If this approximately six hour program can be summed up it’s the three words that are constantly bandied about by interviewees to establish a narrative about the war on drugs: “irony,” “inadvertent,” and “backfired.”
1.) MKUltra causes the counter-cultural revolution.
2.) Nixon’s initiation of the war on drugs is a war on blacks and hippies.
3.) American paranoia about Soviet influence in our hemisphere leads to the Colombian/Mexican cartels
4.) CIA is responsible for the heroin and crack-cocaine ‘epidemic’ and other evils.
5.) 9/11 and the War on Terror is just a natural extension to the war on drugs.
Obviously, this is a special about drugs, but in attempting to envelop almost the entirety of 50 years of domestic and foreign policy as a ‘drug thing’ without a semblance of context the people who put this together stepped outside their wheelhouse and the whole thing looks ridiculous.
It comes off as flippant and Oliver Stone-like in its hand-waving dismissal of the national security, strategic, and domestic aims of the United States. They might as well come out and say the purpose of this program was to establish a foundation for the legalization of all drugs in the United States, absent any other suggestions made in the program.
Stripped of emotion drugs are about money. Get control of the money you get control of the problem. At the heart of the drug ‘’war’’ is government. It uses this so called ‘’war’’ as a means of exerting power over the populace. It’s garbage in, garbage out and see how the money rolls in.