Title: How America Lost the War on Drugs - Rolling Stone
Headings: How America Lost the War on Drugs
How America Lost the War on Drugs
After thirty-five years and $500 billion, drugs are as cheap and plentiful as ever. An anatomy of a failure
1. After Pablo
MarijuanAmerica: Inside America’s Last Growth Industry
2. The Making of a Tragedy
3. Brainiacs & Cold Warriors
4. The Young Guns
5. The Lobbyists & the Mad Professor
6. The General & the Adman
7. The Harvard Man
8. Helicopters & Coca
9. The Temple of Hope
10. The Return of Don Berna
11. The Water Balloon
12. The Privateers

Content: In 1986, trying to cope with crack’s corrosive effects, Congress adopted mandatory-minimum laws, which hit inner-city crack users with penalties as severe as those levied on Wall Street brokers possessing 100 times more powder cocaine. Over the next two decades, hundreds of thousands of Americans would be locked up for drug offenses. The War on Drugs became an actual war during the first Bush administration, when the bombastic conservative intellectual Bill Bennett was appointed drug czar. “ Two words sum up my entire approach,” Bennett declared, “consequences and confrontation.” Bush and Bennett doubled annual spending on the drug war to $12 billion, devoting much of the money to expensive weaponry: fighter jets to take on the Colombian trafficking cartels, Navy submarines to chase cocaine-smuggling boats in the Caribbean. If narcotics were the enemy, America would vanquish its foe with torpedoes and F-16s — and throw an entire generation of drug users in jail. Though many on the left suspected that things had gone seriously awry, drug policy under Reagan and Bush was largely conducted in a fog of ignorance. The kinds of long-term studies that policy-makers needed — those that would show what measures would actually reduce drug use and dampen its consequences — did not yet exist. When it came to research, there was “absolutely nothing” that examined “how each program was or wasn’t working,” says Peter Reuter, a drug scholar who founded the Drug Policy Research Center at the RAND Corp.
But after Escobar was killed in 1993 — and after U.S. drug agents began systematically busting up the Colombian cartels — doubt was replaced with hard data.