These days, with the psychedelic renaissance, marijuana decriminalization in some states,
and (more recently) with Oregon becoming the first state to decriminalize possession of all drugs,
it can be tempting to believe that the War on Drugs is coming to an end. In reality,
however, the War on Drugs is alive and well and so are all of the broad-based implications of it.
What began as a campaign initiated by the Nixon administration as a form of social control has now
bred numerous destructive power structures of its own. Drug cartels, gang violence,
the prison-industrial complex... these are all creations of the War on Drugs and they are not
going away anytime soon. And I understand that on this channel, we talk primarily about psychedelics
and mental health and that's probably what many of you have subscribed to this channel for. But there
is also a part of me that believes that I would be doing myself a disservice by pretending like
these topics exist in a vacuum. This video that you're watching right now (in my view) is the
most important video that I've made on my channel to date, but it is likewise a video that I feel
incredibly nervous about making and the reason for that is because we're going to be addressing
some hard topics today. Not everything I say is going to make you feel good.
I might not communicate every point perfectly but I'm going to try my best to speak the truth
—to share the things that I've learned. And if there was ever a time that I need grace from you,
the audience, it would probably be for this video. So with that said, this is what we're going to
cover. Number one: a brief history of the War on Drugs. Number two: systemic reasons why this drug
war needs to end and number three: I'm going to round this video out by sharing a piece of pretty
incriminating evidence that suggests that this drug war (in all of its 50 years of existence and
all the lives that it has ruined) may have started as a lie —and the guys up top certainly knew it.
So bear with me. I appreciate you and I will see you on the other side of this transition.
As many of you know, this is not America's first dance with drug prohibition. And by "this," I mean
the War on Drugs. What makes the current war on drugs so unprecedented is not the essential nature
of the policies involved, but rather, the scale at which these policies are enforced. In 1971,
when Nixon declared that drugs were public enemy number one, only two percent of Americans agreed
with him at the time. But Nixon had a powerful ally in the media, which was eager to stoke the
flames of hysteria. Soon, his drug war began to gain momentum. The DEA was established in 1973 and
local police units across the country started to militarize. What I mean by this is that weaponry,
equipment, and tactics —once used exclusively by federal law enforcement or the military—
were now being transferred to local law enforcement. When Reagan came in in the 80s, he
significantly expanded what Nixon had started. The 80s saw the emergence of the crack epidemic, which
disproportionately affected Black communities. In 1986, Reagan passed the Anti-Drug Abuse Act,
which mandated a sentence of at least five years without parole for every person caught with at
least five grams of crack cocaine. Now when it came to powder cocaine, you had to be caught with
at least 500 grams in order to trigger the same penalty. So this is what people mean by the 100:1
sentencing disparity between crack and powder cocaine (which, by the way, on a chemical level...
they are nearly identical). Unsurprisingly, the 80s also gave rise to a skyrocketing of demand
for more prison facilities, which led directly to the birth of the prison-industrial complex.
To this day, the private prison lobby remains a powerful force in D.C. Next came Clinton (and
—okay yes. H.W. Bush before Clinton but... this is a brief history here). Clinton did
not want to be outdone by his predecessors and he wanted to be seen as even tougher on crime,
so he expanded mandatory sentencing laws and zero tolerance policies for non-violent offences,
which only added fuel to the ever-growing issue of mass incarceration. After Clinton came Bush II and
his primary contribution was that he launched the War on Terror, which called for even more
police militarization with little oversight. I want to show you a chart, which shows the number
of incarcerated adults between 1972 and 2002. What you're seeing here is a 700% increase in
the span of 30 years. During the Obama era, the tides of the drug war started to turn. While Obama
did not end this war, he made a few changes that quietly shifted the federal government's approach
to drug policy. A couple examples of this include reducing the sentencing disparity between crack
and powder cocaine from a ratio of 100:1 to that of 18:1. Obama also ended federal interference
with state marijuana laws, which enabled marijuana legalization in 15 states plus D.C. So now take a
look at this updated chart with updated numbers. Notice that for the first time since 1971,
the rate of incarceration starts to decline during the Obama years. I don't know if you're expecting
me to talk about the Trump administration next. What is true is that the War on Drugs wages on—
With that said, we can now move on to the economics of drug prohibition and also my three
reasons for you as to why this drug war needs to end. Number one: the War on Drugs has led to an
increase (not a decrease) in violent crime. And I know this sounds counter-intuitive but it makes
perfect sense with economic reasoning. Let me just walk you through it. When you get rid of the legal
market for drugs, you don't eliminate the demand for drugs. We're not talking about kinder surprise
eggs with toys in them here. Drug users are different in that they're not as price-sensitive
because they can't afford to be —especially if they're addicted. So all of this creates
a lucrative opportunity for sellers on the black market. And, sure, you can amp up law enforcement;
you can amp up drug enforcement to eliminate some of these sellers, but the evidence suggests
what economic reasoning could have predicted all along. And that is when you get rid of one drug
operation, it is only a matter of time before it gets replaced and each successive operation will
be stealthier, more powerful, and more violent because that is what the market requires. Consider
what it means to be competitive in a legal market. You could focus on having better prices or better
customer service (what have you), but when it comes to the black market —especially the
black market for hard drugs— there's really only one way to gain an edge. And that is to be more
violent than your rivals and more powerful than the authorities. There have been a number of cases
of corruption on the part of law enforcement taking bribes or assets from drug operations
and I'm not going to focus on that in today's video. What I would like to focus on is the fact
that drug prohibition actually increases the rate of violent crimes at home and abroad. Take,
for example, this meta-analysis published by the International Center for Science in Drug Policy.
In analyzing the literature related to violence in the drug market, researchers found a significant
positive correlation between drug law enforcement and violence on the streets. The authors of this
report even went as far as to suggest that drug law enforcement may have (quote) "the perverse
effect of creating significant financial incentives for other individuals to fill
this vacuum by entering the market." Dare I say that prohibition (the market forces that
prohibition has created) actually drives cartels into developing into monopolies?
Because the government is taking out all the bit players, so who do you think is going to be left?
That was my really casual way of explaining it but I've got some numbers to back it up.
According to the DEA, between 2004 and 2013, the number of methamphetamine lab busts have fallen
over 50 percent in the U.S. And you might be thinking "Go DEA!" They're doing it!"
But at the same time, border states have reported a significant spike in methamphetamine seizures as
Mexican (quote) "super labs" shift drugs across the border. It is estimated that drug cartels in
Mexico bring in between $19 billion and 29 billion annually from U.S. drug sales. As these cartels
grow in U.S. market dominance, civilians back home pay a hefty price too. The Congressional Research
Service Report estimates, for example, that since 2006, over 150 000 Mexicans have lost their lives
to organized crime. Number two: drug prohibition causes overdose deaths to skyrocket. Take a look
at this chart here, courtesy of the CDC. This chart shows the number of overdose deaths per
100,000 people between the years of 1980 and 2008. And despite the fact that what we're clearly
seeing is a jaw-dropping trend upwards, this chart still doesn't tell the full story. Between 1971
and 2008, there was a 12-fold increase in the number of overdose deaths. Between the years
2000 and 2014, more people in the U.S. died from drug overdoses than from car crashes. Almost 70
percent of all overdose deaths today now involve opioids. Two-thirds of these cases, by the way,
involve synthetic opioids. A majority of overdose deaths are related to the consumption of potent
and/or tainted drugs and here's why. When it comes to tainted drugs, the consumer has no
quality control mechanisms to rely on and they have limited information about the purity of the
product that they're purchasing. So if they suffer repercussions from a tainted product, they would
still have a disincentive to report it because doing so could implicate their criminality. On
the supply side, producers and sellers face weak incentives to conduct quality control because they
know that buyers are unlikely to communicate with one another and certainly not likely to
report their problems to authorities. Furthermore, due to the high-risk nature of engaging in sales,
sellers are incentivized to push more potent drugs onto their buyers so taken all together,
that is how we get the issue of potent and tainted drugs on the black market (which is a product of
War on Drugs). Number three: the War on Drugs has created a two-tiered system of citizenship,
which many scholars refer to as the "New Jim Crow." I want you to stay with me on this.
There's so much to unpack and if you typically feel uncomfortable whenever matters of race are
discussed, I would —I would urge you to suspend your discomfort for as long as you can because
this message is important and it might not be what you think it's going to be. Despite the
fact that White and Black Americans use drugs at nearly identical rates and that drug dealers
are more likely to be White than Black, Black Americans are nearly six times more likely to
be incarcerated for drug-related offences than their White counterparts. Almost 80 percent of
people currently serving time for a federal drug offense are Black or Latino. The incarceration
rate for Black people in the U.S. today is higher than what it was in South Africa during apartheid.
One in three Black boys today are expected to go to prison at some point in their lives. For Latino
boys, it's one in six. For White boys, it's one in 17. Taken together, this means that the U.S.
has the highest incarceration rate in the world —second to none. On any given day, almost half a
million people are incarcerated for non-violent drug offenses and it gets worse. Even after
you've served your time, you're still branded as a felon for the rest of your life and this
has life-changing consequences. This means that by law, you are excluded from participating in public
housing and food stamps programs. Employers and landlords are allowed to discriminate against you
and you will no longer qualify for federal Pell Grants and student loans. This is the
reality for over half a million adults who are released from the prison system every year.
So is it any wonder that according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, approximately 70 percent of
formerly incarcerated people will return to prison within three years of release? This is perhaps the
most nefarious aspect of the War on Drugs. It has created a two-tiered system of citizenship that
is invisible to the silent majority on tier number one. And honestly, this is the most heartbreaking
thing for me to learn because I didn't know this —I did not know this that the extent of mass
incarceration worked this way. (And, by the way, I'm Canadian. I did study political science but
even as I talked to my American friends... a lot of this stuff they didn't know either,
so...) And then my next thought was, "Just how frustrating must this be?" For this to be
your reality but yet you can't communicate it to other people in everyday conversation because of
the colorblind nature of the way that we "see" the world now. There are people who truly believe that
systemic racism doesn't exist and I can't think of a better example of systemic racism than what is
happening with mass incarceration. Now I want to share with you a quote from Nixon's domestic
policy chief John Ehrlichman. This quote was taken from an interview that he gave journalist
Dan Baum for Harper's Magazine. Baum describes Ehrlichman's confession to him as a personal
"Come to Jesus" moment and this is what Ehrlichman confessed and I quote: "The Nixon campaign in 1968
in the Nixon White House after that had two enemies: the anti-war Left and Black people, you
understand what I'm saying? We knew we couldn't make it illegal to be either against the war or
Black, but by getting the public to associate hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and
then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders,
raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the
evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did." So Ehrlichman's children
have come out and they've publicly questioned the veracity of this quote because according to them,
their father was a good father and they never saw him or heard him say anything derogatory about
people of color in their presence. So in their mind, it just didn't add up... their father seemed
like a decent man, their father was a decent man, and so they just couldn't picture him being a part
of such an oppressive system. What I wish people would understand is that you don't necessarily
have to have blood gushing out of your eyes or you don't necessarily have to be a monster in
every sense of the word to be a participant or if not a perpetuator of an oppressive system. If you
look at all the cases of mass atrocities that have happened throughout history, you'll notice that in
a vast majority of those cases, they have relied on the cooperation of the silent majority in order
to continue the regime. This silent majority is often an unconscious majority. A majority that
is not privy to the truth of everything that's going on. I fundamentally believe that if people
knew better, they would act differently and call me naive... but this is what I need in
order to keep moving on because, otherwise, I would just be sad all the time. This drug war,
I'm telling you affects us all. It affects me here too in Canada. Our drug prohibition policies
have been influenced by American drug prohibition policies —as is the case in the U.K., and in many
other countries around the world. This is a piece of the history that I didn't really touch on but
in the the latter half of the 20th century, American politicians really made it a priority
to take their case to the world stage and that is the reason why many countries around
the world have prohibition. None of us know why it continues and many of us now are thankfully
slowly starting to peel away at it, but slow and steady is not enough because this war should not
have been waged to begin with. It makes absolutely no sense and I hope that you see my points now.