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: 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. 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: