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: The Making of a Tragedy
F or Cañas and other drug warriors, the death of Escobar had the feel of a real pivot, the end of one kind of battle against drugs and the beginning of another. The war itself had begun during the Nixon administration, when the White House began to get reports that a generation of soldiers was about to come back from Vietnam stoned, with habits weaned on the cheap marijuana and heroin of Southeast Asia and hothoused in the twitchy-fingered freakout of a jungle guerrilla war. For those in Washington, the problem of drugs was still so strange and new in the early Seventies that Nixon officials grappled with ideas that, by the standards of the later debate among politicians, were unthinkably radical: They appointed a panel that recommended the decriminalization of casual marijuana use and even considered buying up the world’s entire supply of opium to prevent it from being converted into heroin. But Nixon was a law-and-order politician, an operator who understood very well the panic many Americans felt about the cities, the hippies and crime. Calling narcotics “public enemy number one in the United States,” he used the issue to escalate the culture war that pitted Middle Americans against the radicals and the hippies, strengthening penalties for drug dealers and devoting federal funds to bolster prosecutions. In 1973, Nixon gave the job of policing these get-tough laws to the newly formed Drug Enforcement Administration. By the mid-1980s, as crack leeched out from New York, Miami and Los Angeles into the American interior, the devastations inflicted by the drug were becoming more vivid and frightening. The Reagan White House seemed to capture the current of the moment: Nancy Reagan’s plaintive urging to “just say no,” and her husband’s decision to hand police and prosecutors even greater powers to lock up street dealers, and to devote more resources to stop cocaine’s production at the source, in the Andes.