Drug War

By Kurt Alec Mira The season of love came quickly, but not without its familiar surprises. In a span of 28 days, February reminded us that we are still humans who long for love amidst all heartbreaking affairs around us. Here are the events that defined the shortest month of…

The last I posted here was a year ago. I revisit last year’s list of what I thought was going to be interesting in 2022, and give you substantial updates on each what’s important about it, and how the significance of this topic has changed, from this view, a year…

Medellin, Colombia, June 2022. Juan Manuel Santos was the president of Colombia from 2010–2018. He campaigned and governed from the center-right. He rose under the graces of former president Alvaro Uribe, but broke free to form his own path, his own political identity. …

Alaska Governor Mike Dunleavy has been accused of many, many (many) things, but imagination isn’t one of them. So it was no surprise last week when the world’s foremost Big Tex impersonator unveiled what he hopes will be a signature piece of second-term legislation, a predictably draconian crime bill that…

How much blood has been split over a plant? How many children made into orphans, how many wives widowed, husbands widowered, all in the name of this plant? What plant? Marijuana, coca, opium poppies, etc. All can be used to make or are themselves illegal drugs. These arbitrary laws were…

Montel Williams means business. He always has. His popular syndicated TV show, which ran for seventeen years, was more or less the last real talk show in which he used his voice to connect real issues and real insight to an attentive public. There were no continual episodes in which…

On June 17, 1971, President Richard Nixon declared drugs “public enemy number one”. The media dubbed this policy: The War on Drugs. Several decades and trillions of dollars later, the war has done little to eradicate drugs but has succeeded in birthing drug cartels and turning America into a penal…

What David Simon and His Visionaries Got Wrong About The Drug War I have finally finished Dopesick. There is a lot I can say about it — the quality of the writing, the extraordinary level of the performance, what it ultimately says about the war on drugs. But I have…

For almost a third of a century, from 1930 until 1962, one man, Harry Jacob Anslinger (1892–1975), had the dominant role in shaping and enforcing U.S. policy about the use of drugs — other than alcohol and tobacco. Understanding his life and work is, therefore, a necessity for understanding the…