Portside

Reading her life story will change the way you view the world. This is not simply a story about a formerly incarcerated woman dedicated to working for justice and freedom in the era of mass incarceration. It is a story of a black woman who, as she often tells me, is “nothing special” and yet has somehow managed to transform her own life as well as hundreds of lives around her. She has emerged as a leading figure in the movement to end mass incarceration.

If 'yes' votes prevail across the country, about 75 million people accounting for more than 23 percent of the U.S. population would live in states where recreational pot is legal

After decades of atrocities, the warlords were finally being held to account. Then the Americans stepped in.

“You want to know what this was really all about?” asked Watergate conspirator Ehrlichman. “The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities.”

The war on terror’s methods of mass surveillance and remote warfare are not unique. The US is also addicted to covert tools in its ‘war on drugs’, with disastrous consequences.

The decision to release 6,000 federal prisoners before the end of their sentence is a sign of the failure of the "war on drugs." But it’s no substitute for systemic reforms that cut off the cycle of mass incarceration. Congress still needs to pass comprehensive criminal justice reform," said Michael Collins, policy manager with the Drug Policy Alliance.

While hysteria and panic reign over the barbaric acts of the faraway Islamic State in Syria and Iraq, U.S. involvement in the “war on drugs” in a neighboring country gets just passing attention here. Curiouser and curiouser, hysteria and panic over Mexico only seem to rise when ISIS is reputed to be involved (at least in the fantasy worlds of various right-wingers). Consider it all part of the true mysteries of our strange American age of repetitive war.