Dan Baum has written a bunch of good books about a variety of subjects, and I’ve mentioned him many times on this blog (search for his name, if you want). I first met Dan and his wife, Margaret, in New Orleans in 2007. The title of my book, “In Defense of Flogging,” was coined the…
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It makes homicide — which kills “just” 40 Americans a day — look positively benign. 47,000 Americas died from drug overdose in 2014. That’s a shocking figure. 47,000 is the number of US soldiers who died in Vietnam combat. And that was over 20 years. Heroin deaths have shot up since 2010: From the Times:…
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Out of 12,000 Chicago Cops, 124 are responsible for a third of misconduct lawsuits settled by the city since 2009, costing $34 million. The Tribune(behind a paywall unless you good for the article) reports that 82 percent of the department’s officers were not named in any settlements. (Keep in mind that a good chunk of…
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It’s been awhile since we’ve gotten a Kingpin. Almost a year. El Chapo. We’ve gotten this guy before. Like non-sequel movies, are we running out of Kingpins?
A good piece of journalism in the Sun: In Baltimore, where there are an estimated 19,000 heroin users, including 9,500 chronic users, annual spending on the drug is estimated at least at $165 million. … When the brothers of one local kingpin were kidnapped, he came up with $500,000 for ransom. When investigators searched a…
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This is what the War on Drugs looks like. Just another day. From the Chicago Sun-Times: One of Chicago’s most notorious informants — who provided drug tips to the police while secretly killing and robbing people and doing drug deals — was paid hundreds of thousands of dollars for his information with the approval of…
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Dan Baumwrites about what the Drug War was really about: In 1993, I was researching my first book, Smoke and Mirrors, which is the tale, starting in the 1968 Nixon presidential campaign, of how drugs were turned into a political weapon. I tracked down as many people as I could who had been involved in…
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Sometimes it’s fun to re-read my old field notes. I should write a book or something. This is from Jan 24, 2001 (and better than my average day’s notes): [Officer A] and I are walking our 4 miles at 5am: “People say this is a good neighborhood with a few bad people. But it’s not.…
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In the New York Times David Brooks repeats John Pfaff’s argument in Slate that the war on drugs isn’t responsible for our crazy high prison population. Brooks vouches for Pfaff as “wonderfully objective, nonideological and data-driven.” That might all be true. Pfaff is probably a swell guy and kind to animals, too. There’s something to…
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Is there any place in the US that so does more bad policing per capita? This Georgia county has a population of 43,000. Why oh why do I even know you exist, Habersham County? Oh, because of this. And this. And this. Well, related to drug raids gone bad, we now have this. A sheriff’s…
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