Drug Trade
America spent fifty years losing a war on drugs while the supply got cheaper the prisons filled and 107000 people died in a single year. Four series trace the full story of American drug policy and its costs.
Drug Trade
The meth and opioid crises killed differently than crack — in rural trailers and suburban bedrooms rather than city streets. Together they pushed annual overdose deaths past 107000 by 2021.
Drug Trade
Fentanyl killed 73000 Americans in 2022 — more than traffic fatalities and gun deaths. A synthetic opioid 100 times more potent than morphine now contaminates counterfeit pills and the entire illicit supply.
Drug Trade
When U.S. law closed domestic meth labs in 2005 Mexican cartels built super labs producing 100 pounds of meth per day at 90-100 percent purity — cheaper and more dangerous than anything before.
Drug Trade
Methamphetamine grew from within rural America in the 1990s — out of farm communities watching their economies collapse. Twelve thousand meth labs seized in 2001 alone before Mexican cartels took over the market.
Drug Trade
Purdue Pharma launched OxyContin with false safety claims its own team knew were wrong. The resulting epidemic killed more than 500000 Americans between 1999 and 2019 and is still going.
Drug Trade
Nixon declared the War on Drugs in 1971. Fifty years later drug use is higher the supply is more dangerous and the U.S. has incarcerated more people per capita than any country on earth.
Drug Trade
Oregon decriminalized all drugs in 2020 then partially reversed it in 2024. The reform era has lowered incarceration and spread naloxone but has not replaced the enforcement framework it dismantled.
Drug Trade
The U.S. prison population grew from 200000 to 2.3 million between 1972 and 2008 — a 1000 percent increase. Drug offenses drove a twelve-fold share of that growth while Black incarceration hit six times the white rate.
Drug Trade
The NYPD conducted 4.4 million stop-and-frisk encounters between 2002 and 2013. Ninety percent targeted Black and Latino New Yorkers. Eighty-eight percent were found to have done nothing wrong.
Drug Trade
California's three-strikes law gave a man 25 years to life for stealing a pizza slice. Applied at 13 times the rate against Black defendants as white defendants — and reversed by voters in 2012.
Drug Trade
Federal mandatory minimums drove the U.S. prison population from 24000 to 210000 between 1980 and 2010. The crack-powder disparity meant 88 percent of federal crack defendants were Black.