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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THREAD. Today's orders by Trump federalizing D.C. police and deploying National Guard in D.C. in response to "out of control" crime are authoritarian. But I want to comment on something subtle lurking beneath the surface.
As with most media/politician talk about "crime," it is completely divorced from reality. D.C. crime is at historic lows. What police call "violent crime" is down 26% since last year. More broadly, it's been at multi-decade, historic lows for years.
So, how is this possible? What lays the groundwork for such ludicrous claims? The news media has been fear-mongering for years. Indeed, in my Copaganda book, I have a very interesting section about prominent Washington Post journalists using this same "out of control" language.
THREAD. A recent poll shows that people in the United States suffer from mass delusion about crime. The results are alarming for Democrats. It should be a massive scandal for mainstream news, and it's a pillar of the authoritarian zeitgeist.
Only 9% of respondents correctly answered that murder rates in the U.S. have decreased a lot since 1990. today.yougov.com/topics/politic…
This is just simple "flat-earther" stuff. But it continues the broader fear-based delusion that has been gripping the population for years across a range of crime issues.
The level of ignorance among liberal pundits about surveillance technology, police violence, and authoritarianism is astonishing. Just no effort to understand important issues before commenting on them.
The idea that the problem with what ICE is doing now is that it lacks hundreds of millions of dollars for surveillance technology is utterly a wild thing for someone to utter in public. Just an incredible thing to focus liberal energy on.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
Here are some other recent examples from a smorgasbord of UK copaganda about low-level theft: “Broken Britain.” “Industrial-scale crime.” “Shoplifting crime wave."