Portside

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.'

Lean on Me. Hottest Year on Record. Movie: Spare Parts. Why We Need to End the War on Drugs. The Koch's Mysterious Swiss Bank.

Koch Industries' Mysterious Swiss Bank. Black and White in the War on Drugs. The Courage of Stuart Scott. Why Are There No Women in The Hobbit? Jerusalem's Most Contested Neighborhood.

Reader Comments - Ten Points Towards a Two-State Solution; Students Walk Out Suburban Denver Schools; Indiana Autoworkers and Two-Tier Contracts; Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism; War on Drugs Damages Black Social Mobility; Freelancer Economy; Transformative Utopias and Human Rights; Climate Change Rally; Banned Books; Texas Schoolbooks; ISIS, Iraq and Syria; Freedom University Georgia; Immigrants; Cuba Training World's Doctors

Here’s the real shock: whites are actually more likely than blacks to sell drugs and about as likely to consume them.

Drug possession is the No. 1 reason people were in Cook County Jail last year. That’s been the case for the better part of the past decade. Since 2006, people have been booked and released more than 100,000 times for possession, according to jail records. And during that same time period, taxpayers have spent $778 million jailing people on the lowest-level possession charges.

Angela Davis on Prison Abolition, the War on Drugs, Why Social Movements Shouldn’t Wait on Obama, Solitary Confinement, Immigration Detention and "12 Years a Slave"