Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA)

A revisionist view of the drug wars.

The war in Afghanistan was nasty and brutish, marked by the same imperial arrogance that doomed U.S. involvement in Vietnam.

When President Nixon launched the war on drugs in 1971, it set off a bloody chain reaction in Mexico as new documents reveal.

Until both American and Mexican police forces stop treating it like a war, the violence of drug prohibition won't stop.

Much of the migrant "crisis" is blowback from decades of official U.S. policy in Central America.

Meditating on blotter not just as art, or as a historical artifact, but as a kind of media, even a “meta medium.”

Matthew Lassiter’s history plays out in ranch houses, high school parking lots, and courtrooms from Shaker Heights to Westchester to Orange County.

The tensions between the Manhattan District Attorney and President George H.W. Bush.

How the FBI's doomed attempt to stop criminal activity conducted via mobile phones shaped the regime of ubiquitous backdoor surveillance under which we live today.

A few decades ago, the left and the right, politicians and the public, universally embraced the criminalization of drug use. But a new consensus has emerged.

The history of the movement is one of unlikely success. But what can we learn from embattled experiments like prescribed heroin? 

The racist roots of the opioid crisis.

The disastrous consequences of focusing on law enforcement and criminality.

Smokeable pot's proliferation in North America involves the Mexican Revolution, the transatlantic slave trade, and Prohibition.