THREAD. As we hit an unprecedented 100,000 drug overdose deaths, I answer the following question in this thread on the "War on Drugs": are punishment bureaucrats incompetent at achieving their goals, or are they pursuing goals that are different from what they tell us publicly?
After over 40 years, the drug war has:
-Cost more than $1 trillion
-Caused over 50 million people to be caged (almost all of them poor), including over 20 million for marijuana
-Caused an estimated hundreds of millions of police stops that meet legal definition of kidnapping.
The drug war has:
-Caused tens of millions of years in prison
-Separated tens of millions of children from their parents
-Cost tens of millions of people their education, houses, and ability to make a living
-Caused millions of square acres of pristine land to be spray-poisoned
The drug war has:
-Cost tens of millions of people their right to vote
- Killed hundreds of thousands in the militarized drug wars and U.S.-led murder in Latin America
-Led to militarization and widespread surveillance by local police and federal agents of every U.S. city.
The drug war has:
-Deprived hundreds of millions of people low cost, sustainable treatments for a wide range of illnesses
-Cost millions of people billions of dollars in wealth from police civil forfeiture seizures of their property.
-Led to mass spread of infectious disease
The vast majority of these horrific consequences were inflicted on people for personal use of certain substances, an exercise of bodily autonomy that other countries have protected and that this country protects (and allows profit) for harmful substances like alcohol and tobacco.
All of this was done in ways that dramatically increased the racial disparities in every facet of life, and almost all of it targeted the poorest people in our society. Students at boarding schools and ivy league universities use drugs without fear. Laws weren't meant for them.
For all of these costs, drug use either did not go down or increased during the "War on Drugs," and teenagers are using dangerous drugs at twice the rate that they did in the 1980s. Overdose deaths are at all time high. nytimes.com/2021/11/17/hea…
Government bureaucrats know all of these statistics, and yet the "War on Drugs" continues in every city and town, every single day. Why would sophisticated people pursue strategies that are so counterproductive and destructive to their stated goals?
The only reasonable conclusion is that the “War on Drugs” is not about flourishing communities and ending drug use. It's about profit, racism, surveillance, and social control. Seen this way, the system is actually quite efficient and effective.
I’ll leave you with a quote from one of Nixon’s top advisors explaining their decision to launch the “War on Drugs.”
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The events described in this article are the kinds of things people experience under fascism. The Texas Attorney General's conduct reflects a complete breakdown in democratic institutions.
The failure of the Department of Justice and the judiciary to prevent authoritarian abuse like this should be an alarming moment for the legal profession. It's the kind of thing that should be front-page news in every paper and emergency conversations in every law class.
Federal "law enforcement" officials are behaving as if this is not an urgent situation. Instead of devoting resources to investigating illegal authoritarian abuse, federal resources in the state are mostly doubling down to help Texas officials fearmonger about the border.
THREAD. The Democratic Party platform presents such a profound crisis if we have any hope of avoiding fascism.
Kamala Harris and other Democrats would essentially only need to say that they will condition aid to Israel on compliance with international law (i.e. follow existing U.S. law on weapons). The refusal to say something so simple presents a point of no return, for a few reasons.
Here is an image of everywhere bombed in Gaza, mostly with U.S. bombs. 100,000s have been killed by conservative estimates in medical journals. The entire infrastructure (schools, hospitals, water, history, etc) destroyed, and many thousands kidnapped, raped, tortured, maimed.
THREAD. A few years ago, we were worried about the hidden epidemic of prosecutor misconduct. Why do so many prosecutors break the law? Why does nothing happen to them? Why does it stay secret? So, we tried to do something. What we found was more shocking than we imagined.
We worked with a group of the country's leading law professors to file ethics complaints against prosecutors in cases where either judges or their own prosecutor offices had already found them to have broken the law. We filed FIFTY of these complaints in New York alone.
A prosecutor breaking the law in a criminal prosecution--which can result in wrongful incarceration and family separation for years--is among the most serious violation of the code of ethics to which lawyers are bound. Ethics boards can discipline them to protect people.
I’m not sure I’ve seen anything more depraved and dishonest in my tracking of the New York Times. In its article about Netanyahu’s speech, it not only fails to report that Netanyahu flagrantly lied, but it repeats the lie with no acknowledgment Israeli media has proven it false.
You can read more about some of the most astonishing lies, and the grotesque applause for them here. But how is the reaction of a *newspaper* simply repeat the lie. It's some of the most shameful complicity in genocide imaginable, and yet normal.
Instead, one of the most fascist moments in U.S. political history--adoring applause and chants for obvious, knowable lies in support of genocide--is portrayed as "forceful" without any correction of the lies. It's a breathtaking low point for @anniekarni and @SangerNYT
In a landmark federal court victory yesterday, we won our 1st Amendment lawsuit against New York judges and officials concerning secretive ethics proceedings against prosecutors. In most cases no one knows why the state does nothing when DAs break the law. Much more to come...
This work--to shed light on how officials in the punishment bureaucracy, from police to prison guards to prosecutors to probation officers to judges, evade accountability at every level--is more and more vital in times of rising authoritarianism.
The work that @CivRightsCorps and a number of amazing law professors across the U.S. are doing to enforce basic norms of accountability and transparency is more vital than ever. You can read more at accountabilityny.org
THREAD. One of the things I explore in my new study of the propaganda surrounding police body cameras in the U.S. media and by Democratic politicians are its similarities to both international development propaganda and colonial counterinsurgency strategy.
As James Ferguson has shown in one of the seminal studies of the issue, decades of discourse about “reforming” the bureaucracy of international development follows a similar pattern.
Observers acknowledge the continuous failures of international government and non-profit aid to end poverty, make the world meaningfully more equal, or prevent ecological catastrophe.