Speaker 1: Clayton. I'm gonna start this episode with a statement and
Speaker 1: not a question. The War on Drugs killed Brianna Taylor.
Speaker 1: That's a powerful statement. On March thirteenth, twenty twenty, Louisville
Speaker 1: police officers rated Taylor's apartment looking for drugs allegedly stashed
Speaker 1: by a former boyfriend. You know what happened when Brianna Taylor,
Speaker 1: she was just sort of lumped in, you know, it
Speaker 1: was almost like a sort of an afterthought, We'll go
Speaker 1: ahead and raid her house. Du N Walker, who was
Speaker 1: in the apartment and dating Taylor at the time, fired
Speaker 1: one shot at police. Louisville police officers fired more than
Speaker 1: thirty shots, many blindly, into the apartment. Taylor was struck
Speaker 1: and killed the mere fact that she was sort of
Speaker 1: adjacent to a drugs I mean, this is you know,
Speaker 1: this is how we justified collateral damage in war. No'm
Speaker 1: not grave. This becomes a nation issue because of a
Speaker 1: Senate stafford in his early twenties named Don Santarelli, and
Speaker 1: he proposes it as a wedge issue, Like wait a minute,
Speaker 1: hold on, that's where it came from. He just made
Speaker 1: a suggestion that we should bust into people's houses and
Speaker 1: they went with somebody who had no police That's crazy.
Speaker 1: You'd be stunned how much laws made by twenty two
Speaker 1: year olds. That's crazy. I'm Greg Glaud and this is
Speaker 1: the War on Drugs telling how you doing today? Man?
Speaker 1: Good about yourself? Greg? Doing well? Doing well? Yeah? Uh
Speaker 1: read something the other day and the title of the
Speaker 1: article was the War on Drugs killed Brianna Taylor and
Speaker 1: you know Brin Taylor for those um who don't know,
Speaker 1: because I mean there's been so many just tragedies since
Speaker 1: since then. As a shame we get lost in you know,
Speaker 1: the tragedy of which is which? But yeah, and it
Speaker 1: kind of crazy, like it's just it happened so often. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it cannot getting them to this stuff, like you really can't.
Speaker 1: But well, really the thrust of the article was just
Speaker 1: saying that, you know, they were able to break into
Speaker 1: her house, coming there at the middle of the night,
Speaker 1: her boyfriend sleeping next to her, and it turns out
Speaker 1: it was on a no knock warrant for some small
Speaker 1: connection that she had with a former kind of friend
Speaker 1: boyfriend drug dealer that she was not helping whatsoever on
Speaker 1: drugs and his house was a you know, miles away
Speaker 1: and it was for a small amount of drugs. Even
Speaker 1: if they found anything, didn't find anything. Bryan Taylor's dead. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you lost somebody close to you, somebody lost a family member,
Speaker 1: that was somebody in the community that was, you know,
Speaker 1: contributing to society. Yeah. Yeah, there was no knock warrants.
Speaker 1: Those that's a that's that's a real kind of dangerous
Speaker 1: thing in the community because it's it's just an excuse
Speaker 1: to kick in somebody's door, Like I mean, that's that's
Speaker 1: essentially what it is. Like, there's no people can't respond
Speaker 1: to the police because you haven't announced yourself as the police.
Speaker 1: You haven't, you know, And I don't understand the value
Speaker 1: in a no knock warrant. It seems like it's more
Speaker 1: of a dangerous situation for the officers, right, yeah, because
Speaker 1: if this person is selling drugs, then the person that
Speaker 1: they probably worried about is other drug dealers, right and
Speaker 1: you know who kicks indoors without stating this is the
Speaker 1: police and flashing lights other drug dealers. So yeah, Omar
Speaker 1: is the only one from the wire that ever announced
Speaker 1: himself that we're about rob right with a whistle, You
Speaker 1: know what I'm saying, Like he comes up whistling farmer
Speaker 1: in the daily you know what it is like the
Speaker 1: police don't even give you that much of a warning
Speaker 1: with the no knock like yeah, yeah, maybe that should
Speaker 1: be the law to play the ice cream music or
Speaker 1: something like you gotta turn your music up. But yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean, and Branda's story, as tragic as it was,
Speaker 1: is you know, not something that's rare in our It's
Speaker 1: not uncommon. Now it's a little bit too common, I think. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean there's countless stories of people, you know, officers
Speaker 1: getting the wrong address and barreling into someone's house. I
Speaker 1: mean we've seen that a million times. We saw that
Speaker 1: in was that Henry County? Yeah, yeah, outside Atlanta. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And like you talked about with like police, I mean
Speaker 1: there's places that don't do this at all in the
Speaker 1: United States. I mean, Florida has has not allowed for
Speaker 1: nor Knox for for years in statute, and like they're
Speaker 1: doing just fine. Um, it's it's not necessary. But the
Speaker 1: reason that you're able to do these things is because
Speaker 1: the War on drugs. The vast majority of no knock
Speaker 1: warrants and swat units and all this stuff is to
Speaker 1: execute drug ring. Yeah, a lot of this stuff, like
Speaker 1: when you make it the War on drugs, which this
Speaker 1: podcast is about, it's a war, so it is. That's
Speaker 1: what you're seeing. You're seeing police having to be more
Speaker 1: like soldiers and looking at citizens as enemy combatants. Almost. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and you know we're gonna talk to um Radley Alco
Speaker 1: who's an amazing investigative reporter, has an awesome book called
Speaker 1: Rise of the Warrior Cop. And what I love about
Speaker 1: it it shows like cops didn't always act like this,
Speaker 1: Like they didn't have these tactics of swat team units
Speaker 1: and military gear that literally is coming over from Iraq
Speaker 1: and Afghanistan in our war zone. Yeah, and it's coming
Speaker 1: right to local law enforcement with little to no training, accountability,
Speaker 1: oversight and all these things. And the trigger at every
Speaker 1: point when you see this expanded police power that makes
Speaker 1: them more like the military. It's all drug related. It's
Speaker 1: the fear of the drug war and it allows for
Speaker 1: this government expansion and it's kind of terrifying, and it
Speaker 1: happens so slow you don't realize it, and then these
Speaker 1: tragic consequences have you're like, wait, we didn't always do
Speaker 1: it this way. We didn't have to always do it
Speaker 1: this way? Why are we doing this right? And yeah,
Speaker 1: I like it because I'm glad to hear what he
Speaker 1: has to say because it's kind of it makes me
Speaker 1: feel like I'm not crazy because we're seeing how far
Speaker 1: it's come. But even in my lifetime I've seen it
Speaker 1: doesn't seem like the SWAT team does what they used
Speaker 1: to do. Seemed like the SWAT team used to be
Speaker 1: called in dangerous situations when things, you know, when nobody
Speaker 1: else could do. Now it seems like SWAT Team is
Speaker 1: strictly for serving no knock war rufen. Yeah, like, yeah,
Speaker 1: SWAT used to We used to watch those movies like
Speaker 1: in the eighties nineties, like Liam Neeson would be in
Speaker 1: it or Arnold Hostages, Yeahstages. We got a dude and
Speaker 1: the sniper rifle on the scope and you got the
Speaker 1: negotiating dude, don't take the shot. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And
Speaker 1: now it's just dope fiends and they're they're just right,
Speaker 1: like that's who we're going on right with m fors
Speaker 1: and A. Yeah. So yeah, I'm I can't wait to
Speaker 1: get into with Radley about like all this stuff, like
Speaker 1: the history of it. I mean, the nerd of me
Speaker 1: just loves that stuff. But it really does show you
Speaker 1: how we got here and it doesn't have to be
Speaker 1: this way, and what other places do and what can
Speaker 1: we do and what are the reforms that can you know,
Speaker 1: get us away from these devastating consequences like Grinn and
Speaker 1: Taylor and people need to hear it. Yeah, so let's
Speaker 1: get in to it. Excited Bradley, Welcome to the War
Speaker 1: on Drugs. Thanks thanks for having me. Yeah, we're glad
Speaker 1: to have you. Yeah, this is awesome. Yeah, I'll kind
Speaker 1: of kick it off here. You know, we all heard
Speaker 1: the story of Brianna Taylor that it was a no
Speaker 1: knock garade based upon very scant evidence of drug activity
Speaker 1: at her house. It was an old boyfriend or a
Speaker 1: friend that used to have packages delivered to her house
Speaker 1: because his would get porch pirated and hers were able
Speaker 1: to be protected. You know. They came in at you know,
Speaker 1: midnight or whatever. It was one o'clock, her and her
Speaker 1: boyfriend lawful, you know, firearm owner, and people are barreling
Speaker 1: into their house. What do you expect? And then he
Speaker 1: was shot and killed or she was shot and killed,
Speaker 1: and he was charged with murder at first, and then
Speaker 1: I believe those were all dropped. But it seems like
Speaker 1: these types of tactics no knock garades and warrants not
Speaker 1: only are incredibly dangerous for the people that are being
Speaker 1: rated on, also for the police officers as well. Can
Speaker 1: you talk a little bit about kind of the rise
Speaker 1: of these type of tactics. Where does no knock warrants
Speaker 1: come from? Has that just always been how it's been
Speaker 1: just kind of talk about that, and then kind of
Speaker 1: the combination and connection with the War on drugs and
Speaker 1: how that's kind of raisen at the same time of
Speaker 1: these type of military tactics. Sure, before I get into
Speaker 1: the history, I mean, one thing that I think we
Speaker 1: need to mention about the Brenna Taylor raid is, you know,
Speaker 1: if you buy into the war on drugs and you
Speaker 1: buy into the idea that they have to do these
Speaker 1: kinds of raids, which I don't buy into either, you know,
Speaker 1: they had enough evidence for the guy that they were
Speaker 1: after in this case, right, there was overwhelming evidence. The
Speaker 1: reason why they raided Brionna Taylor as well. I think
Speaker 1: is important to note in a discussion like this. You know,
Speaker 1: in order to fight a war, you have to do
Speaker 1: humanize your enemy, right, you have to make them sort
Speaker 1: of look like worthless. You have to you have to
Speaker 1: sort of instill in the public the idea that these
Speaker 1: people aren't worse, sort of the basic dignity that we
Speaker 1: give to other human beings. And the fact that you know,
Speaker 1: what happened with Brionna Taylors, which she was just sort
Speaker 1: of lumped in. You know, it was almost like a
Speaker 1: sort of an afterthought that was gonna we'll go ahead
Speaker 1: and raid her house too, since while we're at it,
Speaker 1: and like the idea that you know, you're gonna be
Speaker 1: breaking somebody's door down in the middle night and subjecting
Speaker 1: them to these volatile tactics, subjecting them in any people
Speaker 1: that happened to be in the home that you know,
Speaker 1: just the mere fact that she was sort of adjacent
Speaker 1: to a drug. I mean, this is you know, this
Speaker 1: is how we justify collateral damage in wars, right, that's
Speaker 1: how we justify killing citizens wars. Well, we had to
Speaker 1: bomb you know, this bridge and there happened to be
Speaker 1: citizens on it, you know, Oh well, you know, I
Speaker 1: mean it's a tragic, but it had to be done.
Speaker 1: And you know, it's important to remember that the no
Speaker 1: knock grade for the first sort of couple decades of
Speaker 1: its existence as a as an actual sort of policy.
Speaker 1: This is not something that police chiefs were clamoring for
Speaker 1: or sheriffs wanted. Um you know again, police were reluctant
Speaker 1: to use it, and when the places where it was passed.
Speaker 1: But then Nixon runs in nineteen sixty eight and he
Speaker 1: makes um, you know, drugs and the drug war a
Speaker 1: huge priority of his campaign. He's it's this you know,
Speaker 1: pretty blatant racist appeal to sort of white fear of
Speaker 1: black crime or suburban fear of urban crime. And so
Speaker 1: you know, as part of that campaign, he has a
Speaker 1: number proposes a number of policies like doing away with
Speaker 1: cash bail, um, a lot of really some insane things
Speaker 1: about that sort of indefinite attention. And at one point
Speaker 1: they wanted to sort of arrest the attorneys for you know,
Speaker 1: suspected drug dealers. But one of the big policies was
Speaker 1: the no not great. It was this idea that you know,
Speaker 1: we're going to show how tough we are in drugs
Speaker 1: by we're gonna let cops just kick down doors to
Speaker 1: to you know, go in and seize the drugs. And
Speaker 1: I mean the interesting thing about this, you know, I said,
Speaker 1: this is not something that law enforcement wanted. Um, this
Speaker 1: is not something they were clamoring for. So this becomes
Speaker 1: a national issue because of a guy, a Senate stafford
Speaker 1: in his early twenties named Don Santarelli, and he proposes
Speaker 1: it as a wedge issue like this is this is
Speaker 1: going to be something that we can do to appeal
Speaker 1: to Middle America. You know, most people don't think of
Speaker 1: themselves that the kind of people who are going to
Speaker 1: be wrongly rated by police officers. Wait a minute, hold on,
Speaker 1: that's where it came from. He just made a suggestion
Speaker 1: that we should bust into people's houses and they went
Speaker 1: with somebody who had no police That's crazy. You'd be
Speaker 1: stunned how much law is made by twenty two year
Speaker 1: old just say it like about this. Yeah, man, it's yeah.
Speaker 1: This whole city's run by like people making thirty thousand
Speaker 1: dollars a year. Where it's nuts. Yeah. I read interviewed
Speaker 1: centrally from my book, and you know today he says
Speaker 1: this is one of the biggest mistakes of his career.
Speaker 1: And he's he's very sort of mournful, almost for the
Speaker 1: way that this tactic has been sort of used and
Speaker 1: abused over the years. Um. You know, but it's part
Speaker 1: of this successful campaign. And Nickson gets elected and in
Speaker 1: I believe its seventy or seventy one, Congress passes this law.
Speaker 1: They pass two laws. One is a bill that authorizes
Speaker 1: no knock grades for federal narcotics officers, and the other
Speaker 1: is one that legalizes no knock grades for police officers
Speaker 1: in Washington DCS. Congress has jurisdiction over the District of Columbia.
Speaker 1: And they're two very different reactions. In DC, DC at
Speaker 1: the time actually had a pretty progressive police chief named
Speaker 1: Jerry Wilson. I interviewed him for the book as well,
Speaker 1: and Wilson hated this idea. Um. And you know, when
Speaker 1: I asked him why he didn't want to implement this idea,
Speaker 1: this no knock graide idea, he said some things that
Speaker 1: I think are pretty profound. Um. First, he said, you know,
Speaker 1: nobody goes into drug dealing to kill cops, right they Uh,
Speaker 1: any drug dealer knows that to be kill a cop,
Speaker 1: you're going to be lucky to survive the next five
Speaker 1: or six seconds. It doesn't do business. Yeah, business. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's bad for business, You're gonna be it's bad for life. Right,
Speaker 1: You're you're probably gonna be killed, or you're gonna go
Speaker 1: to prison for the rest of your life. You're gonna
Speaker 1: be executed. Um. The other thing he said is, you know,
Speaker 1: the main justification for no knock grades other than say
Speaker 1: the police is that they need that evidence in the
Speaker 1: house to get a prosecution. Right. And if you wait
Speaker 1: and give the person time to destroy the evidence, um,
Speaker 1: then uh, you know that person's going to be to charge, right.
Speaker 1: And from his perspective, it's like, you know, the amount
Speaker 1: of drugs that you can flush down the toilet or
Speaker 1: dispose of, you know, in the in the whatever twenty
Speaker 1: thirty seconds that the police ought to give you before
Speaker 1: breaking in, you know, um, you know, that's not a
Speaker 1: significant quantity enough that it merits justifies the risk that
Speaker 1: comes with a no knock rade and the kind of
Speaker 1: violation of civil liberty. Yeah, you're not a kingpin, You're
Speaker 1: not El Chapo. If you got it down in two flush, yeah,
Speaker 1: And if the purpose of the drug wars to get
Speaker 1: the drugs out of the the streets, you know, those drugs
Speaker 1: aren't on the streets. Anymore. Right there, they're flushed. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: you know, his officers refused to to implement it, and interestingly,
Speaker 1: crime actually goes down in DC over the next couple
Speaker 1: of years as it goes up and the rest of
Speaker 1: the country. I don't think his decision not to do
Speaker 1: no knock rades it's the reason crime went down, but
Speaker 1: it certainly didn't make things worse. But the federal level,
Speaker 1: it's very different. Um So Nixon had also set up
Speaker 1: these strike forces, which were federal narcotics officers teaming up
Speaker 1: with local police. And these guys just go crazy. They
Speaker 1: start kicking down doors left and right. They're they're raiding
Speaker 1: places without warrants, they're lying on warrants, and they're raiding
Speaker 1: the wrong houses, and people are getting terrorized, and some
Speaker 1: people are getting killed. You know, since then there's a
Speaker 1: trail of bodies. You know, I write about a botch
Speaker 1: no knock that ended up with an innocent person dying.
Speaker 1: You know, I would say they're probably four or five
Speaker 1: of those a year, at least, lots more where people injured,
Speaker 1: lots more where cops are killed or injured. And we
Speaker 1: see this in the Brionna Taylor case. So the warrant
Speaker 1: for the search warrant for the raid on Brionna Taylor's
Speaker 1: own was illegal. It had this cut and paste boilerplate
Speaker 1: language that they'd used in all the other search warrants
Speaker 1: in that investigation. And I think it's a very sort
Speaker 1: of underappreciated aspect of the case, which is that this
Speaker 1: is kind of standard policy. I mean, the police police
Speaker 1: departments across the country are routinely violating the Supreme Court's
Speaker 1: ruling and nobody really cares. Um. You know, I found
Speaker 1: in Little Rock a few years ago, I did a
Speaker 1: review of about one hundred search warrants over a year
Speaker 1: and a half period in Little Rock, a hundred no
Speaker 1: knock warrants, and I found I think it was ninety
Speaker 1: to ninety five percent of them had verbatim word for word,
Speaker 1: cut and paste in the no knock section. And you know,
Speaker 1: I actually interviewed the judges who signed those warrants, and
Speaker 1: they didn't think they had done anything wrong. They could
Speaker 1: They did no idea why it was even you know,
Speaker 1: asking about this, and it's sort of like they were
Speaker 1: signing illegal warrants. They were violating the law. And yet
Speaker 1: because there are no consequences for any buddy involved, the judges,
Speaker 1: the prosecutors, the police. It's just become sort of routine
Speaker 1: for police to do this. And that's what happened in
Speaker 1: Brenna Taylor's case. Yeah, that's that's unbelievable, and that she's
Speaker 1: kind of just looked at as the same as someone
Speaker 1: who actually was a suspected trafficker or whatever else and
Speaker 1: just the exact same on that same footing. And to
Speaker 1: your point, it's that almost dehumanizing of everyone. It's too general,
Speaker 1: just boilerplate. These are the people that are in a
Speaker 1: different subcategory of human beings more or less, and we
Speaker 1: can do whatever we want. Yeah, there's there's no consideration
Speaker 1: for their for their humanity. And you know the other
Speaker 1: thing about Brown and Taylor's case, there was a criminologist
Speaker 1: at the University of Eastern Kentucky who part of his
Speaker 1: grad student thesis, he was allowed to sort of inbed
Speaker 1: himself in the Louisville Police department and he talked about
Speaker 1: how he went on a lot of these raids and
Speaker 1: he was sort of in the car watching it, and
Speaker 1: over and over again he saw them. The battering ram
Speaker 1: hit the door at the very time the same time
Speaker 1: that they announced that they were pleased, right, and this
Speaker 1: is a you know, brazen violation of Supreme Court. Again,
Speaker 1: the police thought called those knocking announce rates right, even
Speaker 1: though they'll whole purpose of knocking announces to give the
Speaker 1: people inside notice and let them avoid this violence by
Speaker 1: coming to the door. Yeah, if your second knock is
Speaker 1: a battering ram, you didn't really not. We have a
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Speaker 1: one of the things that we are discussing on this
Speaker 1: podcast quite a bit is how the War on drugs
Speaker 1: was never about drugs, and it was about all these
Speaker 1: other things. And one of the themes that I really
Speaker 1: see in your book is, you know, from the sixties
Speaker 1: to the Nixon eras, through Reagan and Bush and Obama
Speaker 1: and all throughout, drugs are used kind of as a
Speaker 1: reason to expand military kind of reduce some of the
Speaker 1: constant protections from the Fourth Amendment and all these other things.
Speaker 1: Can you kind of talk a little bit about that
Speaker 1: history of militarization through the eyes of the War on
Speaker 1: drugs a little bit, or are just generally there? Yeah,
Speaker 1: I think that's an important question. I think there are
Speaker 1: two aspects to police militarization. The first is the stuff, right,
Speaker 1: the guns, the armored personnel carriers, the helicopters, the bayonets,
Speaker 1: ballistics gear, all of that, and that you know, that
Speaker 1: stuff is all problematic, you know, for various for very
Speaker 1: obvious reasons, which is this is stuff that was designed
Speaker 1: for use on a battlefield that's being used in domestic policing,
Speaker 1: you know, on American streets in American neighborhoods against America
Speaker 1: and citizens. But the other side, I think, which is
Speaker 1: sort of unappreciated and maybe overlooked a little bit, is
Speaker 1: the mindset, militaristic mindset, and the two kind of go
Speaker 1: hand in hand. Right. If you have a if you
Speaker 1: take a domestic police officer and you dress him in camouflage,
Speaker 1: you dress him like a soldier, you train him like
Speaker 1: a soldier, you arm him like a soldier, and you
Speaker 1: tell him, you know, he's fighting a war, whether it's
Speaker 1: a war on drugs or crime or terrorism or know
Speaker 1: anything else. You know, we shouldn't be surprised if they
Speaker 1: start to think of themselves as soldiers and think of
Speaker 1: their job as the job of a soldier, and so
Speaker 1: the mindset though, I think, you know, we've increasingly seen
Speaker 1: this sort of US versus them mentality in policing has
Speaker 1: driven a lot at the top by politicians who kind
Speaker 1: of have you know, described the war on drugs and
Speaker 1: very warlike, sort of militaristic terms. Yeah. I always think
Speaker 1: about like when I used to put pads on for football,
Speaker 1: like in high school, Like it changes your mentality ready
Speaker 1: to hit. Yeah, Like I don't care if I'm at
Speaker 1: like the Dunbar High School, you know, powder puff football
Speaker 1: game for a homecoming, like I'm going through some people. Yeah, Like,
Speaker 1: you know, it just change your mentality. And if you're
Speaker 1: like doing flag football, like you're a different person. Like
Speaker 1: of course that's going to change that analoviously, that changes
Speaker 1: your perception as a citizen, Like these aren't my neighbors anymore,
Speaker 1: These aren't community police. These are occupiers in a way.
Speaker 1: I mean, I think just intuitively, there's it's going to
Speaker 1: have a profound effect, right. Um. I mean you know
Speaker 1: I've often, um, sort of joked about this on social media.
Speaker 1: But when you see, you know, an officer in a
Speaker 1: city trusting camouflage, Um, there's no you know, there's no
Speaker 1: practical reason for that, right, I mean, you're not You're
Speaker 1: not raiding woods in the middle of New York right then,
Speaker 1: and moreover, it tends to be very conspicuous. They're not
Speaker 1: trying to hide from anything. Right. The whole point is
Speaker 1: to send a message. I mean, that's why they wear it, right. Um.
Speaker 1: And again you know this, the problem with this is that, um,
Speaker 1: police officers aren't soldiers right there. They're supposed to be
Speaker 1: peace officers. Their job is to protect our constitutional rights,
Speaker 1: whereas the soldier's job is basically to to kill people
Speaker 1: and break things to annihilate a foreign enemy. Very different
Speaker 1: primary objectives, right, And for a long time this country
Speaker 1: have done a good job of separating those two and
Speaker 1: keeping them apart. But I think that the War on drugs,
Speaker 1: what it's done, probably one of the more destructive things
Speaker 1: that's done, is has blurred that line between police and
Speaker 1: soldier and it's while we've done a good job of
Speaker 1: keeping soldiers out of domestic policing, where we've kind of
Speaker 1: dropped the ball as we've allowed our domestic police to
Speaker 1: become more and more like soldiers. Yeah, and Raley, one
Speaker 1: thing I always kind of discuss is the you know,
Speaker 1: the relationship between violent crime and the drug war. Can
Speaker 1: you talk a little bit about that connection between militarization,
Speaker 1: drug war and an actual just violent crime occurring, Like
Speaker 1: how much violence in this country happens because of drug
Speaker 1: prohibition and the war that we're you know, putting out
Speaker 1: on on narcotics. Well, I mean, if you if you
Speaker 1: go back to the prohibition era and you look at
Speaker 1: the homicide rate, I mean there's a spike the moment
Speaker 1: alcohol is broken into the Bolstad Act, and then it
Speaker 1: drops the moment that it's it's repealed. So that's you know,
Speaker 1: that's pretty striking. And if you look at the homicid
Speaker 1: rate over a longer period of time, there's a spike
Speaker 1: right at about the time Nixon declares war on drugs
Speaker 1: and implement his policies and during the regular administration. Um,
Speaker 1: So you know, I do think there's a Yeah, there's
Speaker 1: clearly every time you sort of well, when you prohibit
Speaker 1: drugs for the first time, you're going to see a
Speaker 1: spike because you know, you're you're taking a legal activity
Speaker 1: and pushing it underground. Um. You know, I would make
Speaker 1: the joke you don't very often see people murdered in
Speaker 1: a michelobe deal gone back exactly yea Corona boys are
Speaker 1: coming over. Yeah right. I mean, if you two alcohol
Speaker 1: distributors have a beef, they go to court and saddle
Speaker 1: to two drug dealers have a beef, it's a whole
Speaker 1: different matter, right. Um. But you know, also just you know,
Speaker 1: in general, when you then when you sort of crack
Speaker 1: down on drugs, then you just you disrupt the sort
Speaker 1: of established black market. So then people start fighting for
Speaker 1: turf again. I mean, we saw this in Mexico when
Speaker 1: the US government for some of the Mexican government to
Speaker 1: take a more militaristic approach to the war on drugs.
Speaker 1: It disrupted the black market. And you saw this just
Speaker 1: just massive heart wrenching sort of escalation and homicides across
Speaker 1: from Mexico. And you know, the really perverse thing about it,
Speaker 1: I know, getting a little bit off topic here, but
Speaker 1: you saw politicians justify this by saying, basically, I mean
Speaker 1: everybody from Hillary Clinton to Bush's drugs are that, you know,
Speaker 1: these tens of thousands of murdered Mexicans were sort of
Speaker 1: the price that we had to pay to stop Americans
Speaker 1: from getting high, right. I Mean it's just like we
Speaker 1: want to talk about the humanization. I mean, it's just
Speaker 1: this utter sort of disregard for human life. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: kind of switching to something a little bit different, but
Speaker 1: on the same topic as you know, recently, you know,
Speaker 1: Joe Biden just asked, you know, you know, pardoned everyone
Speaker 1: with low level drug possession, kind of a more symbolic
Speaker 1: approach and then also potentially rescheduling. And we've seen, you know,
Speaker 1: thirty five states have some sort of form of legal
Speaker 1: marijuana across the country. I think it would shock people
Speaker 1: and Clay this song. We've talked about how much marijuana
Speaker 1: still is a major contribute to the drug war, criminal
Speaker 1: justice and kind of interactions between police and citizens. You know,
Speaker 1: can you talk a little bit about like how marijuana
Speaker 1: is still able to be you know with this Yeah,
Speaker 1: with the smell of marijuana coming from a car like civilized,
Speaker 1: which is which is crazy too because it can be
Speaker 1: used for anything, like you can if you can smell
Speaker 1: marijuana with both of my windows up while I'm doing sixty. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you were a RoboCup. You are like, yeah, and they
Speaker 1: use it for everything. Well, what it amaze me is
Speaker 1: they you know, they can pull a car over because
Speaker 1: they smelled you know, marijuana that was you know, locked
Speaker 1: in the trunk right of the car, or they can
Speaker 1: smell marijuana that you know, gave rise to a demeaning
Speaker 1: roadside search where they go through every single bag and
Speaker 1: throw everything out on the ground and they don't find anything.
Speaker 1: And yet nobody, nobody, you know, clearly they didn't smell marijuana,
Speaker 1: and yet nobody nobody says anything. It's like, oh, the
Speaker 1: officer was mistaken, Oh well move on. And then you're
Speaker 1: able to use everything there because it was a or
Speaker 1: even if you don't, you just subjected somebody to a
Speaker 1: humiliating search. You know, their ships like spread out all
Speaker 1: over the interstate, and the cops like, all right, see
Speaker 1: you later, go on, you know, and they move on
Speaker 1: to the next person. I mean, I wrote about a
Speaker 1: story where one of these canine units just outside of
Speaker 1: Saint Louis Collinsville, Illinois, um, you know, he pulled over
Speaker 1: this guy and you know, the drug dog magically alerted
Speaker 1: and they didn't find anything. And of course the cops
Speaker 1: will say, well there was there must have been trained
Speaker 1: to shake, you know, yeah, traces of And that guy
Speaker 1: sued the guy that got pulled over, and he found
Speaker 1: out that this cop was training. How he would train
Speaker 1: his dogs. He would go to roadside motels and hotels
Speaker 1: into the parking lot and he would rub pot on
Speaker 1: the bumpers of some of the cars and then he
Speaker 1: would take his dog through dog alerted and that's how
Speaker 1: he trained his dog. Well, imagine if you're one of
Speaker 1: those cars didn't get pulled over the next day, you know,
Speaker 1: and the drug dog comes out and alerts, and now
Speaker 1: you got to search, you know, I mean the drug
Speaker 1: dog thing. I mean, we could do a whole episode
Speaker 1: just on that. Man. I've never probably calls believed on
Speaker 1: them like all the way, like no like, and even
Speaker 1: the research shows they're only good for about like two
Speaker 1: hours out of the day. Well also snah, so I
Speaker 1: am too well as government work. Well, I mean, yeah,
Speaker 1: these dogs are trained, dogs have great noses, but but
Speaker 1: we've also bred into dogs for several hundred years. This
Speaker 1: this innate desire to please us. And so if you're
Speaker 1: a drug handler, you want a dog that's gonna please you.
Speaker 1: And so the dog can read that and if he
Speaker 1: if you're drug handler things there's drugs in the car,
Speaker 1: the dogs are going to alert because it wants to
Speaker 1: please the handler. And that's not taught out of them.
Speaker 1: I mean I've talked to people who train drug dogs
Speaker 1: and they've said told me, we could train that out
Speaker 1: of dogs. So they only alert when they're actually drugs
Speaker 1: in the car. Police departments don't want that. They want
Speaker 1: dogs they're gonna alert that they are gonna alert whenever
Speaker 1: the cop wants them to alert. It's amazing. Yeah, cop
Speaker 1: get excited, the dog get excited. Ye, everybody's happy. Yeah. Radley,
Speaker 1: we want to thank you for coming on. We really
Speaker 1: appreciate it. Man. Pleasure. Um, what the work you're doing
Speaker 1: is important, and let these people know how they can
Speaker 1: support you, where they can find you and where they
Speaker 1: can get more formed on what's going on. Sure. So
Speaker 1: I'm an independent journalist now, so you can find my
Speaker 1: work at the Watch, which is a substack. So if
Speaker 1: you go to Radley Balco dot substack dot com or
Speaker 1: just google my name and the watch or my name
Speaker 1: and substack. You should be able to find it pretty easily.
Speaker 1: I appreciate that. Yeah, everyone go check out Radley's work.
Speaker 1: He is one of the foremost experts on this issue.
Speaker 1: His book Rise of the Warrior Coop is terrific, something
Speaker 1: that definitely got me more interested in my career to
Speaker 1: do this. So yeah, thank you again, thanks for the invitation.
Speaker 1: I appreciate it again, Thank you so much. Clayton wasn't
Speaker 1: cheap to get so we had to cut a couple
Speaker 1: of commercials. We'll be right back. Somebody gotta pay me.
Speaker 1: The theme I kept seeing was drugs was an excuse
Speaker 1: to kind of militarize the police. And so it wasn't
Speaker 1: that we were concerned about drugs and safety. It was
Speaker 1: this is an area that we can exploit to actually
Speaker 1: increase the police force, increase this kind of presence, increases
Speaker 1: police state. Yeah, I mean, once you get past automatic weapons,
Speaker 1: I don't I don't know who you think they're dealing with,
Speaker 1: Like you need that much military equipment and I think,
Speaker 1: I don't know. It's it's scary because I think the
Speaker 1: military probably has more protocol there's accountability, there's protocol, like
Speaker 1: if you act up, you go to a military tribunal. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you know, like you could get courtmark, you could get yeah.
Speaker 1: Like and I think with police, they're getting all that
Speaker 1: equipment with none of that. There's no training requirements, there's
Speaker 1: nothing like it. And in facts with them, it's called
Speaker 1: the ten thirty three program. If you don't use it
Speaker 1: within a year, you have to give it back. Oh
Speaker 1: so you got to use it. You're incentivized to use
Speaker 1: it in some way. So whenever something the next thing
Speaker 1: that happens, whether it's you know, the high school football
Speaker 1: game was out of control, yeah, put that right gear on,
Speaker 1: get it on. Yes, you have to go out there,
Speaker 1: don't smack anybody, but show them we got it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so we could keep it. Yeah, seriously, it's crazy. Um.
Speaker 1: And you know when I mean, you're you're dude, I'm
Speaker 1: a guy. Like, we're idiots. Um. All we do is
Speaker 1: like we have new toys, we want to use them. Yes,
Speaker 1: and so you're going to give these things to police forces,
Speaker 1: they're going to use them. And you know, you you
Speaker 1: have all this stuff lying around. What is the most
Speaker 1: common thing you do? It's drug warrants, and we've seen
Speaker 1: it a million times go horribly wrong, these middle of
Speaker 1: the night swat style raids, no knock warrants, when they're
Speaker 1: not knocking and announcing, and I mean, I think the
Speaker 1: most famous one that we've seen Pascual Hers with Breonna Taylor.
Speaker 1: It's a midnight raid. Their only evidence was that the
Speaker 1: guy that there was their target had packages delivered to
Speaker 1: her house at some point because they were on and
Speaker 1: off again dating, and that was the justification to break
Speaker 1: into our home at midnight without announcing themselves break into
Speaker 1: because that's what it is like. If you announce yourself
Speaker 1: as the police and you've got the place surrounded, you
Speaker 1: probably have the upper hand. But when you just bust
Speaker 1: through somebody's door, and if you say you're gonna have
Speaker 1: the drug dealers, drug dealers worry about other drug dealers. Yeah,
Speaker 1: he don't. And they don't announce themselves. They don't be like, hello,
Speaker 1: this is the cartel, we're outside, where's our money? You know,
Speaker 1: they just bust in and they start shooting. So now
Speaker 1: you're blending to get how is that even safe for
Speaker 1: the officers? It's not, And I think people forget that.
Speaker 1: We look at like, Oh, that's the bad guys. These
Speaker 1: the good guys. These are the bad guys. These are
Speaker 1: the good guys. But everybody's a human being in this,
Speaker 1: and that's stuff you don't even think about, like when
Speaker 1: you talk about the War on Drugs. Make sure you
Speaker 1: follow the War on Drugs podcast so you don't miss
Speaker 1: any new episodes or any of our quick fixed bonus content.
Speaker 1: And we'll be back next week with another episode of
Speaker 1: War on Drugs. Until then, thank you for listening. Executive
Speaker 1: producers for War on Drugs are Jason Flam and Kevin Wordis.
Speaker 1: Senior producer is Michael Epstein. Editing by Nick Massetti and
Speaker 1: Michael Epstein. Associate producer and mix and mastering by Nick Massetti.
Speaker 1: Additional production by Jeff Cleburne and Anna mcintee. Be sure
Speaker 1: to follow the show on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook at
Speaker 1: Lava for Good. You can follow Greg on Twitter at
Speaker 1: Greg Glaude, and you can follow Clayton English on Instagram
Speaker 1: at Clayton English. The War on Drugs is a production
Speaker 1: of Lava for Good Podcasts and association the Signal Company
Speaker 1: Number One. I'm your host, Clayton English, and I'm Greg Glaude.
Speaker 1: And thanks for listening to the War on Drugs podcast