Category Archives: War On Drugs

In their continuing effort to raise awareness on key social issues, The Peace & Justice Center of Nevada County is now turning its attention toward the U.S. "War on Drugs."

A screening of the documentary, "The House I Live In" is scheduled for 7 p.m. on June 23 at The Open Book (next to Sierra Mountain Coffee Roasters), located at 671 Maltman Drive in Grass Valley. Community members are encouraged to come for the film and stay for the discussion to follow. Organizers are also hoping to have local law enforcement officers available for the discussion segment.

Filmed in more than 20 states, "The House I Live In" captures heart-wrenching stories of those on the front lines from the dealer to the grieving mother, the narcotics officer to the senator, the inmate to the federal judge and offers a penetrating look at the profound human rights implications of America's longest war. For the past 40 years, the war on drugs has resulted in more than 45 million arrests, $1 trillion in government spending, and made the United States the world's largest jailer. Yet today drugs are cheaper, purer, and more available than ever. The film recognizes drug abuse as a matter of public health, and investigates the tragic errors and shortcomings that have resulted from framing it as an issue for law enforcement. It also examines how political and financial corruption has fueled the war on drugs, despite persistent evidence of its moral, economic and practical failures. Admission is a $6 to $10 suggested donation. For more information visit the Peace Center's website at http://www.ncpeace.org, on Facebook, or by emailing ncpeace@sbcglobal.net.

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Film examines failings of 'war on drugs' - The Union of Grass Valley

President Trump speaks as Jeff Sessions listens in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, on Feb. 9, 2017. Andrew HarrerBloomberg/Getty Images

Donald Trump wants to drag us back into one of the most catastrophic social policies in this nations history: the war on drugs.

The president wants to return to a bygone era of mass incarceration and a full-blown War on Drugs that significantly contributed to the current American prison population of 2.2 million people the largest in the world. Apparently, that isnt enough for the "law and order" president and his accomplice, Attorney General Jeff Sessions.

Trump and Sessions think the War on Drugs has been a very good thing. They are either woefully or willfully ignorant of the facts.

As author of The Power of the Dog and The Cartel, I spent almost 20 years researching and writing about the War on Drugs. After five decades of this war, drugs are cheaper, more plentiful and more potent than ever (as Mr. Sessions himself has conceded). If thats Trumps idea of success, Id hate to see his version of failure.

The so-called War on Drugs quadrupled our prison population (overwhelmingly and disproportionately composed of minorities), handed out life sentences to nonviolent offenders, militarized our police forces, promoted the disgusting concept of for-profit prisons, shredded the Bill of Rights and cost taxpayers upward of a trillion dollars.

Did Trump and Sessions somehow miss all this? Surely the president and the top justice official in the country are aware that violent crime is at a a record low , and most criminologists agree that incarceration was a minor factor in its thirty-year decline. The more important causes were demographic changes, improved police techniques, community policing and strong economic growth.

Trump and Sessions cite a rise in homicide rates in some cities since 2015. But fully half those murders, mostly a result of gang violence, occurred in one city Chicago while many of the rest were concentrated in Houston, Baltimore, and Washington, D.C. The murder rate in New York City actually dropped 25% during that period.

Trump and Sessions blame this gang violence on drugs, but that's reductive to say the least.

Lets look at Chicago. Writing in US News & World Report, Alan Neuhauser points out that the Chicago police force has lost a quarter of its homicide detectives since 2008. And two years ago the state of Illinois drastically cut funding for community policing and violence prevention programs, which directly corresponds to the spike in violence.

Chicago police superintendent Eddie Johnson said, Impoverished neighborhoods, people without hope, do these kind of things... You show me a man that doesnt have hope, Ill show you one thats willing to pick up a gun and do anything with it.

Johnson has a point. A study by the Brennan Center for Justice shows that cities with at least a ten-year history of poverty and unemployment are the same cities that have experienced a rise in violence.

That there is a relationship between poverty and crime should come as no surprise to our country's chief executive and his top law enforcement official, but apparently it does.

Trump and Sessions want to cut funds for social programs and community policing and return to the era of mass arrests and incarceration in short, the War on Drugs. They want to trade policies that work for policies that dont.

Sessionss assistant Steven Cook told the Washington Post, Drug trafficking is inherently violent. Drug traffickers are dealing in a heavy cash business. They cant resolve disputes in court. They resolve the disputes on the street and they resolve them through violence.

Mr. Sessions made remarks to the same effect.

And they're right: Drug trafficking is inherently violent . Because of drug prohibition .

Nicotine is a legal drug you dont see the tobacco companies slugging it out on the street. Alcohol is a legal drug, and you dont see gangs killing each other for the right to sell beer and whiskey (as they did in Prohibition days).

There is, of course, another major difference between drug dealers and people who sell nicotine and alcohol products the latter two are mostly white. Sell drugs, youre a guest in the Big House; sell enough booze or cigarettes, youre a guest in the White House.

The racial disparities are indisputable. African-American males are thirteen times as likely to be sent to prison for drug offenses than white males, whose drug usage is proportionally much higher . Sentences for African-American males are over 13% longer than those for whites. The War on Drugs has largely been a war on people of color.

Apparently, the current administration doesnt mind that these policies are racist. Prompted by his boss, Mr. Sessions recently instructed federal prosecutors to seek maximum sentences for even nonviolent drug offenses.

Its wrong, and it makes no sense on any level.

We know that rehabilitation programs and treatment are vastly more effective at reducing drug use than imprisonment. In fact, our jails and prisons are rife with illegal drugs, and those who go in as addicts usually come out as addicts. If mass incarceration worked, wouldnt our drug problem now be better instead of worse?

But rather than make a real effort to address the drug problem at its roots at a time when more Americans die from opiate overdose than from car accidents Trump and Sessions hand us fantasies such as the border wall, which will do absolutely nothing to slow the flow of drugs, and facile, intellectually lazy, "lock `em up" sound bites that make for good politics but horrible policy.

The mass incarceration policy is also a fiscal disaster.

An administration that prides itself on trimming the budget wants to expand our spending on prisons, even though a year spent in a California cell is more expensive $75,650 than a year at Harvard. As of 2012, the United States spent $63.4 billion a year on incarceration . Trump and Sessions want to spend even more.

Trump and Sessions are tough on gangs that wield guns, but not so much on those who push guns on the American public. The National Rifle Association donated over $30 million to Trumps campaign, and he promised, among other things, to end gun-free zones. The attorney general has an A+ rating (along with $35,750 in Senate campaign contributions) from the NRA and has voted against background checks on buyers at gun shows.

My most recent novel, The Force, deals with the New York Police Departments struggle against drugs and guns. My research shows that most of the weapons used in gang violence originate in states that have weak gun laws and unrestricted gun shows. From there, buyers ship weapons up the "Iron Pipeline" of Interstate 95 and its connecting highways, to cities such as Chicago, Baltimore, and Washington, D.C.; guns that police forces are desperate to get off their streets; guns that kill gang members, innocent bystanders, and, yes, cops. But Trump and Sessions advocate loosening what few restrictions still exist.

That is not law and order. That is lawlessness and disorder.

In the last days of the Obama administration, we finally began to see a more sensible policy toward illegal drugs: clemency for nonviolent offenders serving long prison terms, a move to end mandatory minimum sentences, a less aggressive stance on enforcing marijuana laws and the abolition of prison privatization on the federal level.

In his endless, thoughtless rush to undo all things Obama, Trump wants to roll all that back, to a failed policy that will only result in more suffering, more expense, and more death.

Thats a catastrophe.

Don Winslow is the author of The Cartel and The Force.

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Donald Trump, Jeff Sessions Drug War Is Bad | Time.com - TIME

When Gary Webbs investigative series, Dark Alliance, came out in the San Jose Mercury-News in 1996 alleging the Central Intelligence Agency was involved in the importation of cocaine into South Central Los Angeles, many people in the Black community claimed the articles proved the CIA deliberately was out to destroy Black people, and a long-standing urban conspiracy theory was born.

Webbs story has since been removed from the Mercury News website, and resulted in a two-part CIA report released in 1998 on cocaine and the agencys involvement in drug trafficking investigations, it fueled deep distrust among the Black community that is still present today.

Anthony Lapp, an executive producer behind the History Channels new documentary series Americas War on Drugs, says that although these theories around federal agencies injecting drugs into the Black community have swirled for years, this new docu-series will reveal that theyre just not true.

Of course it wasnt any kind of genocidal experiment or anything like that, what it was is the CIA basically being the CIA, Lapp said. Theyre completely amoral and they dont really look at the long term blowback effects of their operations.

Americas War on Drugs four-part series beginning Sunday night comes as the U.S. fights a raging prescription opioid addiction crisis and increase in heroin use. The series also comes just a month after U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced he will instruct federal prosecutors to enforce so-called mandatory minimum sentences on gun and drug offenses. While Sessions says this is meant to help get criminals off of the streets, opponents say it will mean going back to the days of harsh sentencing that will likely have profound effects on people of color.

Related: Black Lives Matter Chicago Sues City, Seeks Court Oversight of Police Reform

Lapp, alongside Julian P. Hobbs, Elli Hakami, spent a year conducting dozens and dozens of interviews with former CIA officers, Drug Enforcement Agency officers, historians and more. The crew takes viewers through an eight hour journey crisscrossing the world and deconstructing how the U.S. war on drugs truly began through interviews, old footage, and reenactments.

What they uncover is that Americas history with drugs is intertwined with fears of communism, rogue drug mobsters and warlords, the failed takedown of Fidel Castro in 1961, the Vietnam War, infighting between the DEA and CIA, and drugs -- including LSD, heroin and cocaine -- slowly making waves in communities.

Amado celebrates his rise to power at home. "America's War on Drugs" premieres Sunday, June 18 at 9PM ET/PT. Talos Films/HISTORY

But the documentary also makes the case that Blacks were victims caught in the melee of CIA operations and President Richard Nixons desire to have a law and order administration in the 1970s through the war on drugs.

Christian Parenti, a New York University professor interviewed in the documentary, said the trick with the war on drugs was to deal with a variety of things outside of the governments control.

The war on drugs brought together the peace movement, the hippies, the counterculture, African Americans, all of this stuff can be captured and addressed by force with law enforcement under the rubric of the war on drugs, Parenti said.

Toward the end of the first episode, the creators of the series include a taped conversation between John Ehrlichman, counsel and chief domestic advisor under President Richard Nixon and a Harpers Magazine journalist decades after the war on drugs is declared. Its there that Ehrlichman makes a chilling admission.

The Nixon campaign had two enemies, the antiwar left and Black people, Ehrlichman said. We knew we couldnt make it illegal to be either against the war or Black but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and the blacks with heroin and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.

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New Docuseries Aims to Factcheck 'America's War on Drugs' - NBC ... - NBCNews.com

Coronado Island isn't really an island. At least, not in the traditional sense. It sits at the top of a long and narrow strip that forms the outer edge of San Diego Bay. But just because it isn't an island doesn't mean it didn't feel like one.

Before a connecting bridge was built in 1969, Coronado's isolation in plain sight of San Diego sowed the seeds of a teen drug smuggling ring. Instead of crossing the border by land, they swam marijuana from Mexico in the dead of night.

It all started as a way to pass the time, then quickly developed into a multi-million dollar drug operation. The teens would call themselves the Coronado Company.

Katherine Nichols wrote about the Coronado Company in her new book, "Deep Water: From the Swim Team to Drug Smuggling."

She spoke about it with Take Two's A Martinez.

Who were the kids who eventually became the Coronado Company?

They were kids who graduated actually, one was still in school at the time. They later recruited their high school Spanish teacher, Lou Villar, who had taught at Coronado High School from about '65 to 1970.

They seem like normal, everyday kids who live near a beach.

Absolutely. They were swimmers, they were surfers, water polo players. Eddie was a lifeguard. Bob Lahodny had been class president.

How did they get started?

Lance was one of the first guys to start doing this. It was his idea, along with another person who is Paul Acree.

They just thought, "Oh, we'll sell a little bit, make a little bit of profit, bring it to the party at the bonfire at the beach. No big deal."

In 1971, President Nixon was initiating his campaign, "The War on Drugs." This actually started to change the dynamic of bringing things across the border. I believe this created an opportunity for guys who understood the ocean. They thought, "Hmm. Why not go around?"

Tell us what these guys were facing in the water when they swam pot from Mexico back to Coronado.

That swim is terrifying. Number one, it's at night. That's petrifying. It's filled with great white sharks out there.

They were facing strong currents, huge surf where they came in, sharks, jellyfish they were very tough.

How far did they take this thing? How big did this thing get?

It got to be $100 million. That's actually a conservative estimate. Some people have said that it could have been a lot more. That's over a period of 10 years.

This activity could never have happened today with the technology and the sophistication of the DEA. But in those days, these guys managed to stay a step ahead of the law ahead of time. After an indictment, they were on the run as fugitives for another four years.

Press the blue play button above to hear how the drug empire came crashing down.

The book: "Deep Water: From the Swim Team to Drug Smuggling"

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During the 'War on Drugs,' a scrappy band of Coronado teens made millions smuggling weed - 89.3 KPCC

The good news for Grassley, and for everyoneelse, is that starting Sunday night and running through Wednesday the History Channel is showing a new four-part series called Americas War on Drugs. Not only is itan important contribution to recent American history, its also the first time U.S. television has ever told the core truth about one of the most important issues of the past fifty years.

That core truth is: The war on drugs has always been a pointless sham. For decades the federal government has engaged in a shifting series of alliances of convenience with some of the worlds largest drug cartels. So while the U.S. incarceration rate has quintupled since President Richard Nixon first declared the war on drugs in 1971, top narcotics dealers have simultaneously enjoyed protection at the highest levels of power in America.

On the one hand, this shouldnt be surprising. The voluminous documentation of this fact in dozens of books has long been available to anyone with curiosity and a library card.

Yet somehow, despite the fact the U.S. has no formal system of censorship, this monumental scandal has never before been presented in a comprehensive way in the medium where most Americans get their information: TV.

Thats why Americas War on Drugs is a genuine milestone. Weve recently seen how ideas that once seemed absolutely preposterous and taboo for instance, that the Catholic Church was consciously safeguarding priests who sexually abused children, or that Bill Cosby may not have been the best choice for Americas Dad can after years of silence finally break through into popular consciousness and exact real consequences. The series could be a watershed in doing the same for the reality behind of one the most cynical and cruel policies in U.S. history.

A still frame of former crack kingpin Rick Ross in the HISTORY documentary Americas War on Drugs.

Photo: Courtesy of HISTORY

The series, executive produced by Julian P. Hobbs, Elli Hakami and Anthony Lapp, is a standard TV documentary; theres the amalgam of interviews, file footage and dramatic recreations. Whats not standard is the story told on camera by former Drug Enforcement Agency operatives as well as journalists and drug dealers themselves. (One of the reportersis Ryan Grim, The Intercepts Washington bureau chiefand author of This Is Your Country on Drugs: The Secret History of Getting High in America.)

Theres no mealy-mouthed truckling about what happened. The first episode opens with the voice of Lindsay Moran, a one-time clandestine CIA officer, declaring,The agency was elbow deep with drug traffickers.

Then Richard Stratton, a marijuana smuggler turned writer and televisionproducer, explains, Most Americans would be utterly shocked if they knew the depth of involvement that the Central Intelligence Agency has had in the international drug trade.

Next New York Universityprofessor Christian Parenti tells viewers, The CIA is from its very beginning collaborating with mafiosas who are involved in the drug trade because these mafiosas will serve the larger agenda of fighting communism.

For the next eight hours, the series sprints through historythats largely thegreatest hits of the U.S. governments partnership with heroin, hallucinogen and cocaine dealers. That these greatest hits can fill up most of four two-hour episodes demonstrates how extraordinarily deep and ugly the story is.

First we learn about the CIA working with Florida mob boss Santo Trafficante, Jr. in the early 1960s. The CIA wanted Fidel Castro dead and, in return for Trafficantes help in various assassination plots, was willing to turn a blind eye to the extensive drug trafficking by Trafficante and his allied Cuban exiles.

Then theres the extremely odd tale of how the CIA imported significantamounts of LSD from its Swiss manufacturer in hopes that it could used for successful mind control. Instead, by dosing thousands of young volunteers including Ken Kesey, Whitey Bulger, and Grateful Dead lyricist Robert Hunter, the Agency accidentally helped popularize acidand generate the 1960s counter-culture of psychedelia.

During the Vietnam War, the U.S. allied with anti-communist forces in Laos that leveraged our support to become some of the largest suppliers of opium on earth. Air America, a CIA front, flew supplies for the guerrillas into Laos and then flew drugs out, all with the knowledge and protection of U.S. operatives.

The same dynamic developed in the 1980s as the Reagan administration tried to overthrow the Sandinista government in Nicaragua. The planes that secretly brought arms to the contras turned around and brought cocaine back to America, again shielded from U.S. law enforcement by the CIA.

Most recently, theres our 16-year-long war in Afghanistan. While less has been uncovered about the CIAs machinations here, its hard not to notice that we installed Hamid Karzai as president while his brother apparently was on the CIA payroll and, simultaneously, one of the countrys biggest opium dealers. Afghanistan now supplies about 90 percent of the worlds heroin.

To its credit, the series makes clear that this is not part of a secret government plotto turn Americans into drug addicts. But, as Moran puts it, When the CIA is focused on a mission, on a particular end, theyre not going to sit down and pontificate about What are the long-term, global consequences of our actions going to be? Winning their secret wars will always be their top priority, and if that requires cooperation with drug cartels which are flooding the U.S. with their product, so be it. A lot of these patterns that have their origins in the 1960s become cyclical, Moran adds. Those relationships develop again and again throughout the war on drugs.

What makes this history so grotesque is the governments mind-breaking levels of hypocrisy. Its like Donald Trump declaring a War on Real Estate Developers that fills prisons withpeople who occasionally rent out their spare bedroom on AirBnb.

That brings us back to Charles Grassley. Grassley is now chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, a longtime committed drug warrior and during the 1980s a supporter of the contras.

Yet even Grassley is showing signs that he realizes there may have been some flaws in the war on drugs since the beginning. He recently has co-sponsored a bill that reduce minimum sentences for drug offenses.

So now that the History Channel has granted Grassley his wish and is broadcasting this extraordinarily important history, its our job to make sure he and everyone likes him sits down and watches it. That this series exists at all shows that were at a tipping point with this brazen, catastrophic lie. We have to push hard enough to knock it over.

Top photo: A still frame from the HISTORY documentary Americas War on Drugs.

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The History Channel Is Finally Telling the Stunning Secret Story of the War on Drugs - The Intercept

Today is the 46th anniversary of Americas War on Drugs Otherwise Peaceful Americans Who Voluntarily Choose To Ingest or Sell Intoxicants Currently Proscribed by the Government, Which Will Put Users or Sellers in Cages if Caught, see todays previous post on CD here. To bring awareness to this immoral, failed, costly, and shameful war on the American people, heres some commentary below from Nobel economist Milton Friedman.

In 1991 Nobel economist Milton Friedman (pictured above giving a talk at AEI, exact year unknown) was interviewed by Emmy Award-winning drug reporter Randy Paige on Americas Drug Forum, a national public affairs talk show that appeared on public television stations. In the interview, Milton Friedman discussed in detail his views on Americas War on Drugs, legalization of drugs, the role of government in a free society, and his pessimistic view of Americas future if we continue moving in the direction of socialism. Videos of the entire 30-minute interview appears below in three parts, and here is the transcript of the interview.

Here are some of my favorite parts of the interview (emphasis added):

1. Paige: Let us deal first with the issue of legalization of drugs. How do you see America changing for the better under that system?

Friedman: I see America with half the number of prisons, half the number of prisoners, ten thousand fewer homicides a year, inner cities in which theres a chance for these poor people to live without being afraid for their lives, citizens who might be respectable who are now addicts not being subject to becoming criminals in order to get their drug, being able to get drugs for which theyre sure of the quality. You know, the same thing happened under prohibition of alcohol as is happening now.

Under prohibition of alcohol, deaths from alcohol poisoning, from poisoning by things that were mixed in with the bootleg alcohol, went up sharply. Similarly, under drug prohibition, deaths from overdose, from adulterations, from adulterated substances have gone up.

2. Paige: For us to understand the real root of those beliefs, how about if we just talk a minute about free market economic perspective, and how you see the proper role of government in its dealings with the individual.

Friedman: The proper role of government is exactly what John Stuart Mill Said in the middle of the 19th century in On Liberty. The proper role of government is to prevent other people from harming an individual. Government, he said, never has any right to interfere with an individual for that individuals own good.

The case for prohibiting drugs is exactly as strong and as weak as the case for prohibiting people from overeating. We all know that overeating causes more deaths than drugs do. If its in principle OK for the government to say you must not consume drugs because theyll do you harm, why isnt it all right to say you must not eat too much because youll do harm? Why isnt it all right to say you must not try to go in for skydiving because youre likely to die? Why isnt it all right to say, Oh, skiing, thats no good, thats a very dangerous sport, youll hurt yourself? Where do you draw the line?

3. Paige: Is it not true that the entire discussion here, the entire drug problem is an economic problem to

Friedman: No, its not an economic problem at all, its a moral problem.

Paige: In what way?

Friedman: Im an economist, but the economics problem is strictly tertiary. Its a moral problem. Its a problem of the harm which the government is doing.

I have estimated statistically that the prohibition of drugs produces, on the average, ten thousand homicides a year. Its a moral problem that the government is going around killing ten thousand people. Its a moral problem that the government is making into criminals people, who may be doing something you and I dont approve of, but who are doing something that hurts nobody else. Most of the arrests for drugs are for possession by casual users.

Now heres somebody who wants to smoke a marijuana cigarette. If hes caught, he goes to jail. Now is that moral? Is that proper? I think its absolutely disgraceful that our government, supposed to be our government, should be in the position of converting people who are not harming others into criminals, of destroying their lives, putting them in jail. Thats the issue to me. The economic issue comes in only for explaining why it has those effects. But the economic reasons are not the reasons.

Of course, were wasting money on it. Ten, twenty, thirty billion dollars a year, but thats trivial. Were wasting that much money in many other ways, such as buying crops that ought never to be produced.

4. Paige: There are many who would look at the economicshow the economics of the drug business is affecting Americas major inner cities, for example.

Friedman: Of course it is, and it is because its prohibited. See, if you look at the drug war from a purely economic point of view, the role of the government is to protect the drug cartel. Thats literally true.

Paige: Is it doing a good job of it?

Friedman: Excellent. What do I mean by that? In an ordinary free marketlets take potatoes, beef, anything you wantthere are thousands of importers and exporters. Anybody can go into the business. But its very hard for a small person to go into the drug importing business because our interdiction efforts essentially make it enormously costly. So, the only people who can survive in that business are these large Medellin cartel kind of people who have enough money so they can have fleets of airplanes, so they can have sophisticated methods, and so on.

In addition to which, by keeping goods out and by arresting, lets say, local marijuana growers, the government keeps the price of these products high. What more could a monopolist want? Hes got a government who makes it very hard for all his competitors and who keeps the price of his products high. Its absolutely heaven.

Legalization is a way to stopin our forum as citizens a government from using our power to engage in the immoral behavior of killing people, taking lives away from people in the U.S., in Colombia and elsewhere, which we have no business doing.

5. Paige: So, you see the role of government right now as being just as deadly as if Uncle Sam were to take a gun to somebodys head.

Friedman: Thats what hes doing, of course. Right now Uncle Sam is not only taking a gun to somebodys head, hes taking his property without due process of law. The drug enforcers are expropriating property, in many cases of innocent people on whom they dont have a real warrant. Thats a terrible way to run whats supposed to be a free country.

6. Paige: What scares you the most about the notion of drugs being legal?

Friedman: Nothing scares me about the notion of drugs being legal.

Paige: Nothing.

Friedman: What scares me is the notion of continuing on the path were on now, which will destroy our free society, making it an uncivilized place. Theres only one way you can really enforce the drug laws currently. The only way to do that is to adopt the policies of Saudi Arabia, Singapore, which some other countries adopt, in which a drug addict is subject to capital punishment or, at the very least, having his hand chopped off. If we were willing to have penalties like thatbut would that be a society youd want to live in?

7. Paige: Last question. You have grandchildren.

Friedman: Absolutely. I have a two-year-old granddaughter named Becca.

Paige: When you look at Becca, what do you see for her and for her future?

Friedman: That depends entirely upon what you and your fellow citizens do to our country. If you and your fellow citizens continue on moving more and more in the direction of socialism, not only inspired through your drug prohibition, but through your socialization of schools, the socialization of medicine, the regulation of industry, I see for my granddaughter the equivalent of Soviet communism three years ago.

Part I (below). Milton Friedman interview on Americas Drug Forum (1991)

Part 2 (below). Milton Friedman interview on Americas Drug Forum (1991)

Part 3 (below). Milton Friedman interview on Americas Drug Forum (1991)

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The US War on Drugs started 46 years ago today. Some ... - American Enterprise Institute

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

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

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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.

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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.

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

Do not let author Don Winslow get started on Attorney General Jeff Sessions. Beauregard, Winslow practically sneers, referring to the AG by his very Confederate-sounding middle name, wants to take us back to the good old days, when we were throwing two million people into prison. He thinks the war on drugs was a good idea, and that we were winning. But drugs are more plentiful, powerful, and cheaper than ever before. If thats victory, I would hate to see defeat.

Winslow is, of course, referring to Sessions recent order that all federal prosecutors pursue the strictest possible sentences, including for non-violent drug offenders. Winslow sees this as a return to a failed policy of mass incarceration, and hes one writer who knows what hes talking about. The critically acclaimed authors most famous worksThe Power of the Dog, Savages, and The Cartelare centered on drugs and drug policy. His new novel, The Force, is also drug-centered, examining corruption in the New York Police Department and featuring a crooked cop named Denny Malone who, along with his partners, steals millions of dollars worth of heroin after a major bust. Think of it as a cross between a hard-core New York tale by Richard Price and the classic 1981 Sidney Lumet film Prince of the City.

Its that readable, and that bleak.

Ive always wanted to write a New York cop book, says Winslow, 63, who was born in the city and raised in Rhode Island but whose best known books are set in California (where he now lives) and Mexico. Back when I was living in New Yorkwhere he worked for a chain of movie theaters, and as a private investigatorI would see classic crime films like Serpico, Prince of the City, and The French Connection, and theyre part of the reason I became a crime writer. So after I finished The Cartel [set mostly in Mexico, and soon to be filmed by Ridley Scott], I wanted to get back to New York.

The Force is so awash in corruption, from the lowest beat cop to the mayors office, that it seems hyper-unreal. But Winslow insists what hes writing about is the real deal, that every 20 years or so there is a major corruption scandal in the NYPD. He points to a recent bribes-to-obtain-gun-licenses probe involving crooked cops and prosecutors, but adds that its not just the NYPD, its Chicago, the LAPD, Baltimore. One of the points I was trying to make in the book, we always talk about cops being corrupt, but what about lawyers, judges, the mayors office? Its not worse in New York, its just largereverything is larger in New York.

Winslow is no hard-core cop hater. In fact, researching and writing The Force, which took several years, helped him sympathize with the extremely tough job the police have to do, and the harsh conditions they have to deal with.

The thing that surprised me a little bit about cops, he says, is how deeply they feel what they do. You tend to think they get jaded, and they do, and they come across as stoic, but when you talk to them about cases and stories, the work has an impact on them. When you watch TV shows, you see them joking about victimsand that happensbut when they talk about certain victims and crimes they have more empathy than you would be led to believe. I talked to veteran cops who sat there with tears streaming down their faces talking about their cases.

In fact, the cops in The Force, no matter how corrupt, believe they are fighting the good fight, taking down drug dealers, gangbangers, and murderers by any means necessary. Malone, who considers himself the king of Manhattan North, heads an elite squad of detectives given unrestricted authority to rid their area of human scum. The parallels with the Daniel Ciello character (played by Treat Williams) in Prince of the City are unmistakable, including the ultimate fall from gracepressed by the Feds, both men wind up informing on their partners.

Winslow says that if nothing else, his book shows how complicated a cops life can be, how complicated issues of right and wrong can be. This guy Malone gets himself into a trap where he has no good choices. Who do you betray?

But back to Jeff Sessions and Winslows other bte noire, The Wall. Winslow has long argued that the only way to break the cartels is to legalize all drugs, and has even written about it for The Daily Beast. He has said the drug war is unwinnable, that there is no end in sight. And the Trump administrations attempts to build a barrier across our southern border, accompanied by a hardline prosecutorial stance, have not changed his mind.

Trump and these guys claim to be businessmen, he says, but they dont understand economics. Lets assume you could build a wall, and it could be a deterrent, but it does not affect demand. Anything you do to make the supply more difficult, raises the supplies and raises the profits. Thats just basic high school economics.

Winslow believes that whatever gets builtThere will be something and they will call it a wall, he saysis a fantasy. Certain parts of the terrain make wall building impractical; some of the wall would have to pass through privately owned lands, which invites endless lawsuits; and part of the wall would have to pass through territory owned on both sides of the border by the Tohono Oodham tribe, creating even more legal issues.

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Besides, says Winslow, any wall would actually have huge gates, and they are called San Diego, El Paso, and Laredo. Most of the drugs come in by trucks, and everyone knows this, but it would be impossible to minutely inspect every truck crossing the borderover 2 million annually in Laredo alone.

So whats the end game? You have to wait it out, says Winslow. Towards the end of the Obama administration, they started to get realistic about drug and prison policies. Now we are going back to the old days, but I think there are people who are rational on this topic. Its an issue where right and left meet, but its a generational thing also. I think its a matter of waiting for some people to become extinct. Because they never change.

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Don Winslow Artfully Demolishes the War on Drugs - Daily Beast