The War On Drugs

over 50 billion a year spent. A corrupt DEA that continues to operate with impunity. Asset forfeiture abuse. A complete failure for all but those who profit directly from it. How do we end it? Can we?

fucking terrible Pitchfork favorites

lol

http://mic.com/articles/110344/14-years-after-portugal-decriminalized-all-drugs-here-s-what-s-happening

http://www.commondreams.org/news/2015/10/06/owning-failed-war-drugs-doj-release-wave-nonviolent-offenders it's a start i guess

Despite this terrible record of racialized punishment for political gain, the Clintons’ peculiar ability to reinvent themselves has erased memory of many of their past misdeeds. This is nowhere more true than within the African American community, in which a combination of Bill Clinton’s high-profile black political appointments, his obvious comfort in the presence of black people, and the cultural symbolism of his saxophone performance on Arsenio Hall has severely distorted the New Democrats’ true legacy for the black majority. After all, Toni Morrison, African American Nobel Laureate for literature, embraced Bill Clinton as America’s “first black president,” even if only in jest.

At a deeper structural level, the constraints of the two-party system have resulted in the political capture of black Americans inside the Democratic Party, in which no viable electoral alternative exists. Frederick Douglass said of the party of Lincoln during Reconstruction, “The Republican Party is the ship, all else is the sea.” And so it is, with Democrats in the era of mass incarceration. Equally important is the sharp class polarization inside the African American community in which a select group of black elites understands their fate as wholly bound up with the leadership of the Democratic Party. The Clinton presidency is a cautionary tale in this respect. The couple’s close relationships with Vernon Jordan and other black insiders offered an illusion of access that superseded any real concern for how hard-line anti-crime, drug war, and welfare policies affected poor and working class African Americans. As the movement against state sanctioned violence and for black lives grows, it is important to remember that proximity to power rarely equals real power.

https://newrepublic.com/article/129433/clintons-war-drugs-black-lives-didnt-matter

Harpers cover story

"I started to ask Ehrlichman a series of earnest, wonky questions that he impatiently waved away. “You want to know what this was really all about?” he asked with the bluntness of a man who, after public disgrace and a stretch in federal prison, had little left to protect. “The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and 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.”...

If we can summon the political will, the opportunity to establish a state monopoly on drug distribution, just as Rockefeller urged for alcohol in 1933, is now — before the genie is out of the bottle. Switzerland, Germany, and the Netherlands have successfully made heroin legally available to addicts through networks of government-run dispensaries that are divorced from the profit motive. The advantages of a state monopoly over a free market — even a regulated one — are vast....

The citizens of the U.S. jurisdictions that legalized marijuana may have set in motion more machinery than most of them had imagined. “Without marijuana prohibition, the government can’t sustain the drug war,” Ira Glasser, who ran the American Civil Liberties Union from 1978 to 2001, told me. “Without marijuana, the use of drugs is negligible, and you can’t justify the law-enforcement and prison spending on the other drugs. Their use is vanishingly small. I always thought that if you could cut the marijuana head off the beast, the drug war couldn’t be sustained.”"

https://harpers.org/archive/2016/04/legalize-it-all/

(that opening is no surprise to scholars of the period obviously, but str8 from the horse's mouth etc)

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/26/nyregion/in-a-striking-move-brooklyn-judge-orders-probation-over-prison-in-felony-drug-case.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=second-column-region®ion=top-news&WT.nav=top-news

A federal judge in Brooklyn, in an extraordinary opinion that calls for courts to pay closer attention to the impact of felony convictions on people’s lives, sentenced a young woman in a drug case to probation rather than prison, saying on Wednesday that the collateral consequences she would face as a felon were punishment enough.

The judge, Frederic Block of Federal District Court, said that the broad range of such collateral consequences served no “useful function other than to further punish criminal defendants after they have completed their court-imposed sentences.”

The judge noted that there were nearly 50,000 federal and state statutes and regulations that impose penalties, disabilities or disadvantages on convicted felons.

Such consequences — the denial of government benefits, ineligibility for public housing, suspension of student loans, revocation or suspension of driver’s licenses — can have devastating effects, he wrote, adding that they may also be “particularly disruptive to an ex-convict’s efforts at rehabilitation and reintegration into society.”

since when was the criminal justice system concerned at all with "rehabilitation and reintegration into society"? /trenchant

fucking shitheads

believe I saw Lost in the Dream in top10 music torrents on Pirate Bay - in spite of their "indie creds" they have massive crossover appeal

it's back, baby!

http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/news/a51734/joe-manchin-war-on-drugs/

we need a new slogan! i think...
"Just say no"

Manchin's daughter, Heather Bresch, is the CEO of Mylan, which produces opioids. His campaign committee also has received about $180,000 in donations from the pharmaceuticals/health products industry between 2011-2016

he knows the issue!

finger on the pulse!

i'm sure he can find a friend in Sessions btw

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/features/what-the-drug-war-could-look-like-under-president-trump-w457192

sounds good

The series, executive produced by Julian P. Hobbs, Elli Hakami and Anthony Lappé, is a standard TV documentary; there’s the amalgam of interviews, file footage and dramatic recreations. What’s not standard is the story told on camera by former Drug Enforcement Administration operatives as well as journalists and drug dealers themselves. (One of the reporters is Ryan Grim, The Intercept’s Washington bureau chief and author of “This Is Your Country on Drugs: The Secret History of Getting High in America.”)

There’s 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 television producer, 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 University professor 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 history that’s largely the greatest hits of the U.S. government’s 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....

https://theintercept.com/2017/06/18/the-history-channel-is-finally-telling-the-stunning-secret-story-of-the-war-on-drugs/

http://www.liverpoolecho.co.uk/news/ex-undercover-cop-says-widnes-11854487

Ex-undercover cop says Widnes heroin clinic showed decriminalisation works
Experiment shut down by US Government showed that prescribing heroin reduces crime and harm says ex-detective who infiltrated notorious drug gangs

I knew about Neil Woods but this is the first I'd heard about the Dr Marks and the Widnes experiment

Huge step forward by @BetoORourke. Anything less would perpetuate, not eliminate, the racial disparities that are the hallmark of prohibitionist policies. It’s heartening to see him continue his long history of leading on drug policy by embracing this. https://t.co/LGzKmpRiif

— Shaleen Title (@shaleentitle) September 19, 2019

Whataya know? Beto had a good idea! Let's hope it happens.

the second good idea he's stumped for

not going so well

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/07/health/fentanyl-xylazine-drug.html

That is one of the most horrifying things I have read. I’m glad they seated it firmly in the addicts’ and carers’ perspectives but my god, it’s unbearably sad.