Militarized enforcement and the blurring of police and soldier
Radley Balko, in an episode on posse comitatus, argues that the United States has largely kept the military out of domestic law enforcement, with a few exceptions, but that the country now has domestic police officers who look and act and are armed like soldiers. He lists the transfers: the weapons of soldiers, equipment such as tanks and armored personnel carriers and helicopters, uniforms, with many departments switching from police blues to battle dress uniforms, and training in military tactics with SWAT raids and military lingo. Posse Comitatus – Repealed but Not Gone (2013)
Balko ties this to the language of war, saying police are regularly told they are fighting various wars, whether a war on drugs or crime or terrorism. He contrasts a soldier’s job, to annihilate a foreign enemy, with a police officer’s job, to keep the peace and protect rights, and warns that treating cops as soldiers blurs that distinction, so that officers come to see their patrol areas as battlefields and the people they serve as potential enemies or threats. Posse Comitatus – Repealed but Not Gone (2013)
Bob Zadek responds that for most of his life he did not view the policeman as someone to be feared, apart from the occasional illegal left turn, and that the core relationship between protector and protected has changed. Balko cautions against romanticizing a time that may never have existed, conceding there probably was a time when people like Zadek did not fear the police. Posse Comitatus – Repealed but Not Gone (2013)
Origins: political calculation and racial propaganda
In a 2015 episode, Zadek frames the war on drugs as America’s longest war, its most expensive war, and the war that can only be won by total surrender, adding that it has produced more POWs than any war in American history. He describes it as a federal policy designed to prevent people through criminal law from recreational use of mind-altering drugs, naming marijuana, cocaine, heroin, opium and related drugs. Lucy Steigerwald on The Drug War and Private Prisons (2015)
Guest Lucy Steigerwald, identified as a contributing editor at Antiwar.com and Vice.com, says the war has always been about more than a well-meaning health enterprise. She traces its early history to fears of immigrants using opium and cocaine, and to fears that black people or Mexican immigrants were using marijuana rather than what she calls the safe, familiar beer thing. She calls the racism an undeniable part of the war’s origins and present, and adds that it is also a moral and a practical disaster: there are still drugs, increased crime rates, and bursting prisons. Lucy Steigerwald on The Drug War and Private Prisons (2015)
Zadek supplements this with a quotation he reads from the Journal of the American Medical Association from the early 20th century: “Negroes in the South are reported as being addicted to a new form of vice—that of cocaine sniffing.” He adds that newspapers of the time claimed cocaine use caused blacks to rape white women and improved their pistol marksmanship, calling this mainstream journalism and the antecedent to today’s war on drugs. Lucy Steigerwald on The Drug War and Private Prisons (2015)
Zadek also recounts a federal blue ribbon panel appointed to study opium, quoting its finding: “If the Chinaman cannot get along without his dope, we can get along without him.” He notes that for most of the 19th century and into the early 20th century cocaine was totally unregulated, and that the Sears and Roebuck catalog offered a syringe and a small amount of cocaine for $1.50. He adds that cocaine was an ingredient in the original formulation of Coca-Cola, and describes a congressional hearing featuring fears of drug-crazed, sex-mad Negroes murdering whites, degenerate Mexicans smoking marijuana, and Chinamen seducing white women with drugs. Lucy Steigerwald on The Drug War and Private Prisons (2015)
Steigerwald says the sentiment continued in subtler form later, with Time and the weekly magazines playing their part when Nixon made the war official in the 70s. Zadek calls Nixon the father of the war on drugs, saying he declared it for crass political purposes and political calculation rather than medical or social foundation, and compares the calculation to Bill Clinton hiring Richard Morris to poll on whether it was better politics to tell the truth or a lie. Steigerwald says it was about what Middle America would like to see, what cops and feds could stand next to for a photo opportunity, and what young people, minorities and hippies were up to. Zadek agrees hippies were the target, calling them a wonderful antichrist-type target, and says Nixon focused on the Timothy Leary set. Lucy Steigerwald on The Drug War and Private Prisons (2015)
Federal power, MAPS, and the medical turn
In a 2016 episode, Zadek tells guest Dr. Rick Doblin that for most of the country’s history narcotic-type drugs, psychedelic drugs, cocaine, opium and heroin were basically legal and not banned at all, and that the federal government understood it lacked the enumerated power to regulate drugs. He says the first regulation of drugs was not done under any health statute but by an expansion of the Commerce Clause, and that marijuana and cocaine were thereafter regulated under the taxing statutes rather than any health statute. Dr. Rick Doblin on MAPS and the War on Drugs (2016)
Doblin is identified as holding a PhD from the Harvard John F. Kennedy School of Government and as founder and executive director of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, known as MAPS. Zadek introduces him as having spent most of his grown-up life encouraging a more enlightened drug policy, and says the show will set the stage with the racist, uninformed and ugly political history of the war before turning to Doblin’s work. Dr. Rick Doblin on MAPS and the War on Drugs (2016)
Zadek tells Doblin that Nixon, important to Doblin’s early life, declared a war on drugs, and that this was Doblin’s first exposure to the issue. The excerpt breaks off there. Dr. Rick Doblin on MAPS and the War on Drugs (2016)
Economics: prohibition, violence, and the Sessions enforcement push
In a 2017 episode, Zadek says never in the country’s history has more money been spent on a more flawed policy than the so-called War on Drugs, and that any war on a concept, a war on a noun, is doomed to fail. He notes that things had calmed down until the election of President Trump and his appointment of Attorney General Jeff Sessions, whom he describes as a self-described drug warrior who complained in a recent op-ed that being soft on drug sentencing means more violent crime, and who took an oath to vigorously enforce the drug laws. Miron vs. Sessions on the Drug War (2017)
Guest Jeffrey Miron is identified as a senior lecturer and director of undergraduate studies in the Department of Economics at Harvard, a senior fellow at Cato, and author of four books including Drug War Crimes: The Consequences of Prohibition and Libertarianism from A to Z. Asked whether Sessions is right that drugs beget violence, Miron says he has it almost precisely backwards: it is rare that consumption of drugs induces anyone to engage in violent acts or other criminal acts, and the correct connection is that drug prohibition induces violence. Miron vs. Sessions on the Drug War (2017)
Miron’s mechanism: banning something, whether drugs or prostitution or gambling or alcohol, does not eliminate the market or supply and demand but drives it underground, where people cannot resolve disputes about trade, purchase and sale, and contracts with courts and lawyers, so the obvious substitute is violence. He gives the example of an employer in the drug trade who wants workers to believe that stealing the stuff instead of selling it and returning revenues will bring the boss to break your kneecaps, and notes fights over drug territories and contract enforcement resolved violently in underground markets. Miron vs. Sessions on the Drug War (2017)
Zadek restates the point: because commerce in drugs is forced underground, participants do not get the benefits of a civilized system for resolving disputes and are left only with violence and guns. He says there is an assumption, part of American mythology going back to Reefer Madness, that drug users per se commit violence, and that the link does not exist. He characterizes Sessions as saying he will enforce the drug laws because they are laws, without discussing whether more vigorous enforcement or the laws themselves make sense. The excerpt breaks off there. Miron vs. Sessions on the Drug War (2017)
Across episodes
The same question—whether the war on drugs can be justified—is argued in all four episodes, and the treatment shifts with the news hook rather than building a single arc. Balko (2013) supplies the militarization frame; Steigerwald (2015) supplies the racial and political origins; Doblin (2016) supplies the constitutional and regulatory history plus MAPS; Miron (2017) supplies the economics of prohibition in response to Sessions. The later episodes do not revise the earlier claims; they add mechanisms and a new target.
What the sources do not cover
The excerpts do not state the outcome of any court case, the name of any bill, or the text of any statute beyond the general references to the Commerce Clause and the taxing statutes. They do not give the founding date of MAPS, the status or results of the MDMA trials mentioned in the episode summary, or the content of Sessions’ op-ed beyond Zadek’s characterization. Several excerpts break off mid-sentence, and nothing after those points is reported here.