Drug War
Enforcement and its cost. Nixon in 1971, the Controlled Substances Act placing cannabis in Schedule I, the Shafer Commission that recommended decriminalisation and was ignored, eradication campaigns and raids, mandatory minimums, the deeply unequal arrest record, and the people who spent decades in prison for it.
Part of Marijuana
45 moments in this segment.
- - What Is Marijuana? A 1970 Explainer. CBC Take 30 segment from 1970 explaining what marijuana was and how Canadians were using it, years before legalisation.
- - Nixon Announces the Fight Against Drugs (1971). Newsfilm shot in Washington on 17 June 1971 covering Nixon's announcement of a massive new federal narcotics effort.
- - A Drugs Officer Calls for New Marijuana Law (1972). Newsfilm of 10 February 1972 in which a narcotics officer asks for new marijuana legislation and predicts eventual legalisation.
- - The Drug Abuse Commission Reports (1973). Newsfilm of 22 March 1973 reporting the National Commission on Marihuana and Drug Abuse urging an end to criminal prosecution for marijuana use.
- - The Marijuana Commission Decriminalization Hearings (1973). Archival film of the US National Commission on Marihuana and Drug Abuse hearings on decriminalisation, preserved by a film archive.
- - Special Report: The Nixon Drug Laws (1973). Period television special report on the Nixon administration's drug legislation and the harsh new penalties it introduced.
- - Should Marijuana Be Legalized? (1975). Full 1975 WMAQ Chicago teen discussion programme debating marijuana legalisation with a physician and other guests.
- - Reagan declares war on drugs and organised crime, 1982. President Reagan's 1982 speech announcing a federal offensive against drug trafficking and organised crime, the policy foundation of the decade's enforcement escalation.
- - Dutch police clear a cannabis greenhouse, 1986. Police removing a large quantity of cannabis plants from greenhouses at Aalsmeer, the Netherlands, in September 1986.
- - CBS Nightwatch 1990: High Times editor debates Operation Green Merchant. A recorded CBS Nightwatch episode in which High Times editor Steven Hager and Congressman Lawrence Coughlin debate legalisation in the wake of the DEA's Operation Green Merchant, which targeted grow-equipment suppliers and magazine subscribers.
- - AP Archive: Mexican anti-drug forces raid in Oaxaca. AP newsfilm from April 1995 showing Mexican forces destroying illicit crops under US pressure to intensify eradication.
- - Prisoners of the War on Drugs (1996). Full 1996 documentary on Americans imprisoned under mandatory minimum drug sentences.
- - Growing it is illegal, West Virginia. A West Virginia State Police roadside public service sign warning that growing marijuana is illegal.
- - ACLU briefing on the 100-to-1 sentencing disparity. An ACLU press briefing on the federal crack-versus-powder sentencing ratio and its racial impact, recorded two years before the disparity was reduced.
- - PBS NewsHour: narrowing the 100-to-1 crack and powder sentencing gap. Gwen Ifill reports on the Fair Sentencing Act of 2010, which reduced the federal disparity between crack and powder cocaine penalties that had defined mandatory-minimum sentencing since 1986.
- - Al Jazeera: Mexico debates legalising marijuana. Reporting on the 2010 debate among senior Mexican officials over legalisation as cartel violence escalated under the eradication-and-interdiction strategy.
- - Tulia, Texas: Scenes From the Drug War. Report on the Tulia scandal, in which an undercover narcotics officer had 46 people, nearly all Black, arrested on fabricated cocaine charges.
- - Is the US War on Drugs a Failed Policy?. Al Jazeera Inside Story panel debating the racial impact and failure of American drug policy, prompted by drug czar Gil Kerlikowske's remarks.
- - Emperor of Hemp: the Jack Herer story. A documentary on Jack Herer, whose book The Emperor Wears No Clothes made the case that cannabis prohibition served industrial rather than health interests, and who campaigned against it until his death.
- - ACLU on racial disparities in marijuana arrests. Staff attorney Sonia Kumar presents findings from the ACLU's national report on marijuana arrests, which found Black Americans arrested at several times the rate of white Americans despite similar use rates.
- - Embedded with a marijuana eradication team in the San Bernardino mountains. KCET's SoCal Connected embeds with an eradication squad raiding grow sites, filmed originally in 2009.
- - A Life Sentence for Seven Pounds of Marijuana. CNN report on a man serving life imprisonment for a marijuana offence while states around him legalised the drug.
- - Jeff Mizanskey: life without parole for marijuana in Missouri. HLN reports on Jeff Mizanskey, sentenced in 1996 to life without parole under Missouri's prior-offender law for a non-violent marijuana offence.
- - Heroin and the War on Drugs. New York Times Retro Report on how 1970s urban heroin crime drove the war on drugs, and how the response to the later epidemic differed.
- - The disputed Ehrlichman quote in Harper's Magazine. Discussion of Dan Baum's 2016 Harper's piece quoting Nixon aide John Ehrlichman as saying the drug war was designed to target antiwar leftists and Black Americans. The remark rests on a single unrecorded 1994 interview and Ehrlichman's family and several historians dispute it, so it is best treated as a contested claim rather than settled fact.
- - Reaction to the Ehrlichman claim about the drug war. theGrio discusses the reported 1994 Ehrlichman quote and its policy implications. The quote is uncorroborated and contested, and this segment presents it as an allegation rather than an established fact.
- - How police departments use civil forfeiture to collect billions. VICE investigates civil asset forfeiture, the 1980s drug-war power letting police seize cash and property without charging anyone with a crime.
- - Crack and the LAPD. HISTORY segment on the militarised tactics Los Angeles police adopted against crack cocaine, from the series America's War on Drugs.
- - A guide to the UN Commission on Narcotic Drugs. An explainer on the Vienna-based body that administers the 1961 Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs, the treaty that locked cannabis prohibition into international law.
- - ACLU counsel on legalisation as racial justice. ACLU of New Jersey policy counsel Dianna Houenou testifies that enforcement disparities make cannabis legalisation a civil-rights question, with legislative questions and answers.
- - House Hearing: Marijuana Laws and Racial Justice. Full House Judiciary subcommittee hearing of July 2019 on marijuana law, racial disparity in enforcement and the case for federal reform.
- - In the Weeds: inside California's CAMP eradication programme. The California Department of Justice documents its Campaign Against Marijuana Planting teams raiding illegal grow sites, the state programme running since 1983.
- - 13th. Ava DuVernay's feature documentary on the American prison system, tracing the line from the Thirteenth Amendment through the war on drugs to mass incarceration.
- - The War on Drugs Is Designed to Discriminate. VICE documentary segment on the racial architecture of American drug law, and the five-to-one Black incarceration disparity it produces.
- - Brothers reunite after a 30-year marijuana sentence. Local coverage of Richard DeLisi's release, secured after months of work by the Last Prisoner Project.
- - Richard DeLisi Released After Thirty Years. AP report on the release of Richard DeLisi, who served more than thirty years of a ninety-year Florida sentence for selling marijuana.
- - Inside Thailand's drug prisons. 60 Minutes Australia reports from Bangkok's notorious prisons on foreign nationals serving long sentences for drug offences under Thailand's pre-reform laws.
- - The Shafer Report Fifty Years On. NORML founder Keith Stroup and executive director Erik Altieri discuss the 1972 Shafer Commission report, which recommended decriminalisation and which Nixon rejected.
- - Shafer Commission associate director Richard Bonnie on decriminalisation. Professor Richard Bonnie, associate director of the 1972 Shafer Commission, restates the commission's finding and calls for federal decriminalisation.
- - The War on Drugs. Crash Course survey of the decades-long American war on drugs and its disproportionate effect on Black communities.
- - How the 1961 Single Convention made cannabis illegal worldwide. Traces how the UN Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs of 1961 obliged signatory states to prohibit cannabis, exporting American drug policy globally.
- - Inside Singapore's deadly war on drugs. Al Jazeera's 101 East investigates Singapore's mandatory death penalty for trafficking, including executions for cannabis, and the government's defence of the policy.
- - Singapore executes a man for cannabis trafficking. TRT World reports Singapore's April 2023 execution of Tangaraju Suppiah for abetting a cannabis shipment, carried out despite appeals from the United Nations and human rights groups.
- - On the frontline of Thailand's war on drugs. SBS Dateline reports on Thai enforcement as the country moved to ban recreational cannabis again, two years after becoming the first Asian state to decriminalise it.
- - The true origin of the war on drugs: what historians get wrong. A long-form history that interrogates the popular Ehrlichman account and argues the drug war's origins are older and more bureaucratic than the single-quote story suggests.
