Category Archives: War On Drugs

It was just 14 months ago when Pennington County Sheriff Kevin Thom told a state oversight council that meth use had gone off the charts and was out of control in parts of South Dakota.

Since then, the state has appropriated several hundred thousand dollars to bolster treatment opportunities, start a marketing campaign to warn youth and others of the dangers of meth, and to incentivize those on probation and parole to stop using a drug that is almost instantly addicting.

It appears, however, that these efforts have been akin to putting a finger in a dyke that is about to crumble. Meth use has skyrocketed in the past year and is often a key ingredient in violent crimes.

Now, however, meth and the madness and mayhem it creates has a rival and experts say its potency makes it far more dangerous. It's called fentanyl analog and should alarm everyone who is concerned about public health and public safety.

On Tuesday, the Lawrence County State's Attorney's Office announced that nine people were indicted on 50 felony drug charges. The primary drug cited was fentanyl analog. The investigation that led to the indictments came after two Spearfish residents, ages 23 and 38, died in January after using the synthetic opioid that the National Institute on Drug Abuse says is 50 to 100 more times potent than morphine, making it extraordinarily lethal.

The Lawrence County indictments come just one week after a 19-year-old Chamberlain man was arrested for possessing 20,000 fentanyl pills worth $500,000.

Until recently, fentanyl has been seen as primarily a big-city problem in a few states. In 2014, the Centers for Disease Control reported that 80 percent of fentanyl seizures occurred in 10 eastern states.

Since then, however, this killer drug has swept through the nation and now has surfaced in central and western South Dakota where many of us feel insulated from drug epidemics and their fatal consequences. The drug, however, has the potential to sweep through a state like a plague. In New Hampshire, for example, the number of fentanyl-related deaths climbed from 145 to 283 from 2014 to 2015, according to the National Drug Early Warning System. The state's population is only around 1.3 million people.

In Lawrence County, 37-year-old Eric Reeder now faces 20 felony charges, including two counts of first-degree manslaughter. Spearfish police said the suspect told them he ordered the fentanyl on the darknet and they were delivered to him. Also facing a first-degree manslaughter charge is 32-year-old Ashley Kristina Kuntz.

The Lawrence County Sheriff's Office, the Lawrence County State's Attorney's Office and Spearfish police are to be congratulated for pursuing this case and seeking convictions on manslaughter charges. It's become all too clear that our ongoing war on drugs has become a lot tougher and the stakes are even higher.

It is a problem that requires an immediate and strong response from law enforcement. In the meantime, we all have a duty to report any suspected drug activity to law enforcement and to do everything possible to protect our families and loved ones from this devastating drug.

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OURS: War on drugs just got tougher - Rapid City Journal

Written by Adil Akhzer | Chandigarh | Published:June 22, 2017 11:34 am

The Punjab government that promised eradication of drug menace to be on top of its agenda did not allocate any additional funds in its maiden budget worth Rs 1.18 lakh crore presented on Tuesday. Other than an amount of Rs 50 crore for establishment of primary rural rehabilitation and drug de-addiction centres in the state, the template of the budget set aside for health was nothing different than the one presented last year by the SAD-BJP government.

The government allocated Rs 1,358 crore for medical and public health in this fiscal year, which is 14.21 per cent higher than the allocations made the previous year. The allocation had nothing for fighting drugs.

Punjabs Finance Minister Manpreet Badal, during his budget speech on Tuesday said to restore the health of all the citizens of Punjab, while some new initiatives are being taken, some of the existing would be reinforced and remodelled to address the problem in a focused manner.

The previous government, in the last budget, had allocated funds for the similar heads. Then, the government had allocated Rs 708 crore for providing affordable and accountable health care services to the community, Rs 36 crore for ambulance services, Rs 25 crore for treatment of cancer patients, Rs 100 crore for medical insurance for the poor people, and Rs 150 crore for creation of cancer and drug de-addiction treatment infrastructure.

And on Tuesday, when Manpreet Badal presented his budget, he had almost similar things in the health sector. Of the allocated Rs 1,358 crore, Rs 777 crore were allocated for providing affordable and accountable health care services to the community under National Health Mission Programme, Rs 38 crore for providing emergency response services (108-Ambulance Services), medical helpline (104) in the State, Rs 30 crore for treatment of cancer patients under CM Cancer Relief Fund, Rs 100 crore for Universal Health Insurance for the under privileged people, Rs 50 crore for the creation of cancer and drug de-addiction treatment infrastructure, Rs 50 crore for the establishment of primary rural rehabilitation & drug de-addiction centres in the state and Rs 50 crore for tertiary care cancer centre.

Badal said new tertiary-level infrastructure was being created in the field of cancer and drug de-addiction in the state medical colleges. For cancer patients, he said tertiary care centres were being set up at the cost of Rs 50 crore in Fazilka and Hoshiarpur districts.

Badal also said a new medical college would be set up at SAS Nagar (Mohali) with an additional outlay of Rs 10 crore in 2017-18. Rs 100 crore has been provided for upgradation of infrastructure in the Government Medical College and Hospital, Patiala.

The government has planned to transform approximately 3,000 centres in rural and urban areas as Health & Wellness Clinics which will ensure preventive as well as limited curative services, he said.

Reacting to the budget, States Health Minister Brahm Mohindra told The Indian Express that he will set the priority about funds usage in the health sector, as per the needs of the people of Punjab.

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No additional funds for war on drugs - The Indian Express

When the United States first launched the War on Drugs nearly five decades ago, not even the cleverest conspiracy theorists could have imagined the far-reaching consequences the campaign would have around the world. From the CIA allowing drug traffickers to flourish in exchange for their assistance in toppling leftist leaders abroad to the deal made with an infamous Nazi, check out eight things you probably dont about the War on Drugs.

The CIA introduced LSD into the U.S. with the intention of developing the ability to control minds (as depicted in the 1962 Cold War thriller The Manchurian Candidate, which was based on a 1959 novel). Operation Midnight Climax, part of a mind control project (that ran for more than a decade, saw CIA-bankrolled prostitutes lure unwitting testers to a CIA safe house, where the unwitting participants would be dosed with the psychedelic drug and have their altered states observed through one-way glass.

Despite his brutal reign as The Butcher of Lyon, Klaus Barbie became a CIA asset after World War II. Like many high ranking Nazi officers, Barbie fled to South America after the war, where he became chummy with some of the most-fearful drug lords in history, including Pablo Escobar and Roberto Surez Gomz, one of the inspirations of Scarface. With the complicity of the CIA, Barbie and a team of Nazi mercenaries (known as the Fiancs of Death) helped Surez Gomz in his goal to overthrow the Bolivian government and turn it into a narco state.

The term War on Drugs entered the public consciousness in 1971, when President Nixon fired one of the opening salvos. Featuring a press conference and an anti-drug message to Congress, Nixon stated that drug abuse was worse than communism, and called drugs public enemy number one.

In an incident that became a famous photo op, singer Elvis Presley met President Nixon in the Oval Office on December 21, 1970. The crooner had asked for a badge from the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs (which later merged with other federal offices to become the Drug Enforcement Administration, or DEA). Elvis allegedly wanted the narc badge so he could bring his pharmacopoeia stash along on his travels.

According to legend, the late-19th century folk hero Jess Malverde was a Robin Hood-like figure, a generous bandit who stole from the rich and shared the bounty with the poor. Malverde was said to have been caught by authorities and hung. As punishment, his body was left hanging until his bones fell to the ground. He was adopted by drug traffickers as their patron saint to help spin the mythology that drug dealers were on the side of the peopletaking money from wealthy customers, and redistributing it amongst the poor.

Joaqun Guzmn Loera, aka El Chapo, started working in the Mexican poppy fields at the age of 9. He rose to become the head of the Sinaloa cartel and the most powerful drug lord in the world. In 2012, he was #1,153 on the Forbes Billionaires list (#10 in Mexico, and the next year he ranked 67th on Forbes Most Powerful People list.

The 2001 anti-terror law is more often used for drug prosecutions. With it, police can search and seize without probable cause or without your knowledge. Of the thousands of warrants issued under this act, less than one percent were for terrorism; over 75 percent were for drugs. Today, the Talibans largest source of funds is Afghanistans opium and heroin industry. The country is losing its battle against the makings of the powerful drugless than 1 percent of its staggering opium production is currently being seized. Every year since the U.S. first invaded Afghanistan, the production and monetary value of its opium crop has increased.

Around 2008, pain clinics dispensing synthetic opioid painkillers such as oxycodone and OxyContin began to pop up across the country. The American Pain Clinic, started by brothers Chris and Jeff George in South Florida, quickly became the nations largest pill mill (as they were known). These doc in a box sites, where doctor-patient consultations could last mere minutes, had lines around the block, and by 2009, nine out of 10 of their patients were from out of state. The stretch of I-75 leading from West Virginia, Kentucky and Tennessee to South Florida became known as Oxy Alley.

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8 Times America's War on Drugs Was Stranger Than Fiction - History

Fighting marijuana

prohibition isn't just about marijuana. It's also about fighting police brutality, militarization, and asset forfeiture. It's about reducing a U.S. prison population that is the biggest in the world. It's about civil rights and civil liberties.

The national law enforcement group LEAP connected the dots on much of that last week in announcing the organization's name change from Law Enforcement Against Prohibition to Law Enforcement Action Partnership. Maintaining the same acronym probably saves a little money on letterheads and the like.

Success in the LEAP agenda, however, saves lives.

"LEAP wanted to start focusing beyond just speaking out against the war on drugs and talking about criminal justice reform in general," says Steve Miller, a sergeant retiree from the Canton police department and a spokesman for LEAP. "My philosophy is the war on drugs is central to all of this. If we end the war on drugs we could solve a lot of other areas that are in need of reform in the criminal justice system."

LEAP is officially making a connection that many of its members made long ago. LEAP executive director Neill Franklin, a retired Maryland State Police officer, helped convince the national NAACP board to call for an end to the war on drugs back in 2011. Not that the Detroit chapter seems to have heeded that call.

Attorney Michelle Alexander was also in the working group that helped convince the NAACP to make that choice. Her book The New Jim Crow details how the war on drugs has crippled black communities by labeling marijuana users as criminals.

Despite that, the black community has been slow to come around on marijuana legalization. At least among the local institutions that tend to support or represent African-Americans. After all, they're working on civil rights, not drug user rights. And while there are plenty of black marijuana consumers (and inmates), there are precious few in the new and growing industry. Somewhere around 1 percent.

That's something the Rev. Al Sharpton mentioned in addressing the Cannabis World Congress and Business Exposition on Friday, June 16. In a pre-exposition statement told to The Huffington Post, Sharpton said, "I will challenge the cannabis industry and its distributors in states where it is legal to support civil rights movements and ensure that we are not disproportionately excluded from business opportunities."

Sharpton asserts a connection between the marijuana insurgency and civil rights movements here. They are indeed connected.

At a time when the idea of "fake news" is prominent in the national political discourse, the war on drugs stands out as a testament to the government's ability to just make things up and destroy lives from that base. Marijuana prohibition went nationwide in 1937 as a racist attack on Latinos and blacks. When President Richard Nixon launched the war on drugs it was in direct contradiction to the findings of his own Shafer Commission that recommended marijuana possession be decriminalized.

The success of that propaganda has been that even though the war on drugs has obvious detriments to black communities, most "responsible" members of those communities can't see it.

"The misconceptions out there are horrible and they are based on government lies that have been passed on for the past 80 years," says Miller. "The most dangerous part of the drug war is the drug war itself."

Can the government make things up and base life-altering policy on it? You bet it can. That's one reason why fighting marijuana prohibition is intricately tied to larger political struggles.

Here's how Dan K. Morhaim, a member of the Maryland House of Delegates, put it in a May Baltimore Sun opinion piece:

"It's a war that has claimed tens of thousands of casualties both at home and abroad, destroyed the lives of countless innocent bystanders, turned neighborhoods and in some cases whole regions into killing fields, filled prisons to overflowing with non-violent offenders, poisoned farmlands and forests, undermined police and government agencies, corrupted multinational banks and financial companies, funded overseas enemies and terrorists, and despite the tremendous cost in blood and treasure, has not advanced the cause for which the war was declared. Drug use has not measurably declined since President Nixon started that war in 1970.

"Not only has the war on drugs failed, it continues to make the situation worse. It's turned into a war on people, communities, institutions, and ultimately ourselves. A new strategy is needed."

That is what LEAP seeks. It's not a strategy aimed only at drugs. It's a holistic strategy aimed at what the war on drugs has done to our people, police forces, and our communities. Even the police know we need a new strategy. Unfortunately, they generally don't speak out about it until they have retired. It's their job to enforce the law, not change it.

Miller has totally flipped his script. Since retiring from the police force he has gotten a private investigator's license and works for attorney Mike Komorn, a prominent defender of people charged with marijuana offenses. He's also become a supporter of MI Legalize, part of the Coalition to Regulate Marijuana Like Alcohol that is running a petition initiative to get the question of recreational legalization in Michigan on the 2018 ballot. He believes legalizing marijuana will change the way police do their business.

"For one, we're taking a huge thing away from the police to go out and use that aggressive enforcement," says Miller. "Marijuana is an easy target with its smell. It's low-hanging fruit for the police. ... The majority of my career it was get in these crappy neighborhoods and stop every kid that's passing on the street. It's all centralized in the war on drugs getting people, searching people, get in their car, find drugs. Police go out and use that and create a hostile relationship. If marijuana is legal police can move on and do other things. Drug task forces spend a large amount of time on marijuana."

In 2014, according to FBI data, almost 90 percent of about 700,000 marijuana arrests were for possession alone. It seems that if police didn't have to spend their time chasing people for marijuana possession it would save them a lot of effort and expense, let alone pressure on the courts and jails.

LEAP is on the right path and it would do us well to get with it. Repealing marijuana prohibition will ease a lot of other problems that have grown in the prohibition industry. And maybe if police don't have that adversarial relationship with communities, there could be a lot more Officer Friendly types on the streets.

U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions has been making lots of noise about enforcing federal marijuana laws and belittling the idea that the plant has medicinal value. Maybe he should spend a little time studying up on recent science about cannabinoids. However, based on the amount of things he just couldn't remember during recent testimony to the U.S. Senate, information retention isn't one of his strong points.

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Ending the war on drugs - Detroit Metro Times

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mr. Sessions made remarks to the same effect.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The mass incarceration policy is also a fiscal disaster.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thats a catastrophe.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Who were the kids who eventually became the Coronado Company?

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

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

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

How did they get started?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Photo: Courtesy of HISTORY

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Paige: In what way?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Paige: Is it doing a good job of it?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Paige: Nothing.

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

7. Paige: Last question. You have grandchildren.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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