{\an8}- This is your brain.
{\an8}This is your brain after decades
of government propaganda,
{\an8}convincing you that police need more money
{\an8}to fight a war on drugs.
{\an8}Any questions?
{\an8}'Cause I have a lot.
{\an8}'Cause I have a lot.
{\an8}'Cause I have a lot.
{\an8}Let's play a game where
you have to put the answer
{\an8}in the form of a question.
{\an8}For copyright reasons, we'll
call this game, "Shmepordy."
{\an8}This policy increased
police militarization,
{\an8}killed countless innocent people,
{\an8}ballooned our prison population,
{\an8}gave police the right to
literally steal your stuff
{\an8}without charging you for a crime,
{\an8}all while achieving basically
none of its stated goals
{\an8}because it's based on a
politically calculated, racist lie.
{\an8}Ooh, what is the war on drugs?
{\an8}That is depressingly correct.
{\an8}And you know, it's a great question.
{\an8}What is the war on drugs?
{\an8}Well, for starters, a massive failure.
{\an8}And when I say that, I'm really
just paraphrasing the words
{\an8}of former Director of
National Drug Control Policy
{\an8}Gil Kerlikowske, who in 2010 said,
{\an8}"In the grand scheme, it
has not been successful.
{\an8}40 years later, the concern
about drugs and drug problems
{\an8}is, if anything, magnified, intensified."
{\an8}So, today we're going to talk about
{\an8}how the war on drugs is a lie.
{\an8}And how it's fueled some
of the worst aspects
{\an8}of modern policing.
{\an8}But first, let's get on the same page
{\an8}about a working definition.
{\an8}Because it's not really a war on drugs,
{\an8}it's more like a war on certain drugs.
{\an8}Actually, it's more like
a war on certain people
{\an8}framed by an alarmist
view of certain drugs,
{\an8}which just isn't as catchy.
{\an8}In 1971, Richard Nixon
declared his war on drugs,
{\an8}explaining that he viewed drug use
{\an8}as public enemy number
 No. 1 in the United States.
{\an8}He later went on to create
{\an8}the Drug Enforcement
Administration, or the DEA,
{\an8}an agency meant to serve
as a special police force
{\an8}focused on preventing the
use, sale, and smuggling
{\an8}of illegal drugs within the United States.
{\an8}When it was first started,
the DEA had 1,470 agents
{\an8}and a budget of less than $75 million.
{\an8}These days, the DEA
has nearly 5,000 agents
{\an8}and a budget of $2 billion.
{\an2}And it's not just the DEA.
{\an2}Today, we spend over $47 billion per year
{\an2}losing the war on drugs.
{\an8}Now, the name Nixon
isn't exactly synonymous
{\an8}with truth, justice, and virtuous motives,
{\an8}but in a 1994 interview, a
Nixon official openly admitted
{\an8}that the war on drugs was
not about stopping drug use,
{\an8}but rather, as a smear
campaign targeting communities
{\an8}Nixon viewed as his enemies.
{\an2}Nixon's former Domestic
Policy Chief John Ehrlichman
{\an2}told a reporter that the
Nixon campaign felt threatened by
{\an2}Cool, I guess it's a good
{\an2}thing future presidents
{\an2}from both parties decided
{\an2}that we really needed to spend
{\an2}over $1 trillion enhancing
{\an2}and enforcing this lie
{\an2}over the past 50 years.
{\an2}Man, that is a lot of zeros.
{\an8}So what has that spending achieved?
{\an8}Well, we could do an 800-part series
{\an8}on the failure of the war on drugs,
{\an8}but instead, let's start
with why your local police
{\an8}went from looking like this to this.
{\an8}To understand how we got here,
{\an8}we've got to go back to Ronald Reagan,
{\an8}who carried Nixon's legacy into the 1980s.
{\an8}In a June 2020 interview, Radley Balko,
{\an8}author of 
'Rise of the Warrior Cop,' said,
{\an8}"Reagan created these task
forces that are part military,
{\an8}part local police.
{\an8}And then, he starts sort
of informally instructing
{\an8}the Pentagon to make
surplus military equipment
{\an8}available to police departments to use.
{\an8}And this really kick-starts
the militarization."
{\an8}Which gives us the rise of SWAT
teams and no-knock warrants.
{\an8}Despite SWAT teams being created to deal
{\an8}with heavily armed criminals, like
{\an8}hostage-takers and snipers,
these paramilitary police forces
{\an8}are now primarily used
in searches and raids,
{\an8}most of which are related to non-violent
{\an8}drug-related crimes.
{\an8}And though numbers aren't easy to come by
{\an8}'cause the federal government
doesn't track SWAT raids
{\an8}and states aren't obligated to.
{\an8}An ACLU analysis showed that
about 35 percent of SWAT drug raids
{\an8}turned up contraband, while
36 percent of them turned up nothing,
{\an8}and 29 percent of SWAT reports didn't mention
{\an8}whether they found anything,
{\an8}which sounds like those
raids also found nothing.
{\an8}The '80s is also when
no-knock search warrants,
{\an8}a tactic that resulted in the murder
{\an8}of Breonna Taylor this
year, began skyrocketing.
{\an8}Originally, a strategy
exclusively used by the military,
{\an8}it's estimated that municipal police
{\an8}and sheriff's departments used no-knock
{\an8}or quick-knock warrants about 1,500 times
{\an8}in the early 1980s.
{\an8}But by 2010, that number
went up to an estimated
{\an8}60,000-70,000 annually.
{\an8}Oh, and in 2003, the
commissioner of the NYPD
{\an8}estimated that of the 450 no-knock raids
{\an8}the city conducted every month,
10 percent were wrong-door raids.
{\an8}I'm pretty sure if Uber Eats
showed up at the wrong address
{\an8}10 percent of the time, we would
have completely defunded it.
{\an8}When the government frames
vulnerable communities
{\an8}as enemies, it leads to
violence inflicted on civilians.
{\an8}Like in May 2014, when police in Georgia
{\an8}threw a flashbang grenade into the crib
{\an8}of a 19-month-old toddler
during a SWAT raid.
{\an8}Or the March 1994 case
where a 75-year-old minister
{\an8}died of a heart attack
after a Boston SWAT team
{\an8}barged into the wrong apartment.
{\an8}One police source told the 'Boston Herald,'
{\an8}I mean, yeah, I'm also surprised
{\an8}at how many of these police
officers still have jobs.
{\an8}But it's not just Republicans
behind the war on drugs.
{\an8}In 1994, Democratic President Bill Clinton
{\an8}passed the Violent Crime
Control and Law Enforcement Act.
{\an8}The 1994 law allocated billions
{\an8}to increasing the number of police
{\an8}and doubled the rate of
incarceration in this country
{\an8}between 1994 and 2009 by
providing financial incentives
{\an8}for states that kept
people imprisoned longer.
{\an8}The widespread impact of the
Crime Act's harsh punishments
{\an8}for drug use, were influenced heavily
{\an8}by the Controlled Substances Act,
{\an8}which categorized controlled substances
{\an8}based on how dangerous the
government thinks they are.
{\an8}Nixon signed the CSA into law in 1970,
{\an8}placing marijuana in the schedule one,
{\an8}or most dangerous category.
{\an8}As a result, weed became the
drug for which most SWAT raids
{\an8}and searches were executed.
{\an8}This classification was
not based on science,
{\an8}but instead, goes back
to Nixon's original goal
{\an8}of criminalizing Black communities.
{\an8}People of color use marijuana
{\an8}at the same rate as white folks.
{\an8}Yet the ACLU found that
Black people in the U.S.
{\an8}are 3.64 times more likely to be arrested
{\an8}for marijuana possession than
their white counterparts.
{\an8}Let's be real, if the
intention of the war on drugs
{\an8}was to arrest everyone who did drugs,
{\an8}I'm pretty sure Burning
Man wouldn't be a thing.
{\an8}But the police aren't just stopping people
{\an8}to throw them in jail,
they're also stopping them
{\an8}to take their stuff, whether
those people are charged
{\an8}with a crime or not.
{\an8}Civil asset forfeiture
was supposed to exist
{\an8}so police could seize
drugs and paraphernalia.
{\an8}But today, it's a process that allows cops
{\an8}to treat civilians and their property
{\an8}like they are on an episode
of 'Supermarket Sweep.'
{\an8}A 2017 report by the
Justice Department Office
{\an8}of Inspector General
found that the DEA seized
{\an8}more than $4 billion in cash
{\an8}from people suspected of drug
activity over the past decade.
{\an8}But of that figure, $3.2
billion were never connected
{\an8}to any criminal charges.
{\an8}I mean, it's not a $1 trillion,
{\an8}but that is still a lot of zeros.
{\an8}The truth is that the war on drugs
{\an8}was never really about drugs.
{\an8}It was about criminalizing
certain communities,
{\an8}particularly, those of color.
{\an8}But if we want to help
people in communities
{\an8}who do struggle with substance misuse,
{\an8}then more policing will
never be the answer.
{\an8}Instead, we should look to
{\an8}other community-oriented solutions,
{\an8}Take Portugal.
{\an8}In 2001, they took the radical steps
{\an8}of decriminalizing all drugs,
{\an8}combined with a public health initiative,
{\an8}focused on preventing and treating
{\an8}drug addiction and dependency.
{\an8}The results have been
dramatically positive.
{\an8}Overdose deaths decreased by over 80 percent.
{\an8}Incarceration for drug offenses
decreased by over 40 percent.
{\an8}And the much-feared rise
in use never happened.
{\an8}Like many of the worst fads
of the '70s, '80s, and '90s,
{\an8}it's time to retire the war on drugs.
{\an8}But it's up to us to push
these issues to the forefront
{\an8}and stay informed on the policies
{\an8}that impact our communities.
{\an8}Thanks for watching,
we'll see you next time
{\an8}right here on Decoded.
