 In 1985, the DEA received a cassette tape. On the tape was the audio recording of the tortured screams of one of their agents, Enrique Camarena, who went by his nickname Kiki. Kiki Camarena had been working as an undercover agent in Mexico, and when he was discovered, he was kidnapped by corrupt Mexican police officers on the payroll of a local drug lord. He was taken to the ranch of the drug lord, injected with amphetamines to make sure that he stayed conscious, and for the next 30 hours, he was tortured with power tools until he died. When the DEA received the cassette tape of his torture session, it truly meant war between the government and the drug cartels in a way that would define the drug war from the 1980s and into the present. Even today, the name Kiki Camarena has a rage-inducing effect on DEA agents, even from those who never knew him. The DEA launched Operation Leinda to try to bring Camarena's murderers to justice, but the lack of evidence in Mexico's extradition laws made it difficult for them to arrest and try the guilty parties. More significantly in the broad history is that Camarena became essentially the France Ferdinand of the modern drug war. Today, Mexico is the most dangerous country in the world, as it essentially become, as Columbia once was, the primary battleground for the global drug war. I'm Chris Countman, and this is the Mises Institute podcast, Historical Controversies. This episode is going to close the series on the drug war so that I can move on to other topics, but we're only going to wrap up the history of the 1980s and the laws passed in the second term of the Reagan presidency. I talked in the last episode about the death of Lynn Baez and what a tremendous incident this was in pushing people toward a tougher war on drugs. Following this tragedy, there were people in Congress ready to usher in policies that are hard to imagine, even as libertarians, hard to imagine people justifying in the United States. If you pay attention to how the Philippines has been waging the drug war recently, where President Duterte is basically invoking Hitler as his role model for fighting drug addicts, the U.S. Congress was almost ready to be that extreme following the death of Lynn Baez. One proposal made in Congress would have put defense attorneys in prison for defending drug users. Congressman Clay Shaw said, quote, the only way we will get at this problem is to let the whole community, the whole population, know that defense attorneys are part of the problem and they could very well be convicted if they knowingly take these funds. Another proposal made by Dan Lundgren, a congressman from California, would have extended criminal liability to anybody who accepted money from a drug dealer for any reason in any capacity. As in, if a drug dealer buys a soda from a gas station, then the gas station owner or the clerk could be put in jail. Now, thankfully, these proposals didn't get passed, but you can get a pretty good idea of how extreme the politicians were becoming. What Congress did pass, though, was the 1986 Anti-Drug Abuse Act. The most significant provision of this law was that it reinstated mandatory minimum sentences for drug criminals. If you remember from a previous episode, the mandatory minimums were first tried in the 1950s with the Boggs and Daniel Acts. But these were actually done away with in the 1970s because they were shown to have had no effect on drug use. But with the goldfish memories of politicians, this recent historical lesson was forgotten and mandatory minimums were reinstated. Now, here's the interesting thing about the mandatory minimum sentences in the 1986 bill. If you remember the 1984 Omnibus Crime Bill I talked about a couple of episodes ago, the sentencing guidelines set forth in that bill were set to go into effect in 1987. So the 1984 and the 1986 bills both had sentencing provisions and as it turns out, they compounded each other. So the 1984 bill essentially did away with bell and parole for certain criminals and now the 1986 bill established mandatory minimums. So with the combination of these two laws, we can identify the source of the major uptick in prison overpopulation. But the two laws also had major conflicts with each other. In 1984, the law gave sentencing guidelines that took into account somebody's criminal history, whether they felt remorse, how involved in the crime they actually were and all kinds of other factors that could affect the length of the sentence. The mandatory minimums, by contrast, held every person even loosely connected to the crime subject to the same minimum sentence, regardless of the other factors. So with the guidelines, the maximum sentence for somebody with five grams of crack was only one year in prison. But with the mandatory minimums, the minimum sentence for somebody with 5.01 grams of crack was five years in prison with no possibility of parole. On September 25, 1986, Ronald Reagan also signed an executive order mandating urine tests for federal employees. So by this time, Reagan was using marijuana as a convenient scapegoat for other federal problems. After, for example, there was a 1987 train crash, an Amtrak train crash. There's government trains. And marijuana was blamed because THC was detected in the bodies of two members of the trains crew. And this does not mean that they were high on marijuana while they were at work. It just means that two of the workers had used marijuana sometime in the past several weeks. And an even more ridiculous excuse, urine tests were ordered for airline pilots after the number of midair near misses had doubled since 1981. So marijuana was the scapegoat here, even though there was zero link to marijuana use. And what the Reagan administration didn't even consider as a possibility for why there was such an increase in near misses is that in 1981, Reagan fired nearly every experienced air traffic controller in the country in one day because they were striking. So between 1981 and 1986, air traffic controllers were substantially less experienced. But when this caused obvious problems, marijuana was the clear culprit to this drug-crazy Reagan administration. The DEA was also employing drug curier profiles to identify likely drug dealers at the airport. And by 1987, the list of characteristics was so broad that it pretty much encompassed every person flying. For instance, among the characteristics to identify was anybody who was the first to leave the plane, the last to leave the plane, or if they were leaving the plane in the middle of the group. So basically, anybody who exits their plane after a flight is suspect of carrying drugs. They also had people who had no luggage, people who had very large pieces of luggage, and then they had people with medium-sized luggage, as well as people with American tourist luggage. Oh, and also people carrying briefcases. So again, essentially everybody on a plane fit the profile of a drug carrier. In 1988, some of the larger cities in the country were taking very direct and invasive action with the way they enforced the drug laws, too. A lot of this is related to the omnibus crime bill and the way that they started doing the profit sharing with civil asset forfeiture. But a lot of it, too, is just the sentiment nationwide, of course, was against drugs. It wasn't just a government. It was media. It was local politicians. So cities like Detroit and Chicago and Miami, or of course, they're waging a local war on drugs as well. So in Los Angeles, the police conducted what was called Operation Hammer, in which the police sent more than 1,000 officers into the poor areas of the city to arrest anybody on any grounds they could think of. And as one disgusting example of abuse, there was a South Central apartment block that was raided by 88 police officers. And after they literally destroyed the place with sledgehammers looking for drugs, they actually spray-painted LAPD rules on the walls. This is actually, the LAPD is spray-painting, LAPD rules on the walls of an apartment complex that they just destroyed. Then they took 32 of the people in the building back to the station, where they actually beat the arrestees with flashlights while making them whistle the tune of the Andy Griffith show. This was literal torture by a bunch of cops who were drunk on the new power granted by the federal and state laws during the drug war. And in the end, by the way, the most they found from the arrestees they were abusing was two kids with a small amount of marijuana. That's it. During Operation Hammer, two innocent civilians were killed by police. One was a child and the other was an 81-year-old retiree. And of course, no disciplinary action was taken. And obviously we all know that today this has only become more and more common, more innocent civilians killed by the police in the drug war and the militarization of the police that comes from that. When this happened, the press secretary for the California State Senator, one of the California State Senators said, quote, when you have a state of war, civil rights are suspended for the duration of the conflict. So that's the attitude people were bringing to them in the 1980s during the war on drugs. Some of the tactics that the DEA started using to get drug busts are mind-boggling as well. One informant, for instance, was paid $73,000 because he was handsome enough to seduce women into selling him drugs. So he was sent to 18 different women where he would seduce them, he would promise them marriage, promise to love them forever, but only if they would do him a favor, which is to provide him with drugs. Then the DEA would arrest these poor desperate women while this guy was making a killing. This is 1980s money too, right? So that's not the story that most blew my mind. The most mind-boggling story I came across is from July 20th, 1990. And it was a man named Donnie Clark. He was arrested while he was tending the watermelon vines on his farm. So Donnie had been listed as one of 28 people involved in a conspiracy to grow and sell marijuana. Now in 1985, Donnie Clark was caught growing marijuana for which he had already served time. After his sentence was over, he decided to avoid drugs and just run a small farm with legal produce. But his sons had decided to follow in his marijuana growing footsteps. And because of the new drug laws that brought into culpability to even lose connections to the crime, Clark was considered to be guilty of the crimes of his sons because they had learned how to grow the marijuana from him in 1985. But in 1985, it was the state of Florida that convicted him. This arrest was made by the federal government. The new arrest was. So they were charging him for teaching his sons how to grow marijuana in the crime that the state of Florida had already arrested him for. He was being tried again for the same crime. It was double jeopardy, so he pleaded innocent. But double jeopardy doesn't apply according to the courts between the state and federal governments because they are separate sovereigns. So Clark was found guilty and he was sentenced to life in prison with no possibility of parole. He was eventually pardoned by Bill Clinton, but only after he sat in prison for just over a decade. It was about 10 and a half years because the federal government decided to convict him of a crime he'd already served time for. Donnie Clark, by the way, wasn't the only one that this happened to. After Clark lost his case, the Justice Department figured out that this was a wonderful way to boost their arrest rates and appear tough on crime. So they started Operation Trigger Lock in which federal prosecutors were instructed to go over state cases, to find people who had also violated federal drug laws so that the federal government could go and arrest them again after they got out of prison and throw them back in jail. There were times when federal agents literally met people outside of prison the second they were released to arrest them and charge them all over again. It is absolutely mind-blowing to me that more people don't talk about this. The government was also cracking down on people who were purchasing products that were sold by companies who advertised in High Times Magazine, which if you remember is the magazine that promoted cannabis use, medical cannabis use and sold a lot of drug paraphernalia, and they were targeting the companies who advertised in High Times Magazine regardless of what the products themselves were actually used for. On October 26, 1989, the DEA conducted Operation Green Merchant which organized raids in 46 states on people who had purchased equipment that could be used to grow marijuana. In this operation, some of the undercover agents were actually posing, this is absolutely disgusting to me, they were posing as sick people who needed marijuana for medical purposes in order to visit hydroponic stores and try to trick the merchants into incriminating themselves. During Operation Green Merchant, the DEA used asset forfeiture laws to seize $17.5 million in equipment that could be used for growing any number of plants, essentially crippling businesses that were acting completely within the confines of the law, simply because they unknowingly purchased from a company that placed ads in High Times. So a lot of the people, just to be clear on that, they didn't even know what High Times were, they were just purchasing from companies who advertised in various different places, but one of those various places happened to be High Times, so these people were growing avocados or something, I don't know what they were growing, and were caught completely by surprise. They had no clue that these companies were advertising in a marijuana magazine, not that it should matter. So of course, many companies pulled their ads from High Times, which basically made this a way for the government to get around that pesky First Amendment. Because of all the new laws, the prison population was exploding. The number of prisons doubled during the reign years, and it still wouldn't be enough. So this created a problem for the new president, George H.W. Bush, and his drug czar, William Bennett. Bennett actually proposed converting abandoned houses into prisons until the federal government could build more penitentiaries. He also proposed the idea of suspending habeas corpus for drug offenders, which is the right to a jury trial, by the way, and constitutionally, the only time you can suspend habeas corpus is when you're in a state of rebellion. But this still wasn't the worst thing that he proposed. Perhaps most disturbingly was the encouragement of children to turn in their parents for smoking marijuana. I actually had a friend, a classmate, a little bit older than most of us, and she remembers doing this. She actually told on her dad for smoking marijuana. Of course, she thinks that's absurd in retrospect. But this actually came out of the drug abuse, resistance, education, or a dare program, which I remember going through when I was in elementary school, which started in 1983, but it continued into the 1990s, and from this, many children turned in their parents only to watch them get marched off in handcuffs. I mean, think about a way to destroy a child is to trick them, basically brainwash them, into turning in their own parents, which they're gonna have to grow up with, with the guilt of having their parents arrested and imprisoned, or they're gonna have to be put into foster homes. I mean, just, I can hardly think of a more effective way of mentally and psychologically destroying a young child than this. It was very common during the 1990s. Now, there's a juxtaposition to this that might be interesting to fans of the show, of The Wire, because the show came out of the events in Baltimore that I'm gonna talk about. In 1985, a detective named Marcellus Ward was shot and killed while he was wearing a wire during an undercover drug bust. This happened in the same year as the murder of Kiki Camarena. But this tape circulated around Baltimore police and government officials, including the chief state prosecutor of Baltimore, Kurt Schmoak. So the effect of this tape was actually pretty much the opposite of Kiki Camarena's tape that came out the same year. So Kurt Schmoak was bothered by the tape, not only because it recorded the murder of his personal friend, but because he couldn't figure out what Marcellus Ward died for. In 1987, Schmoak became the mayor of Baltimore and he decided he wanted to deal with the AIDS epidemic. He saw the ban on hyperdermic needles, which was a law passed because of the drug war, of course, because of heroin, and he saw these needles as the primary reason, the needle ban, as the primary reason why people were contracting AIDS because heroin addicts were sharing needles. Schmoak decided to approach the drug policy from the completely opposite direction as the Reagan administration. So he instituted a needle sharing program that made needles legally available to anybody as long as they turned in an old syringe. To Schmoak, this was the first approach to the drug war that would have prevented the murder of Marcellus Ward three years prior. Only four months after taking office, Schmoak made national news for giving a speech in Washington, D.C., calling drug prohibition a failure. Schmoak, by the way, was a black Democrat in Baltimore, so he had been seen as a sort of rising star in the Democratic Party politics prior to this speech, and he was pretty much dismissed politically until he won re-election despite attacks from the opposition branding him as legalizer Schmoak. So the people of Baltimore apparently approved of his policies. One other incident I wanna tell you about is Operation Just Cause, which was launched by President George H.W. Bush in 1989. This actually took place in Latin America, which I haven't talked about much because I've been focusing on the United States. I hope in the future I'm able to come back to the topic of the drug war and talk more about Columbia and Mexico and their role in this history because it is obviously incredibly fascinating, but I can only give some bullet points for this story because anything more would require multiple episodes and we wanna move on to other topics. But of course, everybody knows that in the 1980s, Columbia was the primary exporter of cocaine, largely driven by two cartels, the Cali and Medellin cartels, the latter of which was the one Pablo Escobar was a part of. During this time, the U.S. government was also trying to suppress communist upriding in Central and South America, which if you remember I talked about a little bit with the Nicaragua uprisings in the last episode and this is kind of related to it, it's in the same geographical region. So they were hoping to prevent another Cuba from popping up. Well, in the country Panama, which connects Central America to Columbia and South America, the U.S. had supported the dictator Manuel Noriega since 1983 and this meant that the U.S. was giving him money and support so that he could brutally suppress his people under the auspices of combating communism. He was receiving the same kind of aid that Samosa was before Carter cut off the aid to Samosa but Noriega continued receiving the aid all the way until the George H.W. Bush administration. And let me just say that obviously, I hate communism just as much as anybody. I hardly think that on a Mises Institute podcast that hardly even warrants detailing but the tactics that the Latin American dictators used were pretty much the same as the tactics the communists used. So it's really hard to defend these people just because they're fighting the communists is not enough basis to defend these people. Noriega was a despot, he was a dictator just like the Samosas were. I mean they were killing innocent civilians just like the communists would do and it served to oppress the innocent people in the country regardless of their political views. Anyway, while they were supporting Noriega we were also sending DEA officials and tons of money to try to capture Pablo Escobar. And if anybody has seen the show Narcos on Netflix I haven't watched it myself but I have read the book it's based on which is by Mark Bowden entitled Killing Pablo and it's a wonderful book. So on the one hand we're subending a ton of money trying to suppress the Colombian cocaine trade to capture Pablo Escobar which is documented in that book and on the other hand we're funding Manuel Noriega to help fight against the communists. Well Noriega was also making extra money smuggling drugs for Pablo Escobar. Escobar would actually go and meet with him personally and when he was on the run from the law he hid out in Panama with the help of Noriega. So during the 1980s we literally had two branches of the federal government directly working against each other in these countries as well. I talked about how they did this. The CIA was complicit in cocaine smuggling in the last episode and we saw how they were doing this in Vietnam to help fund the Hmong people and I haven't even talked about the fact that they were doing this in Afghanistan as well. So this is a very common theme through the drug war that the CIA is either allowing or even directly aiding in the smuggling of opiates or cocaine as long as it would help fund the enemies of our enemies so to speak. So they're dealing with much the same nonsense that I've talked about in other episodes. The CIA turned a blind eye to Noriega's dealings with the Medellin cartel because he was useful to them. But in 1989 he was driving hard negotiations with the Americans over the future of the Panama Canal. So the CIA took him off their payroll. Now all of a sudden he's no longer of any use so the CIA decides it is finally time to arrest him for cocaine trafficking and with Operation Just Cause they bombed Panama City, not the one in Florida obviously but the one in Panama and they arrested him and tried him in American court. During this trial Noriega's lawyers tried to subpoena evidence to show that Noriega was smuggling cocaine to fund the Contras just like many of the former Samosa loyalists I talked about previously. And they wanted to use the evidence to show that Noriega's cocaine smuggling was done with CIA approval but the evidence was never allowed to be shown to the jury because according to the government it would put national security at risk. So Noriega was sentenced to 40 years behind bars which he probably deserved as much as anybody. He was a pretty evil guy in his own right but it also goes to show the absolute hypocrisy of the federal government and the CIA on these issues. So I am going to end the series on the drug war history here. Obviously the history does not end there we're still waging the war on drugs there are very interesting episodes in the 1990s and in the 2000s when we start ramping up herbicides in Columbia and we do pass some laws especially against amphetamines in the 1990s so there's a lot more history here that I could talk about eventually I would love to come back to it so if people are interested please let us know because there's a lot of history with Columbia, Mexico and the Middle East even that I could spend several episodes on but this is not a drug war podcast as much as I sometimes would like it to be because that's my favorite topic of history it's a historical podcast in general so after this episode we are gonna move on to another topic that's always controversial among libertarians and always interesting among anybody that likes United States history and that's the Civil War so I'm gonna be spending several episodes on the Civil War starting with the antebellum period all the way at least through reconstruction and I'm not sure where I'm gonna end yet we'll see how that goes so you're definitely gonna wanna tune in for that if you have not subscribed to the podcast you definitely wanna do so and thanks for listening. 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