When we go to win a war, we win it.

April 4, 2008 10:42 PM

American Drug War - The Last White Hope (in case you missed it on Showtime) Includes footage of and interviews with gang members, narcs, prisoners (like Tommy Chong), and other folks on the front lines of the drug war including Freeway Ricky Ross (infamous for starting the crack epidemic) and DEA Agent Celerino Castillo who both wound up working for the CIA.

Drug WarRant site mentioned in the film.

posted by Smedleyman (10 comments total)

The drug war, like the "War in Iraq™," isn't a war. Kinda sad how everyone falls in line with the state-mandated vocabulary. "Thinking for yourself is so unpatriotic!"

This post, however, is great.
posted by mullingitover at 12:57 AM on April 5

did he have the parking lot on smash though?
posted by MNDZ at 8:32 AM on April 5

It's still legal to smoke banana peels. Come on by, we'll toke some peels and have a grand old time.
posted by valentinepig at 1:15 PM on April 5

great post, great documentary.

Is salvia next? I hope not.
posted by auralcoral at 5:09 PM on April 5

Interesting documentary. I disagree that 'shrooms and weed are less harmful based on the fact that they are natural. Castor beans and arsenic are natural too, and they are both lethal.

The Gary Webb stuff is, as always, disturbing. I remember being in high school and reading his stories in the Mercury News, and online. All I could think was, "this can't be true. it must just be a few rogue people." If I'd believed it was true at the time, I would have had to question everything else I believed....so I was happy when the NYT and the other big media outlets put it to rest. I had no idea that so many people had congregated outside the hearing with Deutsch. If that happened today, video would have been all over the net.

When the CIA inspector general's report came out two years later in 1998, I was pretty shocked. By then it was back page news....but I remembered. The Mercury had been my local paper. The publishers of the Mercury weaked out it seemed.

Nothing was ever the same again. I couldn't look at the CIA or my government in the same way.
posted by wuwei at 5:18 PM on April 5 [1 favorite]

Forget arsenic, botulism is natural, even organic, yet a microgram will kill you!

Shrooms and pot are both drugs with no known LD-50 (at least, the last time I looked at them), which means that there's no known dosage that results in an overdose; but that's nothing to do with their being "natural", as I believe you can say the same thing about LSD.
posted by lupus_yonderboy at 11:38 PM on April 5

@lupus_yonderboy: LD-50 is a measure of lethality. The use of the term 'overdose' isn't restricted to the outcome of death. Off the top of my head, about 1 in 125 opiate overdoses result in death. As for psychedelics like LSD, a high dose in the milligram range can very well result in dangerous outcomes. But they are very rare because LSD does its intended job at much lower doses.

Nonetheless, your base assertion is well supported(PDF).
posted by daksya at 2:05 AM on April 6

That movie changed remarkably from beginning to end. They would never have called Ricky Ross a good man early on, but by the end they made him out as a victim and almost a hero, fighting against an evil and corrupt government conspiracy which had spread over 5 presidencies. It went from a very informative documentary to a rabid rant, railing against the government with claims that the war on drugs was just an example of the ruling class trying to keep power over certain parts of society. The way that they almost hid the actual purpose of the film kind of bothered me, but I am inclined to take it with a grain of salt; I would be far more deeply bothered if I found out that everything they said was true.
Interesting post.
posted by KingoftheWhales at 1:22 PM on April 6

Top 5 Recreational Drug Experiments
posted by homunculus at 1:08 PM on April 7

Guilty Before Proven Innocent: How police harassment, jailhouse snitches, and a runaway war on drugs imprisoned an innocent family
posted by homunculus at 3:13 PM on April 14