The War on Drugs

The media has a drug problem, we need to stage an intervention. From 'face-eating cannibals on monkey dust' to people on bath salts 'ripping out their scrotum' to 'crack babies', newspapers keep making up drug stories.

In this episode of The War On Drugs, we think about what a legal market might actually look like. We look at different classes of drugs, exploring exactly how legal, regulated markets for heroin, cocaine and MDMA can be structured in order to protect users from harm.

From delays in access and research into cannabis-based medicines to driving a street-valium crisis in Scotland to critical pain-relief shortages across the global south, we explore how the War on Drugs impacts the medical world, causing massive, unnecessary suffering along the way.

For the past decade, the UK has been horrified by the phenomenon of County Lines – big city criminal groups using kids as young as 12 to take over the drug supply of smaller towns and villages.

Over the past decade or so, South American cartels have found a new way to get their product into the vast European marketplace – West Africa.

Cannabis has been legalized in Canada and many US states, and the trend looks set to continue. But just legalizing the drug is not a simple magic bullet. There are many complex issues of social justice and economic equality to be considered. We look at the lessons to be learned from places like Canada and Colorado and explore how we can get cannabis legalization right.

A world flooded with ultra-powerful synthetic opioids, people buying drugs from AI dealers, Mexican cartels pouring methamphetamine into Europe – there are some terrifying prospects on the horizon. And yet, the US, the birthplace of the War on Drugs itself, might just be beginning to turn a corner in how it thinks about this whole failed enterprise.

As the world has been transfixed by the opioid crisis in North America, another crisis, just as serious, has been unfolding almost unreported across Africa.

The Los Zetas Cartel changed the game in the Mexican War on Drugs. From the mid-2000s, they introduced an unprecedented level of violence – paramilitary-style executions, beheadings, bodies hung from bridges. But this was not simply psychopathic violence. These were special forces soldiers from the Mexican military – who had received specialized training from the US Army – who had defected, and used their training to become the most feared drugs cartel in Central America.

In the Mexican War on Drugs, the word, “cartel” gets thrown around a lot. The Sinaloa Cartel; The Gulf Cartel; La Famillia; Los Zetas. But who actually are these organisations which have inflicted grotesque violence on Mexico – and made billions of dollars in the process? How did they grow from small smuggling gangs, to mighty empires – and then splinter into separate factions each fighting one another?

All wars are fought with weapons, and the guns used to murder tens of thousands of people in the Mexican War on Drugs mostly come from America.

The rumours have circulated for decades. Did the CIA flood the inner cities of the US with crack cocaine in the 1980s? Was the American government actually responsible for the crack epidemic? Often dismissed as a conspiracy theory, but passionately believed by huge sections of the population – the idea that US intelligence agencies knowingly protected drug traffickers and played a role in bringing cocaine into the US is one of the most often repeated stories of the War on Drugs.

In 2007, federal police raided the Mexico city mansion of the high-flying businessman Zhenli Ye Gon. Inside they found $207 million dollars – over two tonnes of $100 dollar bills – along with luxury cars and automatic weapons.

We talk a lot about the human and financial costs of the War on Drugs – but this conflict is also having a serious environmental impact. From the military spraying pesticides onto the Amazon rainforest to suppress coca production, to MDMA producers dumping toxic chemicals into rivers in the Netherlands – the illegal drug trade is unquestionably bad for nature. But whose fault is this? All the drugs we take could be produced in much greener ways as part of a legal, regulated market. The problem is not that they are drugs, it’s that they are illegal. Is the war on drugs killing the environment?

From George Floyd to Terrence Crutcher to Trayvon Martin, again and again, the pattern is the same. Law enforcement officers kill an unarmed suspect, then divert the conversation to whether or not that suspect may have used drugs. It is the victim who is ultimately put on trial, rather than the officer who killed them.

In 2021, the world watched as the US military retreated chaotically from Afghanistan after 20-years of war. But in Afghanistan, America was defeated as much by the illegal heroin trade as by the Taliban itself. This is how heroin has fundamentally reshaped Afghanistan as a country for decades – and how you can’t understand the West’s failure there without it.

The UK is experiencing record drug deaths. Every year seems to break a new record in the number of people dying. But it wasn’t always like this. In the early 2000s, drug deaths were falling. What happened? This is how a faction in the British Conservative Party has completely restructured UK drug treatment, wrecking a system that had been considered world-leading – and how tens of thousands of people may have died as a result.