Richard Nixon kicked off a War on Drugs that still rages today.

Nixon’s directive has remained true for the last 40 years.

“This is one area where we cannot have budget cuts because we must wage what I have called total war against public enemy number one in the United States, the problem of dangerous drugs.”

In total war, combatants and the civilian population are not differentiated.

When the phenomena of crack cocaine (crack cocaine is just powder cocaine with baking soda, water, and heat) hit the streets, President Reagan signed into law mandatory minimum sentences that disproportionally sentenced users of crack cocaine and users powder cocaine. Crack, with it longer sentences, was primarily a poor minority drug.

Methamphetamine sparked the three strikes rule in the 90’s, and people are now serving life sentences for non-violent drug crimes.

Today we’ve moved on to the synthetics. We had the sudden DEA terror show that started with the zombie face eating frenzy. That hasn’t popped back up in mainstream media, but now the feds have been able to throw it on a Schedule too.

The drug war has been profitable to prisons and allowed law enforcement agencies to go on shopping sprees for military grade toys. In some communities, prisons prop up the local economy. And, in the post 9/11 era, Department of Homeland Security has continually expanded, driven partly by “terrorism,” but also by the Drug War. The agency eats up resources left and right. The Drug War has even been profitable abroad. Statistics show that the War on Terror has increased heroin production to 90 percent in Afghanistan.

The total war continues expanding into territories once thought off limits. .

Recently, a Reuters article came out revealing how much of a total war this really is.

“A secretive U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration unit is funneling information from intelligence intercepts, wiretaps, informants and a massive database of telephone records to authorities across the nation to help them launch criminal investigations of Americans.”

This intel was found to be coming from the National Security Agency (NSA).

In case you don’t know by now, the NSA works under the Department of Defense (DoD) to “Collect (including through clandestine means), process, analyze, produce, and disseminate signals intelligence information and data for foreign intelligence and counterintelligence purposes to support national and departmental missions.”

The War on Drugs has also led to an exception in the Posse commitatus act that extended to border security in response to the drug trade. Title 10 of US Code 371 expanded to allow for coordination of military and civilian law enforcement. Information must be collected during the normal course of military training and operations, and coordinated to pass information on to federal or state law enforcement.

“The Secretary of Defense shall ensure, to the extent consistent with national security, that intelligence information held by the Department of Defense and relevant to drug interdiction or other civilian law enforcement matters is provided promptly to appropriate civilian law enforcement officials.”

Recent revelations provided by Edward Snowden show that “normal military operations” now include mass surveillance and collection of phone calls, emails, and metadata on US citizens. And in the post 9/11 world, the intelligence community has grown to gigantic proportions with large numbers of personnel (civilian and military) and a black hole for funds with little to no oversight. Corruption and money run parallel, resulting in the over-classifying of even standard operating procedures.

The mass surveillance information is filtered through and sent to various federal agencies like the DEA and tw0-dozen other agencies, through the special operations division (SOD). Reuters reported that “documents show that federal agents are trained to ‘recreate’ the investigative trail to effectively cover up where the information originated.” P.S. that’s the part that is classified, so it had to be covered up!

The article continued, “The document specifically directs agents to omit the SOD’s involvement from investigative reports, affidavits, discussions with prosecutors and courtroom testimony. Agents are instructed to then use “normal investigative techniques to recreate the information provided by SOD.”

As John Lambert, of the Tenth Amendment Center, wrote in Montana Anti-Spying Law Good, More Needed, “We need to put out heads together and come up with effective ways to hinder NSA spying. Noncompliance with federal officials goes a long way toward placing impediments in the pathway of federal agents. What kind of concrete steps at the state and local level can we come up with to battle federal spying?”

So, what can we do when the intelligence mission now involves spying on us then cherry picking information so people could be arrested and property seized?

Each state and locality should:

1. Deny admissibility of NSA intelligence filtered through federal “law enforcement” agencies to local and state law enforcement.

2. Deny cooperation with local and state law enforcement with federal agencies if information for stop is suspected or known to come from SOD.

3. Outlaw parallel construction.

The article included one final thought: “law enforcement agents said they usually don’t worry that SOD’s involvement will be exposed in court. That’s because most drug-trafficking defendants plead guilty before trial and therefore never request to see the evidence against them. If cases did go to trial, current and former agents said, charges were sometimes dropped to avoid the risk of exposing SOD involvement.

4. Defendants should be made aware that due to federal involvement evidence against them may have been acquired through illegal means before pleading to a charge.

5. Use the state’s attorney general to protect any local or state, attorney, or judge from retribution from federal government for leaking where unconstitutional information originated from.

Kelli Sladick

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