Alec Karakatsanis Profile picture
Dec 10, 2021 11 tweets 3 min read Read on X
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.” Image

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More from @equalityAlec

Jul 13
THREAD. This week, the New York Times published a hagiography of a ruthless drug war prosecutor. I want to make a few important points about the most important kinds of misinformation that regularly appear in the New York Times and other mainstream news outlets. Image
First, something subtle. The below quote is a microcosm of the full article: it contains an assertion, reported as fact, that this prosecutor "was trying to make safer” one of the poorest neighborhoods in New York through mass human caging for drugs. Image
This statement of fact about her intentions is absurd—the people involved knew that mass incarceration had been disproven by as a means of reducing dangerous drug use or making anyone safer. Exactly the opposite was true: the policies were increasing violence, death, and lots of other suffering.
Read 23 tweets
Jul 7
THREAD. Something must be said about the New York Times. We are in the midst of a full-blown fascist takeover, and the NYT let one of its most dishonest reporters publish an article today full of misinformation arguing for massive new investments in police and surveillance.
The thesis of the article is that because American cops are so terrible at solving murder (and getting much much worse than they used to be), "experts" believe the U.S. must spend massively more money on hiring police and surveillance. Image
I have a chapter in my Copaganda book on how the news media cherry picks pro-police "experts"--a small group who are kind of like flat-earthers--and then tries to manufacture some kind of consensus. It's actually unbelievable when you lay it all out across outlets and articles.
Read 17 tweets
Jun 20
THREAD. As I visit London next week for the UK launch of my book Copaganda, I have to say publicly how outrageous the mainstream British media’s crime coverage is. It’s like they’ve studied the worst aspects of U.S. news culture while taking performance-enhancing drugs.
This may seem comical to U.S. news consumers who lived through the fake “retail theft” panic, but British press has worked itself into a frenzy in 2025 using the same playbook. Some of it is funny, but the effects will be devastating for British society. Look at BBC: Image
Here are some other recent examples from a smorgasbord of UK copaganda about low-level theft: “Broken Britain.” “Industrial-scale crime.” “Shoplifting crime wave." Image
Image
Image
Read 16 tweets
Jun 18
THREAD. The New York Times editorial on the New York City Mayor race is shameful. A lot of people have criticized its cowardice for refusing to endorse, but I want to highlight something deeper and more disturbing.
One main theme of faux-intellectual neoliberal propaganda in recent years is that we tried progressive policies, and those policies failed. As I discuss in my Copaganda book with lots of funny/disturbing examples, this NYT lie is one of the most pernicious lies in modern media: Image
The story goes: lefty policies to make society more equal, free, and ecologically sustainable are naive. Now that we've tried them with terrible results, we have no choice but to boost repression to manage inequality we cannot solve and to help oligarchs make society less equal.
Read 11 tweets
Jun 15
THREAD: The assassinations in Minnesota highlight a dirty secret hardly ever mentioned in the news: U.S. has 1.1 million private police officers. There is an unprecedented footprint of privately organized violence that is doing all sorts of things most people have no idea about. Image
Many journalists and "experts" quoted in the news go out of their way in new stories to conceal the reach of the private security/policing industries, what interests are behind it, and what it means for the possibility of a democratic life.
In my Copaganda book, I tell the story of how pro-police scholars and journalists have worked to conceal from the public estimates of private police--from forces at universities like Harvard, to much of downtown Detroit, to DC metro, to smaller stuff like this shooter.
Read 5 tweets
Jun 9
Wait till you get to the answer! Image
"Yes." Image
"I had been wondering whether profiting from fascist kidnapping and mass torture/deportation/death was right or wrong, but this philosopher told me it was ok if I give money to the ACLU" is among the best things I've ever consumed in mainstream media.
Read 8 tweets

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