Under federal law, even legal marijuana is illegal. John Oliver explains why conflicting drug laws pose serious problems.
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.
How Prohibition helped create today's "War on Drugs" infrastructure.
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.
Led by executive producer and director José Padilha (2014's RoboCop), the series tracks the rise and fall of "King of Cocaine" Pablo Escobar, and the bloody drug war between the American Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) and Colombia’s notorious Medellín Cartel. A well-crafted blend of The Wire and Goodfellas, Narcos takes an unflinching look at one of the War on Drugs’ single most violent conflicts.
Billie Holiday had been effectively murdered by a conspiracy to break her, orchestrated by the narcotics police - but what could she do? At Billie's funeral, there were swarms of police cars, because they feared their actions against her would trigger a riot. In his eulogy for her, the Reverend Eugene Callender said: 'We should not be here. This young lady was gifted by her creator with tremendous talent . . . She should have lived to be at least eighty years old.'
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