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: Richard Cañas, a veteran DEA official who headed counternarcotics efforts on the National Security Council under both George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton, can still recall the euphoria of those days. “ We were moving,” he says, “from success to success.” This is the story of how that momentary success turned into one of the most sustained and costly defeats the United States has ever suffered. It is the story of how the most powerful country on Earth, sensing a piñata, swung to hit it and missed. The Stoner Arms Dealers
2. 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.