Tag: war on drugs

• Brazil’s top court votes to decriminalize marijuana possession in move that could reduce prison numbers

  June 26, 2024

  Black Brazilians make up almost two-thirds of the country’s overcrowded prison population, despite comprising just 10% of the national population, Bloomberg reported. https://www.semafor.com/article/06/26/2024/brazils-top-court-votes-to-decriminalize-marijuana-possession more ›

• ‘The cocaine superhighway’: how death and destruction mark drug’s path from South America to Europe

  June 13, 2024

  The submerged section of the ‘iceberg’ shows a man being searched by police, labelled packets of cocaine from a seizure and a customs official searching a box of bananas for… more ›

• Matthew D. Lassiter On What We Miss About White America and the War on Drugs

  April 20, 2024

  When I first picked up Matthew D. Lassiter’s groundbreaking new text, The Suburban Crisis: White America and the War on Drugs, I knew I had to interview him and bring the… more ›

• Criminal Leviathans

  November 16, 2023

  What happens when state repression strengthens the very criminal groups it aims to constrain? Under mass incarceration, sophisticated prison gangs have learned not only to organize inmate populations, but to… more ›

• Brazil: Primeiro Comando da Capital (PCC)

  November 16, 2023

  The Primeiro Comando da Capital (PCC), which means the First Capital Command, is a Brazilian gang that operates from within the São Paulo state penitentiary system by means of cell… more ›

• ‘The tsunami just keeps coming’: Europe’s growing cocaine market

  November 15, 2023

  Squeezed between the two channels of France’s biggest container port is a warren of narrow alleyways, blowsy 1950s bungalows and – along a windblown high road – a disheartening parade… more ›

• How a Brazilian prison gang became an international criminal leviathan

  November 11, 2023

  In a forest clearing deep in the Brazilian Amazon, a bullet-scarred Venezuelan gangster sat smoking Colombian skunk. While his sidekicks mingled under the ice-cream bean tree where they sell crack,… more ›

• Nayarit and the Making of a Narco State

  August 7, 2023

  Nayarit rarely makes the headlines in Mexico, far less in the rest of the world. But this fall, the arrest of Mexico’s former secretary of defense, General Salvador Cienfuegos Zepeda,… more ›

• Shrouded in secrecy for years, Russia’s Wagner Group opens up

  August 13, 2022

  “We deal with the fragmentation of military power that is typical for authoritarian regimes,” explained Luzin. “Wagner are neither elite forces nor well-trained commandos, they are just another sort of… more ›

• The Brave New World of Legalized Psychedelics Is Already Here

  March 27, 2022

  If a single line endures from the psychedelic carnival of the 1960s, it’s probably Harvard psychologist and psychedelic cheerleader Timothy Leary’s catchphrase “Turn on, tune in, drop out.” A call… more ›