13 Quotes by Neil Woods

The story of the War on Drugs is a story of the law of unintended consequences.

The War on Drugs is actually many different wars. There is the war between the police and the drug dealers. There is the war between different drug gangs. There is the war between the dealers and their own customers. And there’s the war between the community and addicts driven to crime to pay for their fix.

The first casualty of any war is the truth, and the War on Drugs is no exception.

For the police of the 1960s, drugs were considered deeply uninteresting. Chasing drugs simply wasn’t seen as ‘real police work’. Being a proper copper meant going out and catching burglars and robbers.

The idea that cannabis, heroin, amphetamines, etc. are completely different chemicals, and might require completely different laws, is one of the great what-might-have-beens of the War on Drugs. Lumping them all together was itself an encroachment of American-style drug policy.

It was the drug war that spurred the growth of intelligence-led policing, leading to a massive expansion in the use of informants. It was also the drug war that sowed corruption into this very process.

Crime is driven by opportunity. Cartoonish visions of ‘inherent evil’, or inevitable reactions to social conditions, are far too reductive.

As much as the police like to take the credit, what really ended the hooligan era was the rise of acid house in the early 90s.

People talk about the War on Drugs as if it was like the Second World War; one army against another – the dealers and the cops, the good guys and the bad guys, the defenders of society and the criminals. But that was bullshit. If the War on Drugs was a war at all, it was the Cold War. And, like the Cold War, it was a fucking arms race.