latin American drug cartels deals that ultimately helped flood the United States with cocaine and transform it from a rich person's party drug to a poor person's quick high. The intelligence agency and the drug cartels might have had different, more and less noble goals patriotism on the one hand, money on the other but they share a certain amorality, a certain heartlessness.

Talos Films/History

Former drug trafficker "Freeway" Rick Ross is one of the commentators in History's new series "America's War on Drugs."

Former drug trafficker "Freeway" Rick Ross is one of the commentators in History's new series "America's War on Drugs." (Talos Films/History)

Many stops are made along the way Vietnam, Afghanistan, including the militarization of police (hello, Daryl Gates!), Nancy Reagan's Just Say No campaign, Bill Clinton saying, "But I didn't inhale. There's a colorful, if almost wholly unlikable, cast of shady characters, underworld legends, criminal visionaries, corrupt politicians, dirty cops, mad scientists and paranoid nut jobs on both sides of the law. There are political coups and drive-by shootings. Comparatively little time is spent on the Oxycontin and methamphetamine epidemics and for that matter marijuana, which as a subject does not enter the story nearly until the end, when legalization threatens the cartels' profits which have less of an international profile, and no CIA subplot.

Each episode begins with an advisory "The following program contains intense drug imagery and violence," which you would do well to regard, and one that "In some instances events have been dramatized." "Many," or even "most," is closer to the mark. Such re-creations are common enough, but because the filmmakers have gone to some lengths to make them look technologically appropriate to period and "real" caught by surveillance cameras or home video they get mixed up with the actual documentary footage and photos (which flash by too quickly). They demean the record. They aren't history.

Scant attention is paid to drug use itself, interestingly, and to the extent that it is, the users arent judged. (Reporter: Are you going to tell what's bad about LSD? Ken Kesey: Not necessarily.") If anything, they are regarded as victims of both the problem and the supposed cure three-strike laws, sentencing minimums that has filled American jails and prisons past bursting and had a generations-long effect on the inner cities. Nor is there any moralizing about drug use itself, which most of the commentators regard as inevitable a feature of human existence, not a bug if potentially destructive. This lack of censure is refreshing, but the question of how society might better treat drug addiction is limited to a few observations at the series' very end.

It's undeniably the case that drug epidemics, even apart from the drug-taking, create crime. There is nothing inherently insincere either in Bill Clinton's vow to "take our streets back from crime and gangs and drugs" or George W. Bush's that "Illegal drugs are the enemies of ambition and hope ... and I intend to do something about it," however ineffective or incidentally calamitous the results. As "America's War on Drugs" asserts again and again, this is an unwinnable war, like the war on terror, defined by unintended consequences, backfiring schemes and collateral damage. The faces change, as do the trade routes and methods of delivery, but the drugs go on.

Americas War on Drugs

Where: History

When: 9 p.m. Sunday through Wednesday

Rating: TV-14-DLSV (may be unsuitable for children under the age of 14, with advisories for suggestive dialogue, coarse language, sex and violence)

robert.lloyd@latimes.com

Follow Robert Lloyd on Twitter @LATimesTVLloyd

Trio of L.A. riot documentaries look back to 1992

Direct-to-consumer drug ads: A bad idea that's about to get worse

Original post:

History examines the hazy history of 'America's War on Drugs' with exhaustive but engaging detail - Los Angeles Times

Activists and family members of loved ones who died in the opioid/heroin epidemic march in a "Fed Up!" rally on the National Mall on September 18, 2016. (Credit: John Moore/Getty Images)

While much of the media is focused on Trumps Russian skullduggery, America has quietly found itself enmeshed in the worst drug epidemic in our history. Drug overdoses, mostly from increasingly lethal opioids, now kill more people than guns and traffic accidents. A recent investigation by The New YorkTimes of local and state authorities across the country came to a staggering conclusionthat somewhere between 59,000 and 65,000 people died of drug overdoses in 2016, a nearly 20% spike in a single year, the paper estimates.

2017 is gearing up to be just as bad, or worse.

In the face of this crisis, Attorney General Jeff Sessions has re-declared the War on Drugs, a five-decade old boondoggle that civil-rights organizations, economists and even some law-enforcement groups believe to be discredited by years of failure. While its unclear exactly what Sessions is planning, so far hes called for a crackdown on marijuana and longer mandatory sentences for drug dealers, seemingly intent on a return to policies that historically have ravaged entire communities, corrupted police forces and destroyed trust in authorityall in the name of fighting a war that opinion polls show the majority of the public doesnt want.

But what most Americans dont know is that our War on Drugs isnt just a failed war; its one that was never designed to be won. To understand the true story of the origins of the War on Drugs is to understand why Trumps return to some of its most controversial policies is doomed to fail.

President Nixon kickstarted Americas war on drugs in 1971 (he called it an offensive) and created the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) two years later. Ironically, or perhaps not, the war on drugs was conceived by criminals. Four of the main architects of Nixons drug policyAttorney General John Mitchell, White House aide John Erlichman (who later allegedly admitted the war on drugs was really a war on hippies and black people), Egil Bud Krogh (who famously arranged for a drug-addled Elvis Presley to receive an honorary DEA badge) as well as Watergate break-in conspirator G. Gordon Liddywere all imprisoned over Watergate.

But by the time Nixon declared a war on drugs, the real fighting had begun a decade earlier during Americas effort to overthrow Fidel Castro. In 1961, the CIA conspired with mobsters in Miami to assassinate Castro, whose revolution had put an end to the lucrative drug and vice networks operating on the island. Although the CIA-planned Bay of Pigs invasion failed, many of the agencys Cuban assets survived; and after making their way back to Miami, they turned Southern Florida into an early epicenter of drug smuggling and drug-related violence.

Meanwhile, the CIA had simultaneously helped introduce LSD to the American populace via clandestine programs that dosed countless citizensall part of a Cold War mind-control operation titled MK-Ultra. In Southeast Asia, the CIA teamed up with Laotian general Vang Pao to help make Laos the worlds top exporter of heroin. By the time Nixon began ratcheting down U.S. troop presence in Vietnam to focus on the war against drugs, more troops were dying of heroin overdoses than actual combat, an epidemic that quickly found its way to the streets of urban America.

A decade later, as a result of turning a blind eye to cocaine smugglers funding the CIAs illegal war against the communist Sandinistas in Nicaragua, the CIA unwittingly helped unleash a nationwide crack-cocaine epidemic. Most notably, cocaine kingpin Freeway Ricky Ross was able to take his South Central L.A.-based crack businesses nationwide thanks to his access to a cheap supply of coke from politically connected Nicaraguan suppliers.

Dark Alliance, Gary Webbs landmark 1996 newspaper series alleging CIA involvement in the crack-cocaine epidemic, created a firestorm of controversy that ultimately drove Webb out of journalism and into a spiral of depression that led him to take his own life. Although there were problems with Webbs reporting and the editing of his story that allowed it to be discredited by rival news organizations, it forced the CIA to reveal that for more than a decade it had protected its Nicaraguan allies from being prosecuted for smuggling cocaine into the U.S.

Veteran drug agents, including Phil Jordan, former director of the DEAs El Paso Intelligence Center (EPIC), say they were repeatedly called off cases involving CIA-tied drug rings.

We had three or four cases where we arrested CIA contract workers with cocaine, and I get a phone call that the charges have been dismissed, Jordan recalls in a new HISTORY series, Americas War on Drugs. You know, we are risking our lives, making cases against significant drug traffickers, then on the other hand you got another government agency allowing the drugs to come in . . . And were not talking about 100 pounds, were talking about tons. That introduction of white powder was killing black people.

The CIAs collusion with anti-communist drug smugglers beginning in the 1960s played a direct role in the drug epidemic of the 1980s that was used to justify President Reagans 1986 crime bill. The law introduced harsh mandatory sentencing for non-violent drug offenders, the legacy of which we are still dealing with today.

President Bill Clinton expanded on Reagans drug war by militarizing the nations police forces and introducing mandatory minimum sentencing. Although President Obama tried to revise this policy shortly before leaving office, President Trump seems intent on doubling down on the war on drugs. When Trump recently invited Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte to the White House, he congratulated him for sending police death squads into the streets to kill drug dealers and addicts. Many countries have the problem, we have a problem, but what a great job you are doing and I just wanted to call and tell you that, Trump reportedly said.

National polls in recent years have consistently shown that the overwhelming majority of Americans believe the war on drugs cannot be won. Given the fact that more than half of the United States have legalized medical marijuana, with several others set to join Colorado, Washington and California in approving recreational marijuana use, there has never been a stronger mandate for drug reform than now.

As a nation, we are tired of the drug wars endless cycle of crime, political corruption, mass incarceration and mayhemparticularly in Mexico, much of which is a war zone, while north of the border, we are mired in a highly politicized hysteria over immigration and border security. The war on drugs has already cost U.S. taxpayers more than $1 trillion and our nations jails, prisons and hospitals now overflow with the ranks of its combatants and victims. The stakes couldnt be higher, nor the timing better, for America to end this war, not expand it.

Nick Schou is author of Kill the Messenger: How the CIAs Crack Cocaine Controversy Destroyed Journalist Gary Webb (Nation Books, 2006) and also appears in the upcoming HISTORY limited series Americas War on Drugs, premiering June 18 at 9/8c.

See the original post:

America's War on Drugs Was Designed to Fail. So Why Is It Being Revived Now? - History

BUTLER COUNTY

As the opiate and heroin crisis continues to claim lives in Butler County, local experts are hoping to get some help from the pulpit to help deal with the issue.

Drug overdoses were the leading cause of deaths in 2016 in Butler County, according to Butler County Coroner Dr. Lisa Mannix.. She said that it is the third year in a row that drug overdoses claimed the top spot.

Kristina Latta-Landefeld, coalition coordinator for the Greater Hamilton Drug-Free Coalition, told the Journal-News that the effort to combat the issue is getting stronger, and churches can help in the fight.

It is really fascinating because we know that there is a system out there that works really well, she said. People in the field theologists, psychologists have tried to be able to link a system like Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) that does have a religious component to it, in order to determine what are the positive outcomes and how can that approach be used by churches

Latta-Landefeld added that any type of faith in a higher being or something similar can be an answer for some but not all.

But getting the churches involved speaks to a cultural approach that is important. People in Butler County are very involved in their churches, she said. It is just a part of looking for a solution just like getting health care, schools and law enforcement involved. We have to have a multi-faceted approach to dealing with this.

Kristy Duritsch of the Coalition for a Healthy Middletown said churches can pool resources and expertise within their congregations and focus on the community in which they live in or even a mile radius around their church. She feels this can help address the problem.

I definitely think they can have an impact - but more so on the prevention end of things, Duritsch said. For those in need of help, they can provide resources and even pay for programs for folks addicted. For those recovering they can provide a safe, supportive environment

She added that the problems of the world are now overwhelming, so starting small with the intention and focus aimed at the people they know in the community can make an impact.

Reaching the kids and families to help create a community who cares the simplest things can make a big impact, Duritsch said. For example, Jeri Lewis of Kingswell Ministries has adopted Sherman park to provide daily lunches and activities for the kids that come there.

Developing relationships and being consistent is key in addressing violence and drugs, according to Duritsch.

When there is trust, you can teach them a better way to react to resolve conflict, cope with disappointments, stress and dream for a better future and thus they are less likely to turn to drugs and alcohol as a way to cope or escape, she said.

James E. Wynn III is the pastor of Bethel Baptist Church. He said pastors around the city have been meeting on regular basis, to discuss the drug issue and senseless violence.

We are trying to come up with a way to address these issues, Wynn said.

New Day Baptist Church Pastor Mike Pearl has already been keeping his congregation busy doing outreach that extends all-year. His church helps feed the hungry and doles out school supplies to the needy.

He figures the best approach is to stay consistent addressing the problem while not letting any of the youth fall through the cracks.

Pastor Dave Wess from New Life Community Church agrees that churches are ready and able to keep spreading Gods word, while also adding some tough love from the pulpit.

Read this article:

Butler County experts feel churches can help in war on drugs - Hamilton Journal News