Category Archives: War On Drugs

For decades, tracking how well or badly governments are doing in drug policy has been an elusive endeavour. In no small part, this is because data collection efforts by both governments and the UN have been driven by the outdated and harmful goal of achieving a drug-free society.

The success of drug policies has not been measured against health, development, and human rights outcomes, but instead has tended to prioritise indicators such as the numbers of people arrested or imprisoned for drug offences, the amount of drugs seized, and/or the number of hectares of drug crops eradicated.

Most governments continue to employ a repressive approach to drug control based on this skewed data, which in turns means they cannot be held accountable for the damage their policies inflict on the lives of so many people.

But data and a global analysis of drug policies that ultimately scores and ranks countries can change the status quo. Such a tool already exists for many other fields: we have a Global Hunger Index, a Global Health Security Index, a Global Peace Index, a World Press Freedom Index, a Democracy Index and many more.

And so, an interactive Global Drug Policy Index is an idea for which the time has come. At last, we have the beginnings of a tool that enables us to compare how countries drug policies are faring in achieving the UN objectives of protecting human rights, ensuring security for local communities, securing health, harm reduction and access to controlled medicines, and promoting development for people who grow drug-related crops.

This first edition acts as a proof of concept, covering 30 countries from all regions of the world and shows that it is now possible to hold governments to account for the devastating impacts of their drug policies, based on solid, reliable and updated data.

The strength of the Index lies in the fact that it does not only look into policies on paper. It goes further than that, seeking to capture how drug policies are actually implemented on the ground with data driven from civil society experts in all 30 countries, and stories from communities who have borne the brunt of punitive drug control all over the world.

If there is one key takeaway of the Index, it is this: no one country deserves to feel good about itself when it comes to drug policy, because no country has reached a perfect score. Or anywhere near it.

In fact, Norway, the country with the highest score in this years Index, only scored 74/100. The median score is just 48/100. The five top-ranking countries Norway, New Zealand, Portugal, the UK and Australia scored more than two times higher than the five lowest-ranking countries of Mexico, Kenya, Indonesia, Uganda and Brazil.

To be sure, there are some encouraging signs within the Index. Costa Rica, in ninth position, stands out as the only Latin American country surveyed this year that has made strides at aligning its drug policy with human rights, with its decriminalisation policy, a gender-sensitive approach to drug control, and basic access to harm reduction services.

The Index also shows the efforts made by countries like Jamaica to ensure more proportionate responses within its criminal justice system, ranking first in this dimension. Similarly, Norway and New Zealand, my home country, are also highlighted as having ensured that those suffering from pain can access the opioid medication they need.

But overall, the Index paints a bleak picture of global drug policy. Why?

The answer is simple. Despite countries commitments to align drug policies better with human rights, health and development, the destructive power of punitive and stigmatising drug laws continues to impoverish communities growing plants for illegal drug production, prevent people who use drugs from accessing life-saving harm reduction services like sterile needles and syringes, methadone and drug checking, and drive countless acts of police brutality, arbitrary deprivation of liberty, torture, and killings.

Can we turn things around?

Of course, we can. This Index is a positive and welcome first step at making governments accountable, but also better informed about what is considered as good drug policy. It is there to initiate constructive discussions about what needs to change, emphasise the importance of evidence and rights based drug policies based on recommendations from the United Nations, and guide policy making priorities and reforms for the years to come.

Good, accurate data is power, and it can help us end the war on drugs sooner rather than later.

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Data is power and it can help us end the 'war on drugs' - Telegraph.co.uk

Officials from End It For Good, a Mississippi non-profit organization dedicated to helping address drugs and drug use as complex health issues instead of criminal justice issues, recently hosted a day-long summit to explore the root causes of addiction and harm-reduction policy alternatives to the current enforcement system.

The event, titled SHIFT: From Drug War to Drug Health Drug Policy Summit, was held Nov. 3 at Lake Terrace Convention Center in Hattiesburg and included local and national guest speakers, panelists from faith and criminal justice areas, and personal stories.

We invite Mississippians from across the spectrum pretty much everybody from soccer moms to business men to law enforcement to pharmacists to health care leaders to education leaders to support approaches to drugs that prioritize life and the opportunity to thrive, said Brett Montague, CEO of End It For Good. Through programs, what we do is help people see and explore new ways to address drugs.

We help them see that if we address drugs as a complex health issue, that we could dramatically decrease crime, reduce overdose death rates and prevent the ongoing generational destabilization of families and communities that were seeing play out in Misissippi and throughout the nation.

The summit began with a welcome by Montague, followed by a portion called Addiction: What It Is and What It Isnt featuring Kent Dunnington a professor at Biola University and a personal story from James Moore. Moore, owner of Moores Bicycle Shop in Hattiesburg and a former Petal alderman, lost his son Jeffrey to addiction in 2015.

Next came Harm Reduction: A Mindset SHIFT with keynote speaker Angela Mallette and a personal story by Lacey Elkins. Mallette is the director of outreach for End It For Good, as well as a subject matter expert for the federal Opioid Response Network.

That was followed by a Legislative Panel with Sen. Juan Barnett of Senate District 34, Sen. Brice Wiggins of Senate District 52, Rep. Nick Bain of House District 2 and Rep. Kevin Horan of House District 34.

The second keynote speaker of the summit was Trevor Burrus, a research fellow at the Cato Institutes Robert A. Levy Center for Constitutional Studies and editor-in-chief of the Cato Supreme Court Review. He was written extensively on the errors of the drug war and lectured internationally on the subject.

Following Burruss was Dr. Carr McClain, a physician with Hattiesburg Clinic Heart & Vascular, with a personal story.

This issue has been near and dear to my brain since I was young, McClain said. My career has brought it nearer and dearer to my heart, because people are more important than ideas, and its people and peoples stories that motivate a conference like this, or a movement.

(When I became a physician), I never operated on anybody who was shot because theyd overdosed on drugs; I was operating on the results of drug prohibition. I was operating on the results of the black market that drug policy creates.

The following portion of the event, a Criminal Justice Panel, was made up of Adrian Moore of the Reason Foundation, Lt. Diane Goldstein of Law Enforcement Action Partnership and Judge Prentiss Harrell of the 15th District Intervention Court. Next up was a Faith Panel with Rev. Steve Casteel of Heritage United Methodist Church in Hattiesburg, Rev. Marian Fortner of Christ Episcopal Church in Bay St. Louis and Rev. Barry Walker of The River in Philadelphia.

This is actually the first statewide summit that weve held, and over the last three and a half years, weve held 26 community discussions where we do that education and provide a forum where people from the community can have dialogue amongst themselves, Montague said. Since weve done that around the state, all the way from Oxford down to Pascagoula, we feel like our growth and our brand recognition was big enough to take it to the next level.

We wanted to bring this groundbreaking summit to our state to kind of foster civil, respectful dialogue throughout our state, and how to better address drugs and get hold of the opioid epidemic that were facing. For a hundred years, weve maintained the policy of prohibition, and launched an all-out offensive war on drugs for the last 50 years with the intended purpose of eradicating our worlds drug supply. Since the War on Drugs, drug use is up, overdose death rates are up, incarceration rates are up, and were losing on all fronts including law enforcement, who is bogged down in a war that is perpetual and unwinnable.

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End It For Good hosts SHIFT: From Drug War to Drug Health Drug Policy Summit - HubcitySPOKES.com

TOLEDO, Ohio The double homicide of Laura Luckey and Natasha Carlisle in the 800 block of Vance Street this past weekend is just one more case of deadly violence on the streets of Toledo.

Shay Bankston, a licensed trauma therapist and social worker who has been actively working in parts of Toledo struggling with violence, says the cause of gun violence can be traced to one major issue.

"Our kids really don't have anything to do, and it's essentially like we have a parentless generation and our kids are raising themselves, and they're very angry and they're very numb to it all," Bankston said.

Bankston says government projects like the war on crime and the war on drugs have caused generations of children to grow up with parents or relatives in jail, creating a system where the children have learned to fend for themselves.

"Because a lot of our youth have been left to their own devices, they're going to do whatever they feel they have to do to have just some very basic and essential needs met," Bankston explained.

Bankston says the best way to prevent kids from falling into that lifestyle is to offer them afterschool activities to keep them productive and creative.

Douglas Jones, the owner of Pride of Kids United, an inner-city youth program at the Frederick Douglass Center, agrees, saying that kids need to be taught to channel their boredom and connection to their neighborhood into something productive.

"A lot of these kids want to claim a 'hood. The neighborhood is going to be there whether you're there or not," Jones said. "If you're going to do something for the 'hood, do something positive. Bring some positive recognition back for the 'hood."

Jones says afterschool programs have never been more necessary than now, giving kids a safe place to be instead of out on the streets.

"It's better for the kids to do that, and we can actually tell where they're at, cause everyone comes from somewhere different every day, and the answer isn't cursing and beating and slapping around," Jones said.

In his Toledo Recovery plan, Mayor Wade Kapszukiewicz outlined the need for more inner-city youth programming, which Bankston says is the first time any mayor has done so in recent memory.

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Stopping violence and crime starts by focusing on Toledo's kids, community leaders say - WTOL

The comments, from an experienced law enforcement official who has spent decades heavily involved in organised crime investigations, add to concerns recently aired by Australian Federal Police Assistant Commissioner Nigel Ryan about 90 per cent of criminal networks operating unchecked.

Mr OConnor, who was a NSW Police detective in the 1980s and 1990s before joining the commission, urged the state government to act on the landmark ice inquiry, which in January 2020 handed down 109 recommendations designed to tackle drug use.

Attorney-General Mark Speakman previously said a response was imminent and drug consumption had to be viewed as a health issue. In an interim response to the ice inquiry, the government under former premier Gladys Berejiklian rejected outright five recommendations, including supervised injecting centres and pill-testing.

Ms Berejiklians government also backed away from a proposal for a three-strike policy for people caught with drugs, with penalty infringement notices handed out three times before a criminal penalty is imposed.

NSW is expanding the specialist Drug Court, which seeks to keep drug-dependent offenders out of prison, to four locations.

Mr OConnor said the federal government was failing to advance long overdue laws that could have a real impact on organised crime networks by targeting the money laundering arrangements they depend on to legitimise the proceeds of their activities.

Facing hostility from industry groups, a tranche of planned anti-money laundering laws to impose tougher reporting requirements on lawyers, accountants and real estate agents whose expertise is critical for the sophisticated processes used by criminals has not been passed.

A register of beneficial ownership is also needed to determine the actual owners behind entities who can currently be obscured from authorities by complex corporate structures, Mr OConnor said.

Policing of organised crime will not stop the drug trade, Tim OConnor argues. Credit:

He said organised crime was difficult to measure, but it was fuelling all kinds of overt and destructive criminal activity, such as the gang violence in south-west Sydney between the Hamzy and Alameddine networks.

He said the only way to substantively curb the drug trade was to undermine demand by changing peoples attitudes to recognise the health risks and the murders, kidnappings and assaults associated with organised crime and, in the case of cocaine, the vicious cartels in South America.

We need a generational change. We have to start off with young children today who are going to be the drug buyers in future and give them proper education as to why drugs are bad, Mr OConnor said.

A lot of people who actually indulge in drug activity are not criminals. There is massive recreational use of cocaine and ecstasy and things like that for people that would otherwise not get a parking ticket.

The illicit drug trade is globalised and technologically sophisticated. Credit:AP

He said decriminalisation of use and possession, along with a major campaign to take away the appeal of drugs, could help address the popularity of both recreational substances and highly addictive and destructive substances such as methylamphetamine, known as ice in its crystal form.

Mr OConnor said harm minimisation policies, notably safe injecting rooms, had successfully curbed heroin use from its heights in the 1990s.

We have to consider the same policies to reduce the harm associated with ice, he said.

The long-serving investigator joins former AFP commissioner Mick Palmer and NSWs former top prosecutor, Nicholas Cowdery, in backing decriminalisation, regulation and a greater focus on health in drug policy.

Outgoing NSW Police Commissioner Mick Fuller has backed expansion of a police diversion scheme involving fines and mandatory education and health programs for drug users, but has pushed back against decriminalisation because of concerns about legitimising drugs.

Senior police officers wary of decriminalisation have told the Herald that drug impairment in users is a disaster, carrying real risks in the form of driving accidents and violence. They dont believe there would be a noticeable effect on serious crime if drug use was decriminalised and argue current law enforcement efforts are successful in keeping trafficking and consumption from spiralling completely out of control.

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Mr Fuller has sought to publicly highlight for recreational drug users how their consumption funds organised crime and gang violence, even if they dont realise it.

Data from the Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission and NSW Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research show consistent growth in drug consumption and offending over recent years, as seizures by police in NSW and nationwide continue to break records.

A record 38.5 tonnes of illicit drugs were seized nationally in 2019-20, a 45 per cent increase on the previous year and a 314 per cent increase over the past decade.

The commissions chief executive Michael Phelan last month said law enforcement would continue to target the drug trade but warned organised crime would always find a way to supply the product and the ever-growing problem cannot be addressed by law enforcement alone.

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We need to employ a holistic approach that focuses on supply, demand and harm reduction, with law enforcement and health agencies working together, he said.

Home Affairs Minister Karen Andrews recently promised improved national cooperation to tackle organised crime that is damaging to our community, our democracy and economy.

If the drug trade was eroded, organised crime networks might turn to old and new schemes to make money including standover tactics, cybercrime and gambling.

These activities, Mr OConnor suggested, would be more manageable for police and less profitable for the underworld.

They will go to other things, but other things are probably easier to police, he said.

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Organised crime is overpowering authorities in drug war, says veteran investigator - Sydney Morning Herald

In a lot of ways, summer 2021 felt like it never really got off the ground. While many folks had the same vision of a carefree, cathartic stretch that could serve as a balm for the challenging last year, the warm months passed all too quickly and our new disturbing reality set in. Now, were in the post-daylight savings time abyss of 5 p.m. sunsets and disorientingly long stretches spent in our tiny apartments.

While autumn brings the looming uncertainty of yet another pandemic winter, its also given us perhaps the best run of new music weve had in ages. There have been blockbuster, paradigm-shifting pop records like Lil Nas Xs MONTERO, outstanding indie LPs like Illuminati Hotties Let Me Do One More and Lala Lalas I Want the Door to Open, and incisive storytelling from artists like Xenia Rubinos and Maxo Kream. Here are all the best albums of fall 2021, so far.

Looking at it cynically, the quality of Lil Nas Xs music kind of doesnt even matter. Hes so charming and so good at being famous specifically being famous online that hed still probably be going viral regularly if his songs were C-grade. But theyre not, and MONTERO is one of the most fun big-budget pop records weve gotten in ages.

You cant praise the quality of MONTERO without mentioning Take a Daytrip, the production duo so closely associated with Nas X that when he pretended his debut album was a baby, they were the doctors who delivered it. Their marching band brigade on INDUSTRY BABY is resplendent, the menacing beat on DOLLA SIGN SLIME would be a standout on almost any good trap album, and the flamenco gallup of the title track will keep it a summer staple for years to come.

But these arent just great songs performed by a replacement level vocalist. Lil Nas X sells the yearning that makes THATS WHAT I WANT more than just a post-Hey Ya glossy radio single. His rich baritone shows vulnerability on the tender SUN GOES DOWN, and he raps with supreme authority on tracks like INDUSTRY BABY, even if hes not a technical ace.

Nas first attempt at a longer body of work, 2019s 7 EP, was mediocre apart from Old Town Road and had folks wondering if he was a one-trick pony. MONTERO proves that hes developed a whole stable of skills.

Illuminati Hotties Sarah Tudzin is one of the quiet masterminds of modern indie rock. A true multi-hyphenate talent, she not only writes, sings and produces her own songs, but has worked on records by Pom Pom Squad, Porches and Weyes Blood.

Let Me Do One More is the outfits second LP last years FREE I.H.: This Is Not the One Youve Been Waiting For mixtape was released in part to help get Sarah out of a frustrating record label contract. That project was quite solid, but its clear why she was saving these songs, each one capable of lingering in your brain all day for different reasons.

Theres no shortage of quick-witted songwriters who can cook up a great hook today, but she stands apart for insightful takes on consumerism (The corner store is selling spit / Bottled up for profit / I can't believe I'm buying in / Isnt that genius?), the characters of Los Angeles (Joni is a black jean jacket / Joni's in the first band / Joni has a cool hand / Joni knows the problem is systematic), and romance amid trying circumstances (Never thought Id grow attached / But now our sneakers match / And one of us always feels bad).

And even though Let Me Do One More ends on a somber note the pensive breakup ballad Growth its proof that Illuminati Hotties is great whether on high heat or a low, gentle simmer.

On his debut album, Boylife uses gelato as a metaphor for the transience of life and love as soon as you get your scoop it starts to melt. But its also a fitting comparison for the way this stellar LP sounds. Its consistently rich, and theres a bespoke, handcrafted quality to each song that allows some unconventional flavor pairings to complement each other beautifully (see the choral vocals and post-Yeezus industrial percussion of church).

Boylife (a.k.a. Los Angeles-based producer-vocalist Ryan Yoo) already has an auteurs confidence. Ideas on gelato unfold slowly, like in a Kelly Reichardt movie. Superpretty starts off almost a trap song reflected in a funhouse mirror, before morphing into garage punk. Emotional ballad baddreams starts off with a simple piano arrangement before swelling strings bring it into Adele territory.

As a vocalist, Boylife is still finding a groove (he tries a lot of delivery styles and not all of them land), but as a song-builder hes tremendous, and gelato is more than just a quick sugar high.

Lala Lalas second album, 2018s The Lamb, proved that Chicago-based singer and songwriter Lillie West could make great indie rock music. Her third, I Want the Door to Open, shows that she can make everything else just as well.

Prove It is one of the years great album cuts, as Lillie muses on someones unreachable romantic expectations atop an instrumental that starts off with one sparse guitar line and blooms into something at once dusky and bright. And all the love in the world / Couldnt fill all your need / Couldnt build a city enough alive / For your thrill, she laments. Color of the Pool features babbling streams of synths and hypnotic percussion, while the single Diver swells like the climactic music cue in a great coming-of-age film.

Lillie has spoken about water being an important metaphor on I Want the Door to Open, and the best moments of the record feel like stumbling onto a beach alone at sunrise. Possibility abounds, youre totally present and youre able to appreciate the little components that add up to a majestic whole whether thats hearing one of Lillies reedy vocal riffs or feeling cold sand beneath your feet.

Xenia Rubinos, Una Rosa (October 15)

Its been five years since Xenia Rubinos released Black Terry Cat, her career-making sophomore LP that blended the music of her Puerto Rican and Cuban heritage with hip-hop, R&B and the jazz she studied in college. Her latest, Una Rosa, is a towering accomplishment rich with characters and visual imagery, and brimming with urgent purpose.

Xenia has always been a brave songwriter, unafraid of taking the powerful and corrupt to task. On Who Shot Ya? she laments the killing of Breonna Taylor and the lack of consequences the officers who shot her faced. With Working All the Time, she tackles systemic class division (You better keep me poor and busy / Or Id be a danger / The truth is Im a threat / And its got you upset).

Sonically, the album is bountiful in experimentation, as she creates a new sonic context for Una Rosa, a song that used to play from a lamp in her abuelitas room. She intertwines her vocals with icy synth lines on songs like Did My Best and Si Llego to create bold textures.

Houston hip-hop is all about heritage, and Maxo Kream feels like the most direct link to the emotive storytelling of Scarface, Bun B and Z-Ro. Maxo went from best kept secret to a national name with 2019s major label debut Brandon Banks, but Weight of the World is a stronger record, featuring his signature finely-etched storytelling.

Opener CRIPSTIAN feels like a sequel to Meet Again, one of the most gripping songs in his discography, in which he raps about the hardships of his loved ones and himself in vivid detail. Codeine on my fuckin' bladder / Doctor say I'm gettin' fatter / Wealthy and not healthy, if you ask me, it don't fuckin' matter, he laments. On MAMAS PURSE, he recalls his mother shoplifting Rocawear and FUBU to keep her children happy. Its a moving song about how our understanding of our parents can change so greatly when we reach adulthood ourselves.

Despite, or perhaps because of, his unmistakably Southern mannerisms (at one point he says country like LeAnn Rimes) Maxo has won fans all around the US. Just look at the features here Tyler, the Creator on the swaggering single BIG PERSONA, A$AP Rocky coming to trade braggadocious bars on STREETS ALONE and Freddie Gibbs on the simmering, soulful WHAT I LOOK LIKE. Maxo does more than just hold his own, he brings them all into his world in unique ways.

Synth-pop whirlwind Moon Kissed have been making a name for themselves around New York thanks to jubilant, high-energy live shows where the trios chemistry is infectious. Their second album, Id Like to Tell You Something Important, feels like the self-contained soundtrack to a great coming-of-age film, with soaring musical highs matched with lyrical honesty.

The powerful interlude Ill Ask for It includes an important message about clear consent, and Shake // Those Feelings sees lead singer Khaya Cohen reflecting on heartbreak with major candor. The piano-powered closer Chameleon features the melancholic sting of a great Adele or Billie Eilish power ballad.

But Id Like to Tell You Something is also an absolute blast, from the femme fatale-inspired, stomp-clap opener Bubblegum to the shapeshifting Shake // Those Feelings, which starts off Strokesian before a soaring electropop bridge later gives way to a stripped-down outro. With this album, Moon Kissed has found a way to do something even seasoned bands struggle with bottling the alchemy of their concerts into something that you can listen to again and again.

Not unlike great novelists Alexandra Kleeman or Ottessa Moshfegh, Okay Kaya is one of the great post-postmodern writers of our time. Her songs are recognizable in form, but distinctly 21st century in the way they tackle sex, friendship and mental health.

Her new mixtape, The Incompatible Okay Kaya, features stripped-back, acoustic version of previous standout songs like last years fuzzy slacker track Psych Ward and 2018s minimalist R&B slow-burn Dance Like U. These versions highlight Kayas wry, evocative lyrics (You can peel an orange however you please / In the psych ward) and the elegance of her voice. Ethereal is perhaps the most overused adjective in music writing, but its genuinely apt for Okay Kaya.

Peppered throughout the mixtape are a few choice covers of songs like Nick Caves Into My Arms and Magnetic Fields The Book of Love, which despite the projects title implying a lack of flexibility, are rendered beautifully.

Sometime in the last decade, The War on Drugs quietly became one of the most dependable American bands. Inspired by the heartland rock sound of Bruce Springsteen and the keen eye of Bob Dylan, the Adam Granduciel-fronted operation put out two of the last decades best indie records, and picked up where they left off with I Dont Live Here Anymore.

Change is vintage War on Drugs, to the point that its hard to believe Adam originally conceived of it as a piano ballad back in 2017. Victim leans more new wave than much of their previous work and the fact that its many crunchy textures never overwhelm the ear is a testament to I Dont Live Here Anymores pristine production.

Pitchfork highlighted the way the band capture the feeling of liminal space in their music, and while the songs on I Dont Live Here Anymore have a steady, warm hum to them, theyre always quietly shapeshifting. Just like change in real life, the best moments on their fifth album sneak up on you and overwhelm.

When an indie darling spends years building up to the release of their debut album, they face ever-escalating expectations from fans whove been in it from the jump. Since gaining notoriety as part of the duo Abhi//Dijon, Dijon Duenas has released a string of stellar singles and EPs, culminating in this years Absolutely, a remarkable body of work.

Dijon is a uniquely emotive vocalist. Theres a certain way his voice rasps on the hook of Shouldnt Have To and Talk Down that feels so immediate as to recall Drunk, a bleary-eyed, baleful late night missive thats among the best records hes dropped.

The single Many Times is easily one of the years best songs. Its one part Jai Paul, one part Bon Iver and two parts Vampire Weekend, but the delivery is vintage Dijon, conversational yet rife with feeling. Hes at his wits end on the songs prehook, dropping a colorful string of connected rhymes in order to express romantic exasperation. Strawberry, raspberry, candlelight, satellite, television, x-ray vision / What's it gonna take for you to listen? he pleads.

Absolutely is stuffed to the gills with ideas, but Dijon executes pretty much all of them exceptionally well, from the 80s lite pop of The Dress to the vintage rap breakbeat of Talk Down to the extemporaneous rawness of End of Record. Dijon took his sweet time, but wound up making one of the best debut LPs of 2021.

If theres one silver lining of the pandemic, its the way that people swept up in momentum beyond their control could finally find balance once more. Thats what happened to Snail Mails Lindsey Jordan, who became alt rock royalty before turning 20, and was understandably overwhelmed by her newfound visibility.

Valentine, written in part during a stint back at her parents home during the early days of Covid, sees Lindsey get her footing back and then some. Lyrically, the songs are vintage Snail Mail in their candor and wit (Moved on, but nothing feels true / Sometimes I hate her just for not being you, she says on Ben Franklin), but the musical context is significantly bolder.

Forever (Sailing) has a dreamy, cinematic sway to it, while the title track feels like the final, bristling minute of Lushs Heat Wave stretched out to the length of a full song. Working with Bon Iver and War on Drugs collaborator Brad Cook as her co-producer, Lindsey has done the equivalent of an independent filmmaker jumping into the studio system and making something just as good and pure as their early output.

As the title indicates, the album is about love, but in a way thats both lofty and tactile, poetic and grounded. On Madonna, she blends soaring religious imagery with relatable stories of 21st century technology-aided squabbles. Body and blood, I'll atone / Get to it now, or we can fight on the phone / I used to wanna get even, I'll just get stoned.

One of the most beloved local figures of Chicagos recent talent boom, Tasha is a heady singer-songwriter whose tracks contain flecks of folk, jazz and mellow indie rock. Tell Me What You Miss the Most, her second studio album, is lowkey but also charged with a kind of electricity that recalls the best work of Moses Sumney or Lomelda.

Bed Song 1 is a perfect scene-setter its ruminative and vulnerable, but never so ethereal as to feel weightless. Tasha once considered naming her debut album Bedtime, and she finds plenty to mine in the intimacy and vulnerability inherent to a room of ones own. The lower guitar strings take on a rhythmic, percussive quality and Tasha uses the soundscape to muse aboutthe push-pull of an artists life. If I could I would stay / Here in this bed all day long / But I quite like the way / Pretty girls sway to my songs, she says.

Heavy on glistening guitars and spectral vocals, Tell Me is ideal listening for the delicate stretch in between fall and winter, but more than that its an album that affirms and looks to the future without ignoring the pain of the past. On the standout Year From Now, she sings about reclaiming your sense of self. Don't wait for a sign, it's time to let go / Stop wishing for someone to tell you some secret that you've always known, she says. Look for a sign of life in every breath and every sky and every hand hold.

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The fall 2021 albums you need to hear now - i-D

The third season of Netflixs compelling Narcos: Mexico widened its focus and gained a new narrator as it entered a new decade (the 1990s), but the game remained the same. The stories that Narcos and Mexico have told over their combined seasons have familiar ebbs and flows: A dealer or grower has a grand idea to become a distributor or networker, and next thing you know, a new cartel is born. But just as that leader becomes wealthy beyond belief and begins courting politicians, it always signals the beginning of the end. Again and again, from Pablo Escobar and the Cali Cartel in Colombia to Flix Gallardo, Amado Carillo Fuentes, the Arellanos, and El Chapo in Mexico, the cycle of violence is as predictable as it is savage.

The other important half of Narcos, of course, has focused on the DEA and their role in that cycle of drug leaders and territory disputes; once the traffickers begin getting cozy with officials, the Americans start to take note and follow the money. One thing leads to another, violence ensues, and a new kingpin will rise. In Narcos: Mexico, it began with Kiki Camarenas dogged pursuit of Flix Gallardo, and the latters fatal mistake of torturing and killing a federal agent, leading to new American operation to dismantle Flixs Guadalajara cartel. But as Walt Breslin says to a colleague before one of many failed attempts to capture Benjamin Arellano in this latest season, getting Flix was bullshit; they gave him up. And once again, in this final run of episodes, by the time the DEA shows up the play has already been made from the inside.

In the wake of Flixs end, Narcos: Mexico Season 3 ostensibly focused on Amado Carillo Fuentes, one of the most successful traffickers of all time, and who (according to the final frame of the series), may be the only kingpin to get out alive. But either way, Amado had to get out fairly quicklyit had to end. And this was a man who had a Mexican General in charge of the countrys drug war, one praised by the US government, on his payroll. It still wasnt enough. The dream that Flix started the series withof uniting the cartels into a businesswas never sustainable. Amado didnt try to unite anyone under his reign, he just out-maneuvered them and tried to drop as few bodies as possible. Yet his big idea was still related to Flixs hopes: to sanitize the drug trade as much as possible by (in part) splitting it up into segments to protect himself and his lieutenants, while making connections with high-ranking politicians to clear the way to exceptional wealth and influence. It still didnt work.

Season 3 had some flashy sequences that showed the drug money being spent by traffickers high and low on the chain, but thats never really been what the series was about. Its about those who tried to do something different, to go beyond nightclubs and street fights and build an empire towards legitimacy. That same desire, to tame trafficking, was shared by Benjamin Arellano Flix and his familyhe also made friends with politicians and used his drug money to further mutual interests. But violence was always nipping at the heels of this plan in the same way it did for Amado, Flix, and the others. As soon as an upstart (in this case, El Chapo) feels disrespected, its not about lawyers and loopholes and lobbyists: the guns come out. Here, that violence escalated until Benjamins brother Ramn and his cronies shoot up the Guadalajara airport in broad daylight with not a thought spared for any innocent they mowed down indiscriminately with their gunfire. And that, of course, caught the attention of the Americans, where an increased DEA interest kept the Arellanos on the run while El Chapo and El Mayo filled that void. Once again, the DEA was involved, and was aware, but was also several steps behind while the Mexican government was inert. And even if the Americans or Mexicans did take one crime boss down, even a major figure, there are a host of others waiting in the wings. This business cant be tamed, nor seemingly stoppedgunfire and brutal violence always follow.

Meanwhile, this carousel was being reported on by new characters introduced from the newspaper La Voz, a truth-telling publication that chronicled all of these crossed paths and payouts as best they could before they, too, were victims of extreme threats and violence. And in a storyline that really didnt connect at all to anything else that was happening (but was nevertheless compelling its own right), we saw the ongoing murders of women who worked in factories around Juareza staggering injustice that still has not found an end.

All of this built to a devastatingly bleak finale in which no one really had a win (except, perhaps, Amadothe one character the series has always quietly liked and championed, curiously). For the most part, we saw a variety of different bad guys who wanted to be good guys, or at least respected guys in terms of avoiding the violent cycle of greed and corruption that had played a part in the downfall of their predecessorsand this includes Walt and the DEA. As Narcos continues to prove, even if you try and do everything right, as Walt does, it still goes to shit when it comes to trafficking and everything connected to it. Don Neto says the same to El Chapo in jail: Youre still looking for whats right in all of this? It doesnt exist.

When its at its best, Narcos echoes HBOs excellent series The Wire, which investigated all sides of the drug trade in the inner city of Baltimore, and the many systemic failures of the War on Drugs. Narcos does the same, if not as elegantly in its execution. But also like The Wire, there arent many satisfying conclusions, and high-level investigations tend to get stopped as soon as people with political power start to get named. Because again, the true power lies not in the violent warring of the traffickers, but in the quiet halls of supposed justice. Theres a scene late in Narcos: Mexico Season 3 between Hank and Amado that tells the score:

Amado: Someone tries to kill me, that changes things. You have to adapt. Thats what I do. Hank: There isnt anything you have without me. Amado: Its the end of my business Hank: You dont have one. Thats something you made up. It doesnt exist.

Later, once Amado has found a new supplier, he reminds Hank that his business does exist and does affect him, but Hank still refers to it as ours. The reality is that Hank is right; its not a business at all, at least not in its own right. Technically yes, some of the traffickers did and do have ambitions to create something as stable, but the volatile nature of the drug trade will never allow that stability for long. (Look at a figure like El Mayo, who seemed to exist outside of the drama on the quiet fringe, until he made his brutal play for power.) As Narcos illustrates again and again, it is ultimately controlled by violence and the whims of cruel personalities, with everyone struggling and striving for that same golden ticket. Unlike the boardrooms and halls of power that some of the traffickers aspire to, their world is still define by guns and death, much of it random and arbitrary, and that wont end. Its all corrupt, its all connected, but while the true businessmen and politicians may profit from them, the traffickers will never achieve their same false piety and safe cover of legitimacy. The world turns.

As such, Season 3 concluded with something of a shrug from Walt and Jaime of thats Mexico for ya! even though we saw Walt speaking with Andrea from La Voz to try and shine a light on some of the horrors behind the scenes of this cursed war. But as Andreas narration says in the end, sometimes the truth isnt enough. Its worth fighting for, but thats also all we see of this world: fighting. Narcos: Mexicos final season started and more or less ended with Amado in a shootout on an airfield. None of the money and power he amassed in between mattered. In the end, heand all of the other narcosare still vulnerable to the bullets that define their empires.

Allison Keene is the TV Editor ofPaste Magazine. For more television talk, pop culture chat and general japery, you can follow her @keeneTV

For all the latest TV news, reviews, lists and features, follow @Paste_TV.

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Narcos: Mexico's Third and Final Season Brutally Proved You Can't Tame Trafficking - Paste Magazine

(PDF) (DOC) (JPG)June 15, 2017

The legal battle against segregation is won, but the community battle goes on.-Dorothy Day, 1956.

The 1960s mark a significant historical period, spurred by the Civil Rights Movement and the enactment of the Civil Rights Act in 1964. It ended the infamous Jim Crow era laws, guaranteeing voting rights, interracial marriage, desegregation of schools, etc. to name a few. However, despite the progress made through the enactment of the Civil Rights Act, the promise of equal opportunity remains far from realized. Race-based discrimination has continued through public policies, albeit in more complex ways.

The War on Drugs is one instance of public policy that reveals systemic racism in our society. The implementation of the policy specifically targeted African American communities for possession of drugs leading to imprisonment of a large number of people from minority backgrounds. Michelle Alexander argues that the War on Drugs is representative of a nationwide Jim Crow epidemic that has specifically singled out African Americans, diminishing their rights as citizens (Alexander, 2014). Even though the practice is against the Fourth and Eighth Amendments of our Constitution, its continuation suggests a continuation of Jim Crow era laws, albeit in more complex ways. Mass incarceration, carried on through the War on Drugs, has severe collateral damage on minority communities as well. It is largely responsible for the devastation of urban communities, the rise of the super ghettos in cities across the country, and the institutionalization of a prison industrial complex. This essay examines the patterns of systemic racism perpetrated through the War on Drugs and mass incarceration policies. Following Michelle Alexanders argument, I argue that the War on Drugs is not only a new form of Jim Crow era discrimination, but also responsible for systemic racism in our criminal justice system perpetrated through the institutionalization of a prison industrial complex.

The institutionalization of prison systems in the US begun in the eighteenth century, especially after Jeremy Benthams panopticon design, which enabled detaining a large number of prisoners. While the panopticon model allowed the imprisonment of a vast number of people, the end of slavery after the Civil War and the need for free labor provided the rationale for the prison system, leading to the institutionalization of a prison industrial system in the country.

Early accounts of crime and punishment in the country show that corporal punishment was the preferred form of retribution, and imprisonment was limited to minor crimes like debt. Legal historian Harry Elmer Barnes accounts that crime, as per the Act of 1788, included treason and felonies:

The Act of 1788 for punishing Treasons and Felonies, and for the better regulating of proceedings in cases of Felony, there were sixteen capital crimes enumerated on the statute books-treason, murder, rape, buggery, burglary, robbery of a church, breaking and entry, robbery of person, robbery and intimidation in dwelling houses, arson, malicious maiming, forgery, counterfeiting, theft of chose in action, second offense for other felonies, and aiding and abetting any of the above crimes (Barnes, 1921, p. 39).

The crimes listed here are (for the most part) similar to what society deems as deviant in our present times, although possession of drugs or narcotics was not a crime under the Act of 1788.

The important difference between committing a crime in 1788 in opposition to today is the degree of punishment. Sending violators to the gallows was very common in the early years. In cases where the perpetrators death sentence was not issued, Barnes (1921) explains:

Corporal punishment of another and less severe type was employed. The stocks, pillory, whipping, branding and the ducking-stool were the normal methods used for imposing punishment. For the lesser offenses fines were prescribed, with an alternate sentence of corporal punishment if the fine was not paid. Imprisonment was rarely employed as a method of punishment. Nearly all who were imprisoned for any considerable period of time were debtors, imprisonment for debt not having been abolished in New York State until the laws of April 7, 1819, and April 26, 1831, were passed, the latter in part as a result of the campaign against imprisonment for debt carried on by Louis Dwight of the Boston Prison Discipline Society (p. 39).

By the late 18th century, imprisonment with hard labor gained acceptance over death penalty, and was adopted in the penal system reforms. The Howard League for Penal Reform explains:

Although the 18th century has been characterized as the era of the Bloody Code there was growing opposition to the death penalty for all but the most serious crimes By the mid-18th century imprisonment, with hard labor, was beginning to be seen as a suitable sanction for petty offenders (Howard League, p. 1).

Imprisonment gained legitimacy as a more civilized form of punishment, but it was mostly a form of labor camp. Those found guilty of small crimes were assigned to hard labor during the day, and at night they were held in a detention ship with appalling living conditions.

While the eighteenth-century reforms set the beginning of a process, it was Jeremy Benthams design of the panopticon that institutionalized the notion of prison. Early prison designs were poorly constructed, which made it impractical to detain large number of prisoners. The Howard League for Penal Reform explains that in 1791 Bentham designed the panopticon. This prison design allowed a centrally placed observer to survey all the inmates, as prison wings radiated out from this central position. Benthams panopticon became the model for prison building for the next half century (Howard League, p. 1). This singular innovation was the first brick laid in regards to mass incarceration, as it allowed the states to imprison on a large scale and became an essential piece to the foundation of many prisons.

Furthermore, the end of Civil War and the victory of the Union created a new demand for labor as slavery was abolished. While on the one hand African Americans were promised freedom from slavery by the Thirteenth Amendment, on the other, through a prison system a new form of bonded labor was instituted. Kim Gilmore argues that the system of slavery, the Thirteenth Amendment, and the penal systems have a symbiotic relationship, responsible for the legitimation of mass incarceration:

Built into the 13th Amendment was state authorization to use prison labor as a bridge between slavery and paid work. Slavery was abolished except as a punishment for crime. This stipulation provided the intellectual and legal mechanisms to enable the state to use unfree labor by leasing prisoners to local businesses and corporations desperate to rebuild the Souths infrastructure. During this period, white Redeemers white planters, small farmers, and political leaders set out to rebuild the pre-emancipation racial order by enacting laws that restricted black access to political representation and by creating Black Codes that, among other things, increased the penalties for crimes such as vagrancy, loitering, and public drunkenness (Gilmore, p. 1).

Although slavery was illegal, southern states empowered by the 13th Amendment instituted the Black Codes, which would eventually become the infamous Jim Crow Laws. Black Codes and Jim Crow laws increased the severity of petty crimes, and acts such as loitering or jaywalking resulted in imprisonment. A majority of newly freed African Americans found themselves in prison, and back on the plantations. The criticism from labor unions restricted the use of prison labor to state use system only. Gilmore elucidates:

Labor unions, which had always been skeptical about prison labor, aggressively lobbied against the leasing of convicts to private corporations. Throughout the Depression years, unionists made it clear that an expanded use of prison labor would further imperil an already overfull work force and intervene in free markets in ways that threatened the stability of capitalism and laid bare its most excessive failures. Slowly, prisons and jails solved this problem by developing a state-use system in which prison labor was used solely for state projects. This solution eliminated the competition between convict labor and union labor, while still enabling convicts to offset their cost to the state (Gilmore, p. 1).

By the mid 1900s, the use of convict labor for state projects was well established, and a number of private prisons were instituted to manage the prison population.

The Civil Rights Act dismantled Jim Crow laws but the use of convict labor remained. The War on Drugs policy, enacted in 1971 by President Nixon, supplanted Jim Crow laws with new measures to incarcerate populations for possession of drugs. While the law did not explicitly target communities, the enforcement of the law disproportionately burdened African American communities. Like post-Civil War Black Codes and Jim Crow laws, the War on Drugs was the next platform to repeat the cycle of incarcerating African Americans. However, this time around it was not exclusive to the South but throughout the entire United States.

In June of 1971, President Nixon declared War on Drugs, to classify and regulate the use of drugs and other substances. This policy, as Drug Policy Alliance notes, increased the size and presence of federal drug control agencies, and pushed through measures such as mandatory sentencing and no-knock warrants (DPA). In 1970, after Nixons declared War on Drugs, the Comprehensive Drug Abuse Prevention and Control Act (CDAPC) was enacted to create a list of scheduled drugs. The Act included marijuana in the list of Schedule I drugs, with heroin and LSD. This led to a process of criminalizing marijuana use despite recommendations of a high-level committee to decriminalize the possession and distribution of marijuana for personal use (DPA, p. 1). Marijuana accounts for hundreds of thousands of arrests each year. The listing of marijuana as a Schedule I drug is a clear example of the intention of the federal government to make sure popular drugs carry the most severe penalties.

Although President Nixon instituted the policy, President Reagan expanded the reach of the War on Drugs, leading to skyrocketing rates of incarcerationThe number of people behind bars for nonviolent drug law offenses increased from 50,000 in 1980 to over 400,000 by 1997 (DPA, p. 1). The enactment of the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986 introduced a mandatory minimum sentence punishment for possession and use of controlled substances. Jail sentences varied from 5-10 years based on the drug and amount in possession (PBS, p.1). The idea behind mandatory minimum sentences was to encourage the government to prosecute high-level drug offenders. However, the amounts that triggered a substantial sentence were often lower than those high-level drug trafficking (PBS, p. 1).

This policy spiraled the prison population during the 1980s, and prison beds were filled up for minor offenses. Additionally, laws such as Californias three strikes law amplified the process. In fact,

the law imposed a life sentence for almost any crime, no matter how minor, if the defendant had two prior convictions for crimes defined as serious or violent by the California Penal Code. According to official ballot materials promoting the original Three Strikes law, the sentencing scheme was intended to keep murders, rapists, and child molesters behind bars, where they belong. However, today, more than half of inmates sentenced under the law are serving sentences for nonviolent crimes (Stanford, p. 1).

The three strikes law sentenced people for victimless drug crimes, and in a two-decade span, millions of people have been incarcerated. The data from the Stanford Three Strikes Project shows that more minorities were targeted and charged with small crimes, and these often added up to three total charges, sentencing them to life in prison. Through public pressure, and the passing of Proposition 36, the three strikes law has been struck down. In the first eight months after the enactment of Proposition 36, over 1,000 prisoners were released from custody. Of the inmates released, the recidivism rate stands at less than 2 percent, a number well below state and national averages (Stanford, p. 1).

The law imposed a life sentence for almost any crime, no matter how minor, if the defendant had two prior convictions for crimes defined as serious or violent by the California Penal Code. According to official ballot materials promoting the original three strikes law, the sentencing scheme was intended to keep murders, rapists, and child molesters behind bars, where they belong. However, today, more than half of inmates sentenced under the law are serving sentences for nonviolent crimes (Stanford, p. 1).

The War on Drugs only purpose is to control and imprison, not protect. Policies that have given support to the War on Drugs are detrimental to society, and only provided a new system of fueling private prisons with inmates in the post-Jim Crow era. The War on Drugs increased federal prison population exponentially, by almost 790-percent, according to the ACLU. Fareed Zakaria explains:

Mass incarceration on a scale almost unexampled in human history is a fundamental fact of our country today, writes the New Yorkers Adam Gopnik. Overall, there are now more people under correctional supervision in Americamore than 6 millionthan were in the Gulag Archipelago under Stalin at its height So something has happened in the past 30 years to push millions of Americans into prison. That something, of course, is the War on Drugs. Drug convictions went from 15 inmates per 100,000 adults in 1980 to 148 in 1996, an almost tenfold increase. More than half of Americas federal inmates today are in prison on drug convictions. In 2009 alone, 1.66 million Americans were arrested on drug charges, more than were arrested on assault or larceny charges. And 4 of 5 of those arrests were simply for possession (Zakaria, 2012. p, 1).

Further, as ACLU data shows, a black man is 3.73 times more likely to be arrested for marijuana possession than a white person is, despite approximately equal rates of drug use. Additionally, NAACP data demonstrates African Americans constituted nearly 1 million of the total 2.3 million incarcerated population incarcerated at nearly six times the rate of whites. The model of using prison as a means to suppress African Americans is an old algorithm used post-Civil War. The new model may look different and not be discriminatory on the surface, but accomplishes the same goal.

Incarceration as the method to regulate drug use radically changed the prison culture in our society, institutionalizing a prison industrial complex. Rachel Herzing of Public Research Associates defines the prison industrial complex as the overlapping interests of government and industry that use surveillance, policing, and imprisonment as solutions to what are, in actuality, economic, social, and political problems (Herzing, p. 1). Private prisons are a stark example of this partnership between government and industry. The increase in incarceration rates resulted in a new demand for more facilities, which spurred the growth of private prisons, leading to institutionalization of an entire for-profit supply chain, from building prison infrastructure to providing food for inmates to day-to-day management.

The prison industrial complex has its origin in the Rockefeller drug laws. Brian Mann argues that there is link between the War on Drugs and the Rockefeller drug laws of the 1970s, named after their champion, Gov. Nelson Rockefeller, which put even low-level criminals behind bars for decades. Those tough-on-crime policies became the new normal across the country (Mann, 2013, p. 1). The system of addressing possession and use of narcotic drugs through the penal system led to the social acceptance of get tough on crime philosophy. It was widely believed that longer prison systems would discourage individuals from using drugs. This social perception legitimized the War on Drugs and the institutionalization of private prisons.

In addition, this process of criminalization of drugs, where entire groups of people of particular social circumstances (were) targeted by law enforcement for surveillance, punishment, and control (Herzing, p. 1), was a tool to subjugate lower class citizens, in particular African Americans. Michelle Alexander, in her path-breaking work The New Jim Crow, compares criminalization of drugs with Jim Crow laws. For instance, she argues that systems of segregation such as denial of voting rights present during Jim Crow were perpetuated through the War on Drugs. She argues that an extraordinary percentage of black men in the United States are legally barred from voting today due to an unfair criminal justice system that has mass imprisoned and classified an incredible number of African Americans as felons for victimless drug charges (Alexander, 2010, p. 1). Once youre labeled a felon, the old forms of discrimination- employment discrimination, housing discrimination, denial of the rights to vote, denial of educational opportunity, denial of food stamps and other public benefits and exclusion from jury service- are suddenly legal we have not ended racial caste in America; we have merely redesigned it (Alexander, 2010, p. 2). While the Civil Rights Act aimed to bring in racial equality, it failed to address racial prejudice.

For over two centuries racial biases have been entrenched in law. The country was formed under slavery, when African Americans were considered to be three- fifths of a man, not a real, whole human being (Alexander, 2010, p. 26). Following the abolition of slavery, the suppression of African Americans continued through Jim Crow laws. The Civil Rights Act formally dismantled the Jim Crow system of discrimination in the public sphere- public accommodation, employment, voting, education, and federally financed activities. The Supreme Court in Heart of Atlanta Motel v. U.S. (1964) upheld the civic rights of African Americans under the Commerce Clause. Yet, as Alexander argues, the patterns of discrimination continued even after the enactment of the Civil Rights Act. She explains that after the dismantlement of Jim Crow laws,

conservative whites began, once again, to search for a new racial order that would conform to the needs and constraints of time. This process took place with the understanding that whatever the new order would be, it would have to be formally race- neutral- it could not involve explicit or clearly intentional race discrimination. A similar phenomenon had followed slavery and Reconstruction, as white elites struggled to define a new racial order with the understanding that whatever the new order could be, it could not include slavery. Jim Crow eventually replaced slavery, but now it too had died, and it was unclear what might take its place. Barred by law from invoking race explicitly, those committed to racial hierarchy were forced to search for new means of achieving their goals according to the new rules of American Democracy (Alexander, 2010, p. 40).

The War on Drugs provided the new platform to discriminate against African Americans without officially banning their rights through written laws like in the Jim Crow era. Thus, racism did not end but was rather re- embodied through another outlet. The War on Drugs could finally justify an all-out war on [an] enemy that had been racially defined years before (Alexander, 2010, p.52). The War on Drugs became a chief medium through which private prisons were filled through disproportionate targeting of African Americans. For instance, despite a US Sentencing Commission report that found racial bias in the sentencing of African Americans on crack and cocaine charges, Congress dismissed the review of the process. Additionally, the inability to challenge discriminatory practices in the Court further legitimized the process. The court has closed the courthouse doors to claims of racial bias at every stage of the criminal justice process, from stops and searches to plea bargaining and sentencing, mass incarceration is now off limits to challenges on the grounds of racial bias (Alexander, 2010, p. 194).

A good example showing the Supreme Courts reluctance to address race issues is the landmark case McCleskey v. Kemp (1987). In 1978, the petitioner, a black man, was convicted in a Georgia trial court of armed robbery and murder, arising from the killing of a white police officer during the robbery of a store. An all-white jury recommended the death penalty on the murder charge. The trial court followed the recommendation, and the Georgia Supreme Court affirmed. The petitioner sought habeas corpus relief in Federal District Court. His petition included a claim that the Georgia capital sentencing process was administered in a racially discriminatory manner in violation of the Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments. The statistical data provided by McCleskey showed a bias towards jurors to sentence African Americans to death compared to whites, clearly showing that in the over 2,000 murder cases that occurred in Georgia during the 1970s black defendants who killed white victims had the greatest likelihood of receiving the death penalty (Justia).

However, the Court rejected the petitioners claims by stating that statistics were insufficient to demonstrate unconstitutional discrimination under the Fourteenth Amendment or to show irrationality, arbitrariness, and capriciousness under the Eighth Amendment. This particularly shows that proving racial discrimination is difficult in the court system, as many times discrimination is not a cause and effect relationship, but rather a correlation based on the question of disproportionate burden.

The system of filling of prisons through criminalization of drugs has evolved hand in hand with a surveillance system. Since the landmark Terry v. Ohio case of 1968, the Court has substantially expanded police power to search and seize, limiting the right to privacy of individuals.

Prior to 1968, it was generally understood that the police could not stop and search someone without a warrant unless there was a probable cause to believe that the individual was engaged in criminal activity a basic Fourth Amendment principle (Alexander, 2010, p. 63). Terry expanded the notion of warrantless search to include suspicious behavior as a preventive measure. In this case, which challenged the arrest of three men in front of a jewelry store without probable cause, the Supreme Court affirmed that police officers could interrogate and frisk suspicious individuals without probable cause for an arrest, providing police officers can articulate a reasonable basis for the stop and frisk. When an officer of the law has the ability to confront an individual merely based on whatever he believes constitutes suspicion, it leaves society vulnerable. When the means to justify a warrantless search are endless, it creates a less free society. For instance, the Terry rule was used to target African Americans for sporting flat brim hats and hooded sweatshirts. Although the objective of Terry v. Ohio was to prevent serious crime, it has implications beyond this case as it radically expanded police authority to investigate crimes where there is a reasonable basis for suspicion (ACLU, p. 1).

Terry v. Ohio was the stepping-stone towards a diminished right of privacy and enabled the establishment of a surveillance system. In later cases such as Whren v. United States (1996), the Court further limited the privacy rights of individuals against warrantless searches and seizure in the Fourth Amendment by allowing law enforcement the ability to stop a person in a motor vehicle based on pretext. As Professor Alexander claims, the pretext of a traffic stop (was) motivated not by any desire to enforce traffic laws, but instead motivated by a desire to hunt for drugs in the absence of any evidence of illegal drug activity pretext stops have received the Supreme Courts unequivocal blessing (Alexander, 2010, p. 67).

She explains the greater implication of Whren is that diminished rights and mass incarceration gained legal recognition. Alexander notes that in Whren, specifically:

Although the officers werent really interested in the traffic violation, they stopped the pair anyway because they had a hunch they might be drug criminals according to the officers the driver has a bag of cocaine in his lap On appeal, Whren and Brown challenged their convictions on the ground that pretextual stops violate the Fourth Amendment. They argued that because of the multitude of applicable traffic and equipment regulations, and difficulty of obeying all traffic rules perfectly at all times, the police will nearly always have an excuse to stop someone .. Allowing the police to use minor traffic violations as a pretext for baseless drug investigations would permit them to single out anyone for drug investigation without any evidence that kind of arbitrary police conduct is precisely what the Fourth Amendment was intended to prohibit. The Supreme Court rejected their argument (Alexander, 2010, pp. 67-68).

Together Terry v. Ohio and Whren v United States paved the path of warrantless searches that led to increase in police surveillance and mass incarceration. With no privacy from searches on foot or in a vehicle, and with no requirement that any evidence of drug activity actually be present before launching a drug investigation police officers judgment would be influenced by racial stereotypes (Alexander, 2010, p.108). Together, the War on Drugs and expanded police power to stop and frisk built a perfect machine to mass target and incarcerate. Law enforcement stopped individuals based on previous bias or profiling and justified that action through various pathways like a routine traffic stop.

Additionally, Illinois v. Caballes (2005) shows the extent to which the surveillance power of police has been expanded. In this case, Roy Caballes was stopped for speeding by a state trooper in Illinois. During the stop, the trooper noticed an Atlas, an air freshener, and some suits in the car. He asked Caballes for permission to search the car and was denied. A second trooper arrived at the scene with a drug-sniffing dog. While walking around the car, the dog alerted the trooper to the presence of drugs. The first trooper searched the car and found marijuana in the trunk. Caballes was arrested, tried, and convicted of a narcotics offense. The Illinois Supreme Court reversed the trial courts decision, arguing that use of the dog unjustifiably enlarge[ed] the scope of a routine traffic stop into a drug investigation. The state of Illinois appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court [which found] a dog sniff conducted during a concededly lawful traffic stop that reveals no information other than the location of a substance that no individual has any right to possess does not violate the Fourth Amendment (ABA, p. 1).

The jurisprudence on search and seizure clearly demonstrates a shift in law from protection of constitutional rights to privacy to legitimizing surveillance through stop and frisk as a justified means to conduct a search. Terry and Whren chipped away at the Fourth Amendments protection from warrantless search and seizure, which is inherently a right to privacy. Furthermore, in the 2002 case Lockyer v. Andrade the Court upheld the constitutionality of mandatory sentencing laws. In Lockyer v. Andrade, the jury found Andrade guilty and then found that he had three prior convictions that qualified as serious or violent felonies under the three strikes regime. Because each of his petty theft convictions triggered a separate application of the three strikes law, the judge sentenced him to two consecutive terms of 25 years to life.

Andrade appealed his conviction, which was overturned by the Ninth Circuit. The Supreme Court found that the Ninth Circuit was incorrect and Andrades double life sentence was not in violation of the Eighth Amendments cruel or unusual clause. The Supreme Court could have dismantled Californias three strike law. Many would argue that two 25 years to life sentences for petty theft seems quite cruel and unusual. Upholding mandatory sentencing laws as constitutional has also added to mass incarceration. Alexander explains that mandatory sentencing laws are frequently justified as necessary to keep violent criminals off the streets, yet those penalties are imposed most often against drug offenders and those who are guilty of nonviolent crime (Alexander, 2010, p. 91). Although Andrade did not commit a drug crime, the decision to uphold mandatory sentencing laws has allowed the incarceration of individuals to long sentences for drug and non-drug related offenses.

The most recent case that comments on the Fourth Amendment is Rodriguez v. United States, decided on April 21st, 2015. It reversed the precedent that was set in the case discussed above, Illinois v. Caballes. In Caballes, the court legalized the use of drug-sniffing dogs for routine traffic stops. Justice Ginsburg delivered the majority opinion:

This case presents the question whether the Fourth Amendment tolerates a dog sniff conducted after completion of a traffic stop. We hold that a police stop exceeding the time needed to handle the matter for which the stop was made violates the Constitutions shield against unreasonable seizures. A seizure justified only by a police-observed traffic violation, therefore, become[s] unlawful if it is prolonged beyond the time reasonably required to complete th[e] mission of issuing a ticket for the violation.

Ginsburgs explanation is vintage Fourth Amendment protection of privacy against illegal search and seizure. Because waiting for a drug-sniffing dog surpasses the usual time for a routine police stop, it falls under the unreasonable clause of the Fourth Amendment. This decision is the first in decades to put some sort of limit on police and unreasonable searches, but there are still some questions that are left unanswered. How long is too long in regards to whats considered a reasonable time limit on a traffic stop? Regardless of the time restraint, Rodriguez can be viewed as a win towards resurrecting the power of the Fourth Amendment and it will remain to be seen how the Court rules from this point forward.

Since the beginning of the War on Drugs, the Court has dwindled the Fourth Amendment to coincide with an over empowering police force. As the Fourth Amendment protection from illegal search and seizure dwindled, it allowed for more arrests to be made as the Court legitimized policies that condone no knock warrants. The diminished right has opened the door for police officers to invade peoples property, whether that is in a vehicle or somebodys backpack on the street, with the aim to find drugs to make an arrest. This transgression has opened the door to mass incarceration.

Further, the pattern of arrests in stop and frisk cases also demonstrates that police arrests are led by profiling of individuals based on race and ethnicity. NYPDs stop and frisk policy is a case in point about expansive surveillance power of police and racial bias. The policy, modeled after Wilson and Kellings broken windows theory on redirecting policing to address disorder in society as a preventive measure, targeted African Americans and Latinos. The NYPDs own reports on its stop-and-frisk activity confirm what many people in communities of color across the city have long known: the police are stopping hundreds of thousands of law abiding New Yorkers every year, and the vast majority are black and Latino (NYCLU, p. 1). The NYCLU report found that from 2002 to 2011 black and Latino residents made up close to 90 percent of people stopped, and about 88 percent of stops more than 3.8 million were of innocent New Yorkers. Even in neighborhoods that are predominantly white, black and Latino New Yorkers face the disproportionate brunt (NYCLU, p. 1).

You tube videos posted by anonymous bystanders and victims stories corroborate the data on NYPSs unconstitutional practices. In a letter to the New York Times, titled Why Is the N.Y.P.D. After Me?, Nicholas K. Peart, a victim of stop and frisk procedures, recalled his experience: When I was 14, my mother told me not to panic if a police officer stopped me. And she cautioned me to carry ID and never run away from the police or I could be shot. In the nine years since my mother gave me this advice, I have had numerous occasions to consider her wisdom (Peart, 2011, p. 1). In his letter, Peart included an instance of how a police officer pulled a gun on him, on his 18th birthday at 96th Street and Amsterdam Avenue in Manhattan, even as he was just sitting on a chair by the street. He writes that the experiences

changed the way I felt about the police. After the third incident I worried when police cars drove by; I was afraid I would be stopped and searched or that something worse would happen. I dress better if I go downtown. I dont hang out with friends outside my neighborhood in Harlem as much as I used to. Essentially, I incorporated into my daily life the sense that I might find myself up against a wall or on the ground with an officers gun at my head. For a black man in his 20s like me, its just a fact of life in New York (Peart, 2011, p. 1).

The role of the police is to protect and deter crime. When the police instead instill a sense of fear into African American people, they are accomplishing the same agenda as the Jim Crow laws of the South did generations ago.

Mass incarceration and surveillance policing promoted through the War on Drugs and the prison industrial complex have many impacts on society as well. Institutionally, they militarized the police and justified excessive use of force. Although done in the name of security, as public protests of the last two years show, this has resulted in an erosion of trust in society. Communities, especially minorities, are fearful of the police. Socially, the arrests have collateral effect on family structure. Many families are broken apart due to the economic, social and moral burden of incarceration. Young children are especially vulnerable when a parent or sibling is incarcerated. Child Trends, a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization talks about the ill impacts of mass incarceration on childrens mental health. Their study shows that about 1.5 million minor children have a parent (mostly fathers) incarcerated in state or federal prison in the United States, and there is significant variation along racial and ethnic lines:

One in every 15 African American children has a parent in prison, compared with 1 in every 42 Hispanic children and 1 in every 111 white children. But all of these children are more likely than their peers to exhibit academic difficulties, emotional problems, and antisocial behavior. In fact, it seems that incarceration, by itself, places children and families at increased riskabove and beyond the influence of parental mental health, educational, and employment issuesfor a number of negative outcomes including family instability, poverty, and aggressive behavior. Examination of national data on children of unmarried couples in urban settings has revealed that, compared with other similarly-vulnerable children, those who have experienced parental incarceration are 40 percent more likely to have an unemployed father; 32 percent more likely to have parents living separately; 25 percent more likely to experience material hardship; and 44 percent more likely to exhibit aggressive behavior (Child Trends, 2013, p. 1).

Mass incarceration has had discernible impacts in poor and minority communities who have been disproportionately impacted by drug enforcement strategies (Stevenson, 2011). The negative impacts include felon disenfranchisement laws, displaced children and dependents, increased rates of chronic unemployment, destabilization of families and increased risk of re-incarceration for the formerly incarcerated (Stevenson, 2011, p. 1).

Even more disturbing is that politicians and the general public do not perceive how high incarceration rates in poor communities of color tear apart the very social relationships that offer the best opportunity to nurture the well-being of our children and ultimately the common good of society. The effects of incarceration for an individual are well documented. These include: earning less money over the course of a lifetime (by age 48, the typical former inmate has earned $179,000 less than if he had never been incarcerated), finding it harder to stay employed, being less likely to become married, and highly likely to suffer a wide range of medical and psychological problems. And for mothers who raise a child of an incarcerated father, they face multiple challenges, including, but not limited to, disruptions in parenting, inability to supervise children adequately, loss of role models, and need for public welfare supports that are increasingly difficult to gain (Mikulich, 2010, p. 1).

The disruption of social relationships due to the War on Drugs has left inner cities in dismay. The ghetto is now transformed into a super ghetto with all avenues of society decimated. When a system is set into place that continues to deteriorate poor ghetto areas, there is no room for class/social mobility, the very basis of our capitalist economic system. Sarah Shannon and Christopher Uggen argue that incarceration is responsible for the deterioration of ghettos. Citing the work of Wacquant (2001), they note that the extreme racial disparities in prison populations demonstrate that mass imprisonment is the fourth in a series of social institutions, starting with slavery, designed to control African Americans as a subordinate caste. Prior to the 1970s, policy makers attempted to ameliorate poverty and racial inequality through social welfare policies. Wacquant argues that neoliberal economic changes and the dwindling social safety net of welfare programs since that time has led to the hyper-incarceration of blacks as a means of managing and obscuring these disparities (Shannon and Uggen, p. 1).

From the New Deal up until the War on Drugs, social welfare had been the focus of the federal government. This philosophy brought the United States out of the Great Depression. President Roosevelt increased the federal government with the development of welfare programs like the Food Stamp Plan and The Resettlement Administration. These programs were set into place to help those in extreme poverty overcome their situation. Today, it is not the agenda of the federal government to help poverty stricken groups overcome their situation. Policies implemented through the War on Drugs look to target and imprison rather than address structural issues such as poverty. Roosevelts New Deal ideology is no longer the driving force of the federal government but instead there is a new system that profits from incarceration.

Studies show that imprisonment has a cyclical effect on individuals and do not lower drug use. Cassia Spohn and David Holleran, for example, discovered that there is no evidence that imprisonment reduces the likelihood of recidivism. Instead, we find compelling evidence that offenders who are sentenced to prison have higher rates of recidivism and recidivate more quickly We also find persuasive evidence that imprisonment has a more pronounced criminogenic effect on drug offenders than on other types of offenders (Spohn and Holleran, 2002, p. 1).

Tough on crime policies have not positively benefited society but in fact created social upheaval, as in schools and the workplace, the language of crime and punishment is used as a tool to interpret and address non-crime problems, a practice Simon (2007) calls governing through crime. Common in these analyses is that change in penal policy is driven by political strategy, not by an actual increase in crime (Shannon and Uggen, p. 1). At a larger level, the War on Drugs and mass incarceration have legitimized a crime focused, punitive culture in society.

The War on Drugs incarceration effects have validated the prison industrial complex and implicit racism in policing practices. Its one thing to say drugs are bad morally, socially, and politically. However, to take the next step and codify law that makes it okay to target and imprison an entire race amounted to a new Jim Crow era. The policy has denied entire communities the right to exercise their political rights and live safe and secure lives in the absence of fear of violence. Individual freedom, the bedrock of our democratic values, does not extend to African Americans in the same way as it does to others. The promises of the Civil Rights Act can only be fulfilled by addressing the injustices of our criminal justice system, more particularly the prison industrial complex supported through the War on Drugs.

Barnes, Harry Elmer. (1921). Historical Origin of the Prison System in America. Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology, 12(1), pp.35-60.

Bergner, Daniel. (2014). Is Stop-and-Frisk Worth It? The Atlantic. April 1st.

Center for Evidence- Based Crime Policy. (n.d.) Broken Windows Policing. George Mason University. Retrieved from:http://cebcp.org/evidence-based-policing/what-works-in-policing/research-evidence-review/broken-windows-policing/

Child Trends. (2013). Parents in Prison: Why Keeping Low- Level Drug Offenders in Prison Hurts Kids, and What the Justice Department Is Doing to Help. Child Trends, August 22.

National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. (n.d.). Criminal Justice Fact Sheet. Retrieved from:http://www.naacp.org/criminal-justice-fact-sheet/

Day, Dorothy. (1956). The Catholic Worker. November 2.

Drug Enforcement Agency. (n.d.). Drug Schedules. Retrieved from:https://www.dea.gov/druginfo/ds.shtml

Drug Policy Alliance. (2014). A Brief History of the Drug War. Drug Policy Alliance. Retrieved from:http://www.drugpolicy.org/facts/new-solutions-drug-policy/brief-history-drug-war-0

Gilmore, Kimberly. (n.d.). Slavery and Prison Understanding the Connections. History Is a Weapon. Retrieved from: http://www.historyisaweapon.com/defcon1/gilmoreprisonslavery.html

Herzing, Rachel. (n.d.). What is the Prison Industrial Complex? Political Research Associates. Retrieved from: http://www.publiceye.org/defendingjustice/overview/herzing_pic.html

The Howard League for Penal Reform. (n.d.). History of the Prison System. Retrieved from:http://howardleague.org/history-of-the-penal-system/

Klejment, Anne. (1986). Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker: a bibliography and index. New York: Garland.

Mikulich, Alex. (2010). ITS CRIMINAL! The Consequences of Mass Incarceration without Social Justice. Loyola University, New Orleans. December 1. http://www.loyno.edu/jsri/its-criminal-consequences-mass-incarceration-without-social-justice

N.P.R. (2013). The Drug Laws That Changed How We Punish. National Public Radio. February 14.

Peart, Nicholas. (2011). Why Is the N.Y.P.D. After Me? The New York Times. December 17.

Shannon, Sarah and Christopher Uggen. (n.d.). Incarceration as a Political Institution. University of Minnesota. Retrieved from: http://users.cla.umn.edu/~uggen/Shannon_Uggen_BW_10.pdf

Spohn, Cassia and David Holleran. (2002). The Effect of Imprisonment on Recidivism Rates of Felony Offenders: A Focus on Drug Offenders. Criminology, 40(2), pp. 329-358.

Stevenson, Bryan. (2011). Drug Policy, Criminal Justice, and Mass Imprisonment. Global Commission on Drug Policy. Retrieved from: http://www.globalcommissionondrugs.org/wp-content/themes/gcdp_v1/pdf/Global_Com_Bryan_Stevenson.pdf

Sterling, Eric. (n.d.). How Did It Come About that Mandatory Minimum Sentences for Drug Offenses Were Passed in 1986? Public Broadcast Station. Retrieved from:http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/snitch/primer/

New York Civil Liberty Union. (n.d.). Stop-and-Frisk Campaign: About the Issue. Retrieved from:https://www.nyclu.org/en/issues/racial-justice/stop-and-frisk-practices

PBS. Frontline. (n.d.). Thirty Years of Americas Drug War: A Chronology.

Stanford Law School. Justice Advocacy Project. (n.d.). Three Strikes Basics. Retrieved from:https://law.stanford.edu/stanford-justice-advocacy-project/three-strikes-basics/

Zakaria, Fareed. (2012). Incarceration Nation. Time Magazine. April 2.

[1] John Stern is a Law and Society graduate from Ramapo College, currently a law student at St. Johns University School of Law.

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The War on Drugs and Jim Crows the Most Wanted: A Social ...

Adam Granduciel has taken an open-hearted approach to arena-filling glory. The War On Drugs frontman might cut the rocknroll stereotype all flailing locks and plaid shirts- but hes never bought into the mythology that comes with the role. Instead, the 42-year-old has mastered his craft with obsessive drive, figuring out lifes bumpy road by way of soul-searching Americana.

Granduciel and co. had rounded off a world tour for 2017s A Deeper Understanding, which picked up a Grammy Award for Best Rock Album, when the pandemic arrived luckily Granduciel was already seeking space to create. He also became a father during this period; hes always made deeply spiritual music, so it makes sense the two life-changing events found him more reflective than ever before on fifth album I Dont Live Here Anymore.

The sentiment is confirmed by moving opener Living Proof, which kicks the journey off with reflective keys and a plaintive strum of guitar. With the lyrics, Ive been to the place / That youve tried escaping / I cant recall / Im always changing / Love overflowing, its a hushed ballad that pulses with all the romance and reflection weve come to expect from him.

Harmonias Dream is the first of many blistering anthems that pack the confidence of a band at the peak of their career. It doesnt sound like Granduciel was writing with the bands main stage status in mind, but the album is loaded with tracks ready to conquer them. Take Wasted, a triumphant Springsteen-channeling anthem that feels like American adventure on the open road. Old memories wash up like bittersweet waves on the title track as he softly recalls: We went to see Bob Dylan / We danced to Desolation Row / But I dont live here anymore / And Ive got no place to go. And Rings Around My Fathers Eyes is a soul-stirring anthem that handles the emotions of fatherhood and the depth of human connection.

Its fitting that the album closes with Occasional Rain. The song captures the overarching message at the heart of these songs, which is ultimately about embracing all the stumbles in life. Granduciel courses with all the romance thats made The War On Drugs such an authentic voice: Aint the sky just shades of grey / Until youve seen it from the other side? / Oh, if loving yous the same / Its only some occasional rain.

Some lose sight of their heart and soul on the route to global stardom others take it in their stride. Granduciel recently told NME that music should be filled with wonder, and theres magic everywhere you look on this triumph of an album.

Release date:October 29

Record label:Atlantic

Excerpt from:

The War On Drugs I Dont Live Here Anymore review: a soul-stirring epic - NME

After A Deeper Understanding, Adam Granduciel couldnt really take it any further. It sounded like he had thrown everything at his follow-up to the War On Drugs 2014 breakthrough Lost In The Dream. Runtimes sprawled. The songs were incredibly dense with layers and ideas, sometimes almost impenetrably so. It was the same hallucinogenic spin on rock music lost to the dust of time, but now Granduciel had the ability to make it even more epic in scale. If hed tried to do that again, you could imagine diminishing returns, or music becoming inert under its own weight. So instead, he took the precise sonic wizardry hed learned on Lost In The Dream and A Deeper Understanding, and he applied it to music that is more scaled back and direct. The War On Drugs have faced high expectations before, but perhaps never as feverish as now, following the steady ascent of Lost In The Dream into the Grammy-winning major-label debut A Deeper Understanding. With I Dont Live Here Anymore, theyve delivered on the hype once more.

I Dont Live Here Anymore is essentially the exact album I hoped Granduciel would make after the last two. Much has already been made of the idea that, after years of Granduciel dubiously trying to refute his perfectionist reputation even as he released albums as meticulous as A Deeper Understanding, I Dont Live Here Anymore is a looser record. It is, in some ways raw and fleeter of foot compared to its predecessor. But Granduciel still crams a ton of ideas into these songs, its just that hes streamlined and compacted it all. The result is Drugs music that is synthier, brighter, punchier. It feels like a marriage of the earlier albums ranginess and the later albums impeccable atmospheres, a summation and a new chapter all at once.

Living Proof, the albums opener and lead single, is a quiet curtain rise and something of a feint. Its not entirely misleading: In its rough-hewn intimacy, it previews the more immediate iteration of the War On Drugs that exists here, and the fact that it came together live in the room aligns with the albums slightly more collaborative nature. But from there on out, I Dont Live Here Anymore is mostly in take-no-prisoners mode. Between reflective beginnings and endings, the album spends much of its time going for the jugular. This is music that plays like Granduciel was acutely aware that hed soon be headlining big festival stages and Madison Square Garden, and he had to come armed with the songs for it.

As a result, pretty much everything on this album hits and, save the title track, I Dont Live Here Anymores pre-release singles have done little to prepare you for it. As soon as the prologue of Living Proof concludes, I Dont Live Here Anymore fires off into the sky. First, its in prime Drugs territory, the psychedelic highway pulse of Harmonias Dream steadily gliding through more and more musical ideas until a synth riff midway launches the song into the stratosphere. I Dont Wanna Wait is a revelation: Ditching Boys Of Summer for Phil Collins, Granduciel crafts a creeping, electronic backdrop for a story of lovelorn lust that builds and builds to a massive chorus.

Victim is another marvel, leaning once more into the electronic elements of the Drugs sound for a moody, spacey track that eventually locks into a new groove and becomes more desperate and emphatic as it goes. You think the albums going to pause for a breath when Old Skin begins as a restrained piano song, but then halfway through guitars bubble up and suddenly the band erupts into a Tom Petty-esque rocker. Later on, Wasted fills the runaway train slot in the albums final act, akin to Baby Missiles and Burning. Really, the only gripe I could come up with about this passage of the album is that Change, while solid, is sort of an archetypal Drugs song at this point and its easy to imagine the album with Ocean Of Darkness having made the cut in its stead.

Sitting in the middle of that run, and at the core of the album literally and spiritually, is I Dont Live Here Anymore. And, holy shit where did that song come from? When I interviewed Granduciel last year, he mentioned hed recently written the song and was excited about it. Now we can see why. The War On Drugs have had bangers before, obviously. But theyve never had something quite like I Dont Live Here Anymore. Robbie Bennett provides a perfect drama-building synth riff, the band kicks into a rhythm that feels wistful but propulsive, Granduciel intones about long lost times. Its patient in arriving at the first chorus, and when it does, its one of the most powerful and infectious pieces of music Granduciel has ever put together. Theres a hypnotic, loopy quality to it, the way his and Lucius voices wrap around each other, almost slightly out of time with each other. With all those elements swirling together, the whole thing becomes a rushing, romantic endorphin overload.

Theres at least one new element at play that helps elevate the song. Granduciel, with his voice usually settling into a Dylanesque reediness, has often let the instruments do the heavy cathartic lifting on the biggest Drugs songs. Think the instrumental choruses of Come To The City and Red Eyes, the guitar break of Strangest Thing, the celestial outros of Under The Pressure and An Ocean In Between The Waves. This band has never lacked hooks, and there are a lot of hooks on I Dont Live Here Anymore. But now, Granduciel is up there belting more of them himself. What I keep having to re-learn every record is how to be a singer, he told Pitchfork. But once I pushed it, or sang an octave up, that really helped the song explode. When I noticed that, I was like, I have to push the song. His realization was spot-on, and its exactly what makes songs like I Dont Wanna Wait and Old Skin so stunning. And its very much what makes I Dont Live Here Anymore so unshakeable, so moving. It just might be the best song this band has ever recorded.

Theres something else new about I Dont Live Here Anymore: Granduciel is more dialed-in and focused as a lyricist than hes ever been. Through much of the War On Drugs existence, Granduciels favored placeholder images, like the road and darkness and trains. For a while, that felt like part of the project: exhuming classic signifiers, and imbuing them with some new otherworldly quality. Thats still present on I Dont Live Here Anymore, though overall Granduciel is writing sharper and more specific words. Some are still imagistic, a starting point you can fill with your own meaning before the music takes it home; that, in his own words, has often been his intent. But at the same time, hes writing a Springsteen-worthy couplet like Is life just dying in slow motion/ Or growing stronger every day. Even the seemingly strange or vague lines are more evocative, like I was born in a pyramid/ By an old interstate.

In interviews, one of the main narratives spun around I Dont Live Here Anymore is that of Granduciel becoming a father. Having a child does seem to have altered him as a writer. In Rings Around My Fathers Eyes, he mulls over his own aging father and what is passed down to the next generation. In Old Skin, he reflects on having worked to chase an unidentified dream of his fathers, before it faded away. Theres an overarching sense of mortality, experiencing the miracle of parenthood mingling with an increasingly severe sense of times passage. Many of I Dont Live Here Anymores songs seem to contemplate years gone by, what has disappeared or is disappearing. Theyre building up his block into something unrecognizable in Living Proof and maybe hes been gone too long, but hell keep moving; he lingers on nostalgia for a warm moment at a Bob Dylan concert in the title track.

In a recent New York Times interview, Granduciel spoke about writing from a place of melancholy, that hes still learning how to be happy. When A Deeper Understanding was coming out, Granduciel described it as having a real sickness sound. But despite positive life changes like having a child and his band taking off, Granduciel seems to write from a more noticeably dark place on I Dont Live Here Anymore. At the very least, there is yearning strung throughout much of its songs I Dont Wanna Wait, Victim, and Wasted all try to reach back out to a lover across some new distance. Between losing faith in Harmonias Dream and the passing storms of closer Occasional Rain, you could interpret the album as wrangling with some kind of middle-aged and/or romantic turmoil. Last month, a tabloid story claimed that Granduciel and his partner Krysten Ritter had split; he denied it in the Times interview. Regardless of how you want to read into any of that, I Dont Live Here Anymore feels like an album checkered by something if not explicit loss, then the feeling of something very nearly slipping through your fingers. Its title, after all, is one of moving on present tense reflecting on only recent past tense.

Aside from bestowing one song its title, the word change appears constantly across I Dont Live Here Anymore. Mostly, from Change to I Dont Wanna Wait to Victim, its Granduciel singing that he doesnt want to or cant change, and then on Old Skin hes saying Lets suffer through the change. Even in the albums most transporting moments, the edges are haunted that I Dont Live Here Anymore chorus always ending with the conclusion that we all walk through this darkness on our own.

Yet the album seems to strive for a more optimistic end destination. Hints of life experiences both heavy and inspiring intertwine throughout, then the music seems to lift it up into something hopeful, transformative. Maybe those moments are being parsed, maybe theyre being purged. But at almost every turn, whatever ache is depicted lyrically is answered by music that is triumphant. In its final moments, Occasional Rain concludes the album with another thought to just keep moving: Storms come and go, but some foundations linger and carry you forward. So many of these songs sound like the sun finally rising on a new day and, ultimately, I Dont Live Here Anymore becomes the most affirming album in this bands catalog.

At this point, the War On Drugs have not made a bad album. You could probably find fans who would argue for each and every one of them as their favorite: some contrarian out there preferring the washed-out rough draft of Wagonwheel Blues, those in thrall of Slave Ambients kaleidoscopic loops, everyone who got onboard with the watercolor and grain of Lost In The Dream, those who saw A Deeper Understanding as a peak and culmination. I will tell you where Im at: I often held that soft spot for Slave Ambient, but Lost In The Dream became an incredibly important album to me. I respected A Deeper Understanding and mostly regarded it as Granduciels best work front to back, even if I couldnt find a way to engage with it on the same level myself. Ive been a fan of this band a long time, and they have made some of my favorite new music of my lifetime. And from where Im standing right now, having carried I Dont Live Here Anymore with me for months, across I dont know how many states and thousands of miles on the road it sounds like their best album to me. Its the one I was hoping they would make after A Deeper Understanding, but its also in many ways the album they always sounded like they could and should be building towards. Even if I Dont Live Here Anymore dwells on things fraying, for the War On Drugs its the sound of 10-plus years cohering, of everything coming together.

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Premature Evaluation: The War On Drugs I Don't Live Here Anymore - Stereogum

The War On Drugs have shared a final preview of their imminent new album I Dont Live Here Anymore listen to Change below.

The bands new record comes out on Friday (October 29) via Atlantic, and has previously been teased by its title track, whichfollowed on fromthe LPs first single Living Proof, while the band have also been sharing snippets of other tracks.

Listen to the new song, which sees vocalist and bandleader Adam Granduciel navigating the difficulties of changing as a person, below:

In a new interview with NME ahead of the release of the new album, Granduciel discussed the idea of growth and acceptance.

He said: I think theres an affirmation almost in understanding youre not perfect. Nobody is. you understand that you may be flawed, but you also understand what is true and important and at the end of the day only certain things really matter.

Granduciel also talked about how having his first child affected working on new music. Watching my son twist knobs, plug stuff in, play synths or harmonica it made me realise that this was something I was passing down, he said.

It reminded me that at any level the music should be filled with wonder. I was filled with that myself trying to get to the heart of a song on this record. When you find it, it excites you and you cant stop thinking about it.

The War On Drugs will tour I Dont Live Here Anymore in the UK and Ireland in April 2022 you can check out their forthcoming live dates below and find tickets here.

April 202211 O2 Academy, Birmingham12 The O2, London14 3Arena, Dublin16 First Direct Arena, Leeds18 Corn Exchange, Edinburgh

See the rest here:

The War On Drugs share Change, the final preview of their new album - NME