The War on Drugs - an American-centred narrative that has taken root across the globe, and particularly across the Americas - is one of history’s stranger anomalies. Drugs are already odd in and of themselves, given how they distort the senses, most overtly in how some psychedelic users report a transformed perception of reality. While of course some countries through history have attempted to suppress drug use - most famously 19th century Imperial China, facing the spectre of opium - drugs were often culturally integrated where they were prevalent, and unregulated where they were not. By far the most obvious example of this is alcohol, which is generally considered separate from drugs and normalised and legal throughout much of the world. All this despite serving the exact same purpose as other sense-distorting, inhibition-easing drugs.
Advances in chemistry enabled a proliferation in drugs through the late 1800s and early 1900s. That, in turn, drove common sense regulation, and a growing drug stigma, best represented by 1936’s Reefer Madness. The Nazis also provided the most notorious of the many examples of people under enormous pressure turning to stimulant drugs in an effort to find the energy, which, predictably, only further degraded already monstrously terrible decision making. Many drugs are very bad for you, surprise surprise.
Alcohol had of course already been banned in many countries, mostly due to Islam’s prescriptions against the substance, but America famously dabbled in the disaster of Prohibition. This laid down the foundations for the argument against bans on intoxicants. Given how attracted many people are to substances that are enjoyable, ease the way to interactions, and are downright addictive, demand remains high even when they’re banned. People will risk defying the law to purchase, which means profiteers have good reason to produce and sell lots of this good at a premium. (And sometimes slip antifreeze in the wine.)
And, because this process is so widespread, the law cannot be fairly and consistently enforced when so many are bound to slip through the cracks. All this just to enforce something that defies the general principle of most laws: they are to protect people’s safety and interests from each other, not themselves. Why make the call for somebody what they can and can’t put in their body? Most people correctly judge how much alcohol they can safely have; those who didn’t, often illegally engaged in substance abuse anyway.
As the counterculture of the 60s and 70s rose, so too did drug use. They threatened conservative mores at every level, infiltrating the bodies of stressed businessmen, depressed wives, and their groovy children. That came at a particularly grievous cost to the United States, which, unlike most other Western countries, was fighting a war. For too many soldiers, the only shooting they were doing was shooting up.
So Nixon kicked off the "War on Drugs", founding a model to be intentionally spread by American foreign policy, and also chosen to be emulated by other countries. The priority was not investing in health outcomes for those hurt by drugs. The priority was protecting non-drug users from living alongside drug users by arresting them, and their sellers, and their suppliers. If that meant sending arms, intel and agents into Latin America - and, unavoidably, working with regimes that violated more human rights - that was the price to pay for protecting America from the scourge of drugs.
The results have been disastrous. Thousands and thousands killed, mostly those far more vulnerable than Americans living in the developing world. Many more thousands of lives changed forever by jail sentences. Endless billions of dollars frittered away on this instead of anything meaningful. Drugs continue to thrive anyway. Even if one could somehow construct a calculus where all of Escobar’s murders were worth stopping some Colombians and Californians alike ODing, those overdoses have still happened. From car crashes to break ins, many people detest the idea that perpetrators partly motivated by drugs should be allowed to do those drugs. Whether they’re allowed to or not, they’re doing them. The status quo has a drug problem whether you put a label on it that says otherwise or not.
This raises the obvious question: why not just…raise the white flag? Yes, hardly anybody is going to get on board with legalising coke and the rest, for the obvious reason that a company basically can’t manufacture and sell hard drugs as safe consumer products: they’re too at risk of causing a lethal overdose, addiction, or long-term substance abuse issues. That rings particularly true when you consider all sectors have some level of corporate malfeasance. The parameters are just too narrow to avoid. We only accept this risk with pharmaceuticals because they’re medically necessary rather than simply consumer wants, and even then we tightly regulate them and hold very different cultural understandings about them.
Yet decriminalisation is an option on the table: stop going after users, who have made up so much of the surge in modern prison populations. Pair that with incredibly hard to stomach calls around amnesty and moving past drug conflicts, and - of course you’re not going to magic away the War on Drugs overnight, but you can seriously decrease its scope and collateral damage. Instead, because of cultural concepts around drugs and a general reluctance from leaders to back down and admit fault or allow the guilty to get away with it, the war rolls on.
New Zealand has avoided the worst of this - you’d hardly call it a War on our shores. Nonetheless, drugs remain a scourge and throwing weed smokers behind bars hasn’t exactly been a wonderful call for their lives. I can see two places where the likely next steps for drug reform in New Zealand might fall. The first is obvious: in probably nine years’ time, a Labour-Greens-TPM government is voted in and calls a second referendum on marijuana legalisation almost certain to pass.
After the momentum killer of 2020 for drug reform, an unexpected shot in the arm might come from the strangest of sources: the United States! Despite still being in the grips of drug hysteria, from the opioid crisis to the RNC speakers fintting in fentanyl every fentathird word, the USA has become remarkably chill about marijuana, with states from Colorado to Oklahoma legally selling and producing. Crucially, besides the country’s inconsistent preference for ‘freedom’, money to be made has become an attractive selling point.
Around 70% of the public, including 55% of Republicans, support legalisation of recreational marijuana. In a polarised country, that’s something most people can agree on. Give them a wave election that wipes aside the old guard, plus a 2028 or 2032 Democratic presidential campaign looking to juice youth turnout and unafraid of what attacks might come, and Congress might simply say yes to legal marijuana. That would send ripples around the world, and while I hardly think National and NZFirst would fall over themselves to endorse, ACT might become more vocal in their support and Labour would feel more room to move in this changing environment. It’d certainly be surprising if legalisation doesn’t come in the next couple of decades.
The other avenue is, given the precedent of medical marijuana…what about medical psychedelics? (Sounds silly; they’ll have to hammer out the branding.) Specifically, while I’ve never looked into it in detail, there seems to be a growing movement arguing that, when all other solutions for PTSD or other mental troubles have failed, psychedelics have helped to unlock the mind and process and move past, for instance, traumatic events.
Particularly given that many of the people who can speak to such experiences are from military or emergency service backgrounds, which carry a lot of respect with much of the public, it’s worth keeping an eye on to see if this avenue goes anywhere. There are a lot of things for progressives to feel pessimistic about across the world, but I don’t think the direction of travel on drugs is one of them. The matter, as with so many, will ultimately come down to implementation: will the investment and regulation actually be there to back up the talk and ensure the public don’t regret their decision?
[No spoilers ahead.]
So, anyway, I watched Narcos. I liked this so much more than I expected. Deliberating between an 8 and a 9 out of 10. The obvious warning is that it’s as violent as anything - there is a mass chainsaw beheading cutaway - including serious sexual violence in episode 2.
Narcos ran from 2015 to 2017 and I’ve barely heard a blip about it, other than that it’s good; nor did I know anything about it, beyond that it concerned Latin American drug cartels and that it had Pedro Pascal. After watching Kingsman 2, I was down to kick on with some more Pascal, so into Narcos we go. Sadly, Pascal doesn’t get a ton to do at the outset - theoretically a co-star, he’s relegated to being more of a quiet supporting character. That was one of my leading critiques of the show: I was hungering for more Pascal.
Instead, Narcos is narrated by the far lesser known Boyd Holbrook, a Kentuckian. Where Pedro Pascal plays Javier Peña, a border Texan already fluent in Spanish, Holbrook narrates as his fellow DEA agent, Steve Murphy, a true fish out of water in their new home: Colombia. The real Peña and Murphy consulted on this fascinating period piece of late 80s and early 90s Colombia. Smartly, the show lets you know early on that nobody would dare whack a DEA agent on purpose: bad guys will shoot back in self-defense, but you probably don’t have to worry about them getting kidnapped and machete’d early on. Without a tension overload from the start, and focused on the lives and deaths of Colombians instead, the show gets to build and build.
Narcos strikes just the right chord between documentary and reenactment. The historical footage and events are utilised frequently enough that the show feels real and meaningful, not just a cheap “based on a true story” ripoff. At the same time, the characters and performances are conducted enough like any crime drama that you still feel like you’re watching a TV show with twists and turns, not a stilted reproduction. I have no prior knowledge about Colombia with which to confirm the veracity of this show, but as an ignorant viewer this thoroughly passes the sniff test: I felt transported, not taken for a ride. Absurd moments aren’t immersion-breaking, they’re reflective of how surreal the situation got at its worst or most eccentric moments.
The genre I have seen the most of is action and thriller movies and shows about cops and vigilantes and criminals. This is perhaps the single purest distillation I’ve seen of that formula. Not the best - Breaking Bad has far more compelling characters, richly thematic stories and standout episodes - but where the characters of Narcos lack for arcs and growth, the show’s clearest fault, they nonetheless make for worthy vessels to invest into.
The recurring cops and robbers chase of shootouts, snitchings and stakeouts would bore you in any lesser show going round and round. Instead, in Narcos, the tension, and your investment, only grows and grows, as you go along with the Colombians getting sucked deeper and deeper into layers of hate and recrimination. If Narcos has a thesis statement, that is it: for all we can rightly examine the roles of corruption, ideology, and racism in the War on Drugs, you should never underestimate as a driver of war the desire for revenge and the inability to forgive past crimes.
So much international coverage of conflicts, including in fiction, especially from the American perspective, is to dismiss every developing world government as hopelessly corrupt and its forces uselessly weak and unmotivated. Narcos instead successfully accomplishes absorption into its period piece by centering, alongside the DEA perspective, the Colombian government, and the Escobar family and cartel colleagues. The former, up against paid goons with Uzis, can do some real work on the battlefield and negotiate complex situations behind closed doors. The latter fulfils the key quality of many good examinations of evil: understanding how human beings who are kind and generous to their folks can also be evil S.O.Bs.
Season 1 and 2 are notably different compared to Season 3, and at first I was worried that there’d been a real quality drop off - that the show would end on a low note. I shouldn’t have been worried. Into the second half, the show picks up and up and up, until the tension is absolutely ribcage crushing and you well and truly feel like you’re seeing the satisfying culmination of all that’s coming before. In particular, Jorge Salcedo is an all timer antihero when it comes to winning your sympathy and making you fear for him. That ending episode is ten out of ten - it’s all I could have wanted from a conclusion to Narcos. Except that it tries to set up a fourth season.
The creators of Narcos initially planned to continue its story forwards into Mexico, but decided they’d rather hop back a decade and start over with new characters, so they spun off Narcos: Mexico - same brand, same theme song, some of the same team doing the same things, but a whole new ballgame for the actors, the people they’re portraying, and the settings. I’m only starting this show now, so I can’t speak to if the quality holds up, but I’m at least very excited about the prospect of getting to see Diego Luna. He’s good in Andor, but is a remarkably quiet and reserved protagonist for a guy with a show named after him, so I’m curious to see what Season 2 of that brings.
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