Criminals Incorporated?

       How Big and Bad Is Drug Crime in America?

• 

To anyone who takes a deep look at the claims that the U.S. government makes about drugs it’s obvious that they contain an awful lot of inconsistencies, if not downright misinformation. In the 1930s, marijuana supposedly turned people into hyperactive ax murderers. In the early 1970s, the same drug turned people into ambition-lacking airheads; and today, eternal adolescents with no romantic attachments, permanently infesting their moms’ basements. Oh, and it’s a gateway drug, so there’s always the looming danger of transformation into a full blown heroin addict. And heroin will turn its victims into violent predators in search of cash to acquire a fix before withdrawal sets in, or instant death. Meth causes rapid extreme tooth rot (at least among the population of a single jail in Portland, OR, where the water isn’t fluoridated).

Even though particular effects are sometimes associated with a particular drug, such as PCP supposedly causing superhuman strength proportional to the psychosis presumed to be experienced during the high, overall DRUGS are conceived as a unitary phenomenon, interchangeable in their devastating effects. Anyone regardless of individual traits or experience, no matter what illicit substance consumed, will suffer identical negative effects to body, mind, relationships and employability that could not possibly be the product of social engineering via government regulations and drug education efforts. Many Americans hold this view of drugs as vaguely and interchangeably and dangerously damaging, even though there are not just illegal party drugs, but also illegal performance-enhancing drugs that give an edge to athletes and students, and pain killers are available on the black market.

              Organized Crime and Drug Sales

There’s more misrepresentation than just the narratives about the chemicals, who uses them (losers and dangerous criminals, obviously) and what their effects can be. The way illicit drugs are distributed is also described as a sort of underground mirror image of law-abiding corporations, except they’re marketing poisonous death to troubled and naive Americans the same way that General Mills markets cereal. Just replace supermarket shelf space with sketchy guys on a neighborhood street corner.

These drug organizations are just a specialty subset of American “organized crime,” which is a concept of criminal interactions as a functioning and profitable simulacrum of law-abiding corporate commerce.

If running a legitimate corporation is very complex, what about a business that also has to operate in utter secrecy to protect the continuation of the business, the profit stream and the freedom of all participants? To become a regional, national or international operation, the business, and all participants and customers must avoid not only prosecution, but entirely evade detection of all their illegal activities by random disapproving strangers, rivals, and any level of law enforcement. The sale and shipment of huge quantities of often bulky product, and the transfer of millions or billions of dollars per year remains entirely secret, even though there are numerous local, state, and federal law enforcement agencies actively searching for just such activities. Such businesses would incur additional expenses that above-board businesses do not, such as increased security, because police services cannot be accessed to protect merchandise or locations. Evading detection also complicates storing and moving product and financial transactions because ordinary procedures would be too risky, as legitimate shipping companies and banks alert to suspicious activities. Even the existence of something as simple as a ledger is a potentially devastating paper trail.

Then, as the illegal business gets bigger, larger numbers of employees are needed, which expands the opportunities for incidental discovery of some activity or product of the business, or the unrelated illicit activities of any of the employees or executives or customers. To sell more product means increasing the number of customers, and more customers means even more people who have knowledge that could destroy the business if it comes to the attention of the government, especially if an individual customer is arrested and wants to trade information about others’ activities for a lesser punishment. Growing such a business only multiplies the danger. And even if they want to increase sales and profits, it must all be by the limited and inefficient means of word-of-mouth, since they can’t advertise or arrange for puff-piece interviews in the media. Product placement in TV shows or movies is out of the question.

In addition, members of any of the categories of people acquainted with the business could include people who might think that it’s a perfect target for robbery. What are the legitimate owners of an illegal business gonna do, call the cops? There’s also no way to take to court cases to enforce contracts to perform illegal services or deliver illegal products.

Organized crime as we understand it was the product of some unique historical circumstances, and the particular skill set and opportunities had by Al Capone. The young Capone did have criminal friends and dabble in petty crime, but for years after leaving school he maintained continuous straight employment, including his final legitimate position as a bookkeeper at a construction company. In 1920, his childhood friend, Johnny Torrio, who had run gambling and prostitution operations in Chicago, recognized prohibition as a business opportunity, and invited Capone to Chicago to help. How big was the opportunity? The manufacture of alcohol for human consumption was the 5th largest U.S. industry in 1918. The equivalent in the 2010s would be outlawing the health care industry.

The people who were no longer in that industry still had the skills and experience that made those legal businesses successful. Demand for alcohol didn’t decrease because of the law. Crime organizations hired former brewery staff – and even bought closed breweries. They also employed legitimate lawyers, accountants, truckers, and warehousemen. Capone had an edge over other criminals taking advantage of prohibition – he was an experienced accountant, and also diversified his investments to include legitimate businesses. When Torrio moved to Italy in 1925, Capone was left to run the whole thing, and hold all the profits until his own arrest.

In addition to the advantages that prohibition law violators had in terms of employing available and knowledgable legitimate professionals within the U.S., they were also doing business with actual legal businesses in Canada, known as bootlegging, and the Caribbean, aka rumrunning. Public support for the distribution of alcohol was very high. Many police departments refused to enforce the law. And even before the national repeal in 1933, states had begun voting in repeal at the state level (similar to the lifting of marijuana prohibition at the state level in recent years).

Prohibition was the best set of conditions for a culture of crime that was structured like the legal corporate world to ever exist. Most people dealt in cash for almost all purchases. Banks were not required to report “suspiciously large” deposits. Outside of the Secret Service handling counterfeiting and protecting the president, and the USPS having an investigative unit handling mail-connected crimes, the only federal law enforcement was the Bureau of Investigation, later named the FBI. According to the FBI website, in 1924, when J. Edgar Hoover became the head of the Bureau, it had about 650 employees, of which 441 were special agents. The total U.S. population in 1924 was 105,710,620.

Keep in mind that the huge-scale illegal commerce that was prohibition-era organized crime was not only born of a unique set of conditions, but lasted a very brief period of time. Capone’s entire adult criminal career was the 11 years from 1920 to his arrest in 1931. Nationwide prohibition was over in 1933.

It wasn’t until 1970 that Racketeering (RICO) act was passed, after a few mob crimes garnered wide public attention. In subsequent years, many states passed “Little RICO” statutes. A study of prosecutions under state racketeering statutes in the years 1989, 1990, & 1991 reported 174 cases were prosecuted under those statutes over that 3 year period. Not exactly an impressive amount of criminal enterprises.

Another fact that might put the actual scope of U.S. organized crime into perspective is the total murders convictions of mob hitman Richard “The Iceman” Kuklinski. He is alleged to be the most prolific hitman in mob history, working for multiple crime families in the NYC area. He publicly claimed to have killed hundreds of people, their bodies so thoroughly destroyed that the accuracy of the reported totals, or deaths of specific individuals, can never be confirmed. One of the victims he claimed was Jimmy Hoffa, whom he says he killed in Illinois, then transported the body in a car to New Jersey where he destroyed the remains by burning in a 55 gallon drum. I have to ask, why not bring the drum to Illinois instead of driving the body all that distance? If the Kuklinski’s car would have been stopped and searched on either the way to or from the restaurant where Hoffa disappeared, it would be not only less gross, but less obviously criminal to have an empty 55 gallon drum, compared to a dead union boss.

How seriously should we take what the Iceman said about himself? If you’re in prison for life anyway, is there any reason not improve your safety by insuring your reputation as a cold and efficient killer, and enjoy opportunities to break the monotony of prison life by making claims of spectacularly violent and prolific crimes to journalists?

The number of actual murders that The Iceman stood trial for was 5 – and he was acquitted of one of those.

               But what about the Cartels? 

There definitely are organized groups selling drugs, and killing politicians and journalists – in Mexico. Because of our porous border, some of the violence spills into the U.S.

Following the Mexican revolution of 1910-20, Mexico’s federal government was run by presidents belonging to the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), from 1920 until the election of Vincente Fox in 2000. Mexico has a history of coalitions of regional oligarchs, and the PRI continued a long Mexican tradition of patronage politics in which benefits go to groups in return for support of the party’s aims. Since the PRI started losing its iron grip on power at the end of the 20th century, there have been intense power struggles, resulting in political fractures that have allowed ambitious oligarchs to expand their power. The result has not been the creation of outlaw drug distribution corporations designed to service the U.S. illegal drug market, but more like the instigation of war among neo-feudal proto-states. These organizations run actual municipal and regional governments, and are staffed by ex-police and ex-military officers. Some of their revenue streams come from taking advantage of the black market that drug prohibition creates. But they also engage in counterfeiting and sale of consumer goods such as DVDs of American movies, and transporting people to/across our border. Their goals are all about political control of as much territory in Mexico as they can gain. Their primary function is certainly not provisioning Americans with illicit drugs. If our drug prohibition were to be rescinded, the regional oligarchs of Mexico might lose a revenue stream, but the would certainly not cease to operate. If the government of Mexico wants to consolidate its power over the nation, and decrease the political violence in its provinces, the federal government could seek cash and assistance from the U.S. by portraying those political factions as “drug cartels” compatible with U.S. narratives about organized drug crime.

      But how can this be, with the huge scope 
            of the U.S. drug problem?

Here’s an example of the nature of the obstacles to obtaining accurate data about the amounts of drugs actually circulating in U.S., and the numbers of Americans who might have used illegal drugs and not been caught. Such citizens would have strong motivation for silence, in the form of arrest, prosecution, incarceration and permanent a criminal record specified in federal and criminal codes. But, there are further formalities that can subsequently affect those who have been convicted even of misdemeanors. The scope of these post-punishment punishments are mostly unknown both to those who have been prosecuted, and to majority of the public. The American Bar Association refers to such after-effects of prosecution as collateral consequences, federal or state legislation or regulations outside of the fines and imprisonment assigned by the criminal code. These can have an affect on many aspects of life long after sentences have been served. They include employers refusing to hire someone with a drug conviction no matter how long ago, inability to acquire or maintain profession or business licenses, obtain student loans or grants, housing assistance, food assistance, qualify for personal loans, and many more. How many? According to the ABA, for people with a drug misdemeanor, there are 898 total (there are also collateral consequences for other categories of misdemeanors and felonies, the total number for all categories of convictions is nearly 14,000). The social stigma is also considerable, thanks to the idea that drug addiction is an incurable disease that can relapse at any time. All of the above would make any sane person think twice about letting slip the fact that one has enjoyed some illicit recreational or performance-enhancing substances. Also, if it is discovered that an individual has kept such a secret for a long time, that secrecy fits the narrative that drug use causing dishonesty.

The statistics on people who seek treatment for what is currently labeled “substance use disorders” are problematic because people who participate in treatment are not necessarily doing so because they feel their drug consumption has had a negative impact on their health or social relationships. Often, treatment is presented to someone arrested for a drug crime as an alternative to incarceration and a permanent criminal record. Interestingly, this offer of diversion into treatment is made to the person before charges are formally filed. This process sends the accused into drug court.

Drug courts were created with the stated purpose of reducing the crushing load on courts and prisons that resulted from the drug war’s aggressive policing and minimum mandatory sentences. Drug courts are an ad hoc alternative to society and legislators admitting that there are questions regarding the feasibility of success, the expense and the unintended consequences of the drug war.

Instead of fulfilling the stated purpose of reducing the dockets of existing criminal courts, once a new drug court opens, there are substantial increases of drug arrests in that jurisdiction – a phenomenon called “widening the net.” Judge Morris B. Hoffman observed in 2011, “In Denver, where I preside, drug filings almost tripled one year after the institution of our drug court compared with one year before. A big part of the net-widening phenomenon is pretty straightforward: police and prosecutors are no longer trying to detect crime; they are trolling for patients.” Drug arrests in Denver went from 265 the year before the drug court, to 625, and the number of drug defendants set to prison doubled. According to Judge Hoffman, “Before drug courts, prosecutors retained their broad discretion to charge or not charge small possession drug cases, and indeed the realities of our system drove many prosecutors, and even police, to ignore some low-level drug possession and even some drug dealing. But in the postmodern therapeutic world, drug offenders are not wrongdoers whose transgressions might be overlooked if they are sufficiently minor, but rather diseased citizens in need of treatment.” The public, seeing drug arrests increasing by a large number in a short time could understandably conclude that the drug problems in their communities are getting much worse.

For inmates in federal prisons, regardless of whether their conviction was for a drug offense or not, the Bureau of Prisons offers a drug treatment program. Successful completion leads to the inmate being released a year early. The program requires documentation of “verifiable substance disorder” within 12 months of the arrest that led to current incarceration, and the mental capacity to complete the program. This sounds like the program would at least be limited to prisoners who had, if not difficulties due to drugs, at least a legitimate history of drug use. To demonstrate a problem the Bureau of Prisons’ program would count as a “verifiable substance disorder,” the inmate may provide a letter from a doctor, or documentation of treatment at a rehab facility. But there are other options for documenting drug problems – a narrative written by the prisoner, letters on his behalf from fellow support group members describing his criminal acts under the influence. In other words, the prisoner’s unsubstantiated claims and hearsay from his acquaintances (who might enjoy the favor being returned) are treated as evidence. Beyond the prisoner’s narrative leading to him being rewarded, the prison acquires a collection of narratives that create documentation that apparently connects recreational drug use with committing crimes and other dysfunctional behavior.

Only three factors exclude participation in the federal prisons drug program: the inmate is facing deportation, was convicted of a violent felony, or has any problem that would disqualify being accepted into a halfway house. Interestingly, convictions for offenses that inherently include untruthfulness, such as fraud, perjury, deceit, misrepresentation – i.e., lying – are not on this list of exclusions.

Inmates whose offenses were unrelated to drugs also, by virtue of participating in the federal prison drug program, inflate the numbers of federal prisoners who can be counted as drug users/abusers/addicts.

There are even greater problems when it comes to government and media claims about increasing numbers of “opiate deaths.” The first is that “opiate death” can be legally declared without an autopsy or any toxicological evidence from the body of the departed. Legally, whatever the coroner or Medical Examiner puts on the part of the form for “cause of death” is the cause of death, autopsy or not.

Of American officials with that power to legally declare a cause of death, 2/3 are coroners (most not required to have medical or science credentials). Of the 2342 offices that have the power to investigate and/or document American deaths, 2/3 have no in-house toxicology lab, 2/3 no tissue lab, 1/3 no x-ray. On top of that, the amount of money available being small (the total spent on death investigations in the US, per year, divided by the number of decedents, is less than $3 per individual) and a comprehensive toxicology screen of a corpse can cost $2500. The actual percentage of deceased Americans who are autopsied is minuscule, only 8.5%.
The chances that the U.S. has collected accurate data about the number of deaths of opiate users – whether they use prescription or illegal drugs – is nil.

But, just for a moment, let’s use the numbers provided by the CDC. For 2016, they reported 63,632 overdose deaths, with 2/3 attributed to opiates, totaling 42,421. These numbers sound huge, especially when stated as X% higher than last year, or in contrast to other statistics, such as “surpassed automobile deaths” (ignoring a long-running trend of decreasing car crash deaths). The American population in 2016 was 322,761,018, and the number who died was 2,744,248. The 42,421deaths attributed to opiates is 0.015% of the total of all 2016 U.S. deaths. Here’s another number to compare: the CDC reports tobacco kills 480,000 Americans per year. The number of deaths attributed to opiates are 0.088% of the number of tobacco deaths. While deaths attributed to opiates are sudden, unexpected events, deaths attributed to tobacco are preceded by long illnesses, meaning the attribution of a death to tobacco is much more likely to be accurate than attribution of a death to opiates.

Doesn’t the existence of Federal Drug Enforcement Agencies        demonstrate that we have a huge problem?

There are two major differences between alcohol prohibition and the drug war. First, the gangsters of the 1920s didn’t create and market an entire new kind of product from the ground up starting in 1919. There was an existing industry, from buildings to workforce to the corporate relationships, and customers, and that infrastructure was taken over by criminally-minded individuals and groups, like a hermit crab moving into an empty conch shell.

Another difference is that alcohol has always been part of American culture.The various drugs that have had their turns as the most-terrifying-drug-scourge-yet were brought to the attention of the American public in a more sporadic fashion, over a a timeframe of decades: while opiates were widely available in 19th century medications, marijuana and cocaine came to public attention in the 1930s (conveniently after alcohol prohibition was lifted), heroin in the 1940s-50s, LSD in the late 1960s, quaaludes in the 1980s, and meth, at the end of the 20th century.

A major difference between prohibition of alcohol and drugs is that there was no federal agency whose sole raison d’etre was alcohol violations. But starting with Nixon’s creation of the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA), the federal government has been spawning new federal agencies – some focused on prosecution and punishment, some on treatment. Many such agencies are duplicated at the state level. These agencies have mixed incentives, to get credit for making great progress in “cleaning up” drugs from our streets, and to alarm the public that there is a large and growing threat that they will be uniquely able to address, justifying higher budgets and more employees. Not that the majority of the employees of federal agencies tasked with drug enforcement actually dress up in bulletproof black ensembles and knock down doors. Almost all the actual arrests for drug possession and distribution, 90%, are done at the state and local level, but some of those law enforcement activities are financed and/or coordinated by federal actors. An example is the federal Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Force (OCDETF), created in 1982 and operational in 1983, which provides funding, coordination with local law enforcement agencies, and intelligence on illegal drug trafficking through the Fusion Center, or OFC (the “O” stands for OCDETF), which the OCDETF spawned in 2004.

Here is a small collection of quotes about OCDETF in reports and budget requests over the decades.

One report from 1986 said, “The program’s mission is to identify, investigate, and prosecute high-level members of drug trafficking enterprises and to destroy their operations by adding new federal resources and fostering coordination and cooperation among the agencies involved. “ It also said, “If drug availability were the sole measure, drug enforcement efforts have not had a great impact — every indication is that illegal drugs remain readily available for consumption in this country. Drug abuse, however, is unlikely to be eliminated by domestic law enforcement efforts alone.”

April 2000: A Government Accounting Office report mentions 67% of the funding OCDETF sent to LA in 1997-98 was used for gang enforcement unrelated to OCDETF.

The 2005 drug budget appropriations request noted, “We share the Administration’s concerns about measuring the effectiveness of our prevention programs in reducing drug use. However, the appropriate response is to reform the existing programs by making them more accountable, or to propose new and better programs.” It also said, “Unless the nation is able to reduce drug demand, there will always be a market for illegal drugs.”

One 2017 DOJ report describes, OCDETF’s mission since 2002 as, “….aimed at strategically reducing the nation’s drug supply and the violence that accompanies drug trafficking, as well as maximizing the Program’s performance.” The DOJ describes approvingly, “….the time-tested model OCDETF has been using to disrupt and dismantle transnational drug focused criminal organizations for more than 30 years.” And, “Further, the heroin source areas that remained fairly steady in the last three decades have begun to change.” And, “Further, the NDTA reports that the majority of methamphetamine available in the United States is Mexico-produced. It is highly pure and potent and is increasingly available.” Think of that the next time you go through the complicated procedure to acquire some over-the-counter Sudafed, instituted as a response to the ”meth epidemic” that was just prior to our current “opiate epidemic.”

                     Conclusions

The government and the media claim we have two enormous and intertwined problems – large amounts of drugs coming into the country and criminal organizations that distribute drugs and create mayhem – most of the mayhem actually occurring outside our country, but some spilling into our country. However, evidence & logic suggest that large, organized criminal corporate behavior is not likely in the US. The organizations in Mexico are of an entirely different nature than we are encouraged to envision.

The outlaw criminal business activities of the prohibition era were so unique that even in the in 2019, when I did an internet search for “criminals illustrations” (as inspiration for the illustration for this essay), I found files of clip art full of the styles of the 1920s-30s – pinstripe suits, tommy guns, big black automobiles, chalk body outlines, big hand-led magnifying glasses. It seems that our national imagination, as expressed in commercially available images, strongly connects organized crime with a particular brief period in our history, and prohibition of one category of mind-altering consumable.

As for the customer base for black market drugs, whatever the supply mechanisms that provide those products, it’s impossible to know how many people indulge in black market drugs and also maintain satisfactory behavior so as to not be so disruptive in their employment, relations with family and friends, and communities. As is demonstrably true with alcohol, cars and high calorie foods, it is entirely possible that some people are more responsible with their use than others.

There may be huge numbers of such people who have not been caught, despite the enormous expense and efforts on the federal, state and local level to apprehend anyone with involvement in drug use or commerce. Like the population as a whole, such a group would have a small percentage who are responsible for the vast majority of crimes that are committed by the total members of the group. Professor Alex Piquero, of the University of Texas Dallas, estimates that 5-8% of the U.S. population commits 50% of U.S. crime.

Consider those people who are convicted for no other crime than drug violations. If it’s a small minority of a large group who end up suffering the entire weight of government-generated consequences for drug use, in the form of arrest, prosecution, incarceration, post-release supervision, permanent criminal record and lifelong potential for complications in their interactions with bureaucracies, that would be a monstrous injustice to those people who just happened to get a very unlucky break. Those consequences have been made increasingly harsh over the years so that authorities who either know or should know that the entire project is futile portray themselves as “doing something about drugs.”

Another possibility is that there are relatively small numbers of Americans who consume a huge percentage of the available illegal drugs, and also committing other behaviors that are clearly anti-social and/or criminal, who are actually as dysfunctional as current drug war narratives portray. If the population of American users of illegal drugs is small, and most of those commit other crimes, then lifting drug prohibition would not in any way prevent the investigation, prosecution, incarceration, and post-incarceration supervision of those individuals for theft, fraud, assault, robbery or murder. In fact, we might have more resources to target the crimes that this population inflicts on other people if we didn’t complicate the situation with anti-drug laws.

Whether there’s a large group of drug users that includes a smaller criminal element, or a relatively smaller group of drug users with a high proportion who commit crimes, that doesn’t mean we have to connect drugs and crime through our legal code. Criminals also consume cheeseburgers, drive cars and peruse the internet. No one is suggesting we fight crime with a war on fast food. Only very specific violations lead to permanent revocation of driving privileges or being banned from accessing the internet.

If we rescind drug prohibition, and the populations of drug users and criminal offenders largely overlap, we would still be able to prosecute the actual criminal acts committed by any members of either of these groups (just as we prosecute people whose crimes are unrelated to drug trade and who don’t personally use drugs). This would allow law enforcement efforts to be targeted those who actually steal, defraud, hurt, and kill other people, and not waste disproportionate resources on the hypothetically small group who use drugs without breaking the law.

The continuation of drug-war-as-usual is not without actual harm to actual innocents. Every month, there are wrong-address SWAT raids (In 2003, then NYC Police Commissioner Ray Kelly said 10% of the 450 SWAT raids each month in NYC were at the wrong address). Even during raids at the right address, police often find nothing (According to an ACLU study, no contraband – even including items not on the warrant – was found in 1/3 of SWAT raids). Whether at the right address or not, these police tactics leave damage to property and injured people, and sometimes result in deaths of officers or people inside the house. The idea of SWAT was sold to the American public as a way to address rare volatile situations, like a hostage crisis or an active shooter. But consider that BTK killer Dennis Rader, who killed 5 members of a family in a single afternoon, was followed from his house and surprised by police a few blocks away, and Unabomber Ted Kaczynski, who had explosives and potentially live bombs in his house, was not apprehended by SWAT either.

Other Americans who suffer unfairly under drug prohibition are chronic pain patients and the medical professionals responsible for their care. As if it isn’t bad enough to suffer an incurable and very painful disease or condition, pain patients and their doctors, are subjected to an ever-growing, and ever more creative list of conditions that, even if fully complied with do not guarantee that the patient will not be cut off from opiate/opioid treatment with little or no notice. How depriving law abiding citizens with documented illnesses of the most reliable pain treatment known to medicine is supposed to be of assistance to a project that even the professionals who run it admit will never get the drugs off the streets is a cruel mystery.

The evidence examined above suggests that the enormous amount of federal tax money and law enforcement effort expended to disrupt commerce in drugs are being squandered on an impossible pursuit that entails enormous consequences outside those prescribed by the legislation controlling those efforts. But perhaps worse than the gigantic levels of waste, is the damage the drug war has done to our honesty with ourselves. The public is swimming in a soup of fudged numbers, exaggerated claims of harm, inflated fears, obscured evidence of failures, with almost nothing that could count as an unqualified success. Most of all, our attention is diverted from other pressing and serious matters both here and abroad. I’m sure everyone reading this essay can think of at least one big problem that could do with more attention and resources from our government.

Meanwhile, the very federal authorities responsible for the drug war admit in documents freely available on the internet that government drug enforcement efforts will never end the distribution and consumption of drugs in America. Remember that, and consider what we can do to stop this expensive, wasteful and dishonest charade.

                                                                                      
                    Sources

             Organized Crime & Alcohol Prohibition

http://prohibition.themobmuseum.org/the-history/the-rise-of-organized-crime/the-mob-during-prohibition/
https://www.alcoholproblemsandsolutions.org/corruption-during-prohibition-of-alcohol/
https://www.alcoholproblemsandsolutions.org/repeal-of-prohibition/
repeal began with states

Top US Industries
https://bluewatercredit.com/ranking-biggest-industries-us-economy-surprise-1/

Al Capone

https://www.u-s-history.com/pages/h1616.html
https://www.biography.com/people/al-capone-9237536
https://www.history.com/topics/crime/al-capone

FBI
https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/fbi-founded
https://www.fbi.gov/history/brief-history/the-fbi-and-the-american-gangster

Historical U.S. population and mortality totals
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/vsushistorical/mortstatsh_1926.pdf

RICO enforcement and convictions
https://www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles1/Digitization/143502NCJRS.pdf

RICO financial support of defendants
http://www.liquisearch.com/american_mafia/history/rico_act
https://priceonomics.com/what-happens-when-you-enter-the-witness-protection/

Mexican Cartels & Politics
https://www.britannica.com/topic/Institutional-Revolutionary-Party
http://borderzine.com/2012/06/drug-cartels-grab-a-piece-of-the-market-for-knock-off-goods/

                     US Drug Courts

https://digitalcommons.law.umaryland.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1178&context=rrgc
https://www.pennlawreview.com/online/160-U-Pa-L-Rev-PENNumbra-129.pdf

Prison Drug Testing

https://criminal.findlaw.com/criminal-charges/drug-possession-penalties-and-sentencing.html
https://prisonprofessors.com/residential-drug-abuse-program-understanding-rdap/
http://time.com/76356/a-misdemeanor-conviction-is-not-a-big-deal-right-think-again/
https://niccc.csgjusticecenter.org/database/results/?title=drug%20misdemeanor&jurisdiction=&consequence_category=&narrow_category=&triggering_offense_category=&consequence_type=&duration_category=&page_number=1

                   Autopsies & Death statistics

https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/databriefs/db67.htm
http://projects.propublica.org/forensics/ – coroners v ME pro publica/pbs as of 2011
http://sites.nationalacademies.org/cs/groups/pgasite/documents/webpage/pga_049924.pdf

US Autopsy Rates

https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/databriefs/db67.htm
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article/more-deaths-go-unchecked-as-autopsy-rate-falls-to-miserably-low-levels/
https://www.cincinnati.com/story/news/2015/01/24/cost-death-morgue-budget-problem/22242687/

Death Statistics

CDC opiate stats 2016 (as of 2/7/19, latest available)
https://www.cdc.gov/media/releases/2018/p0329-drug-overdose-deaths.html

US population 2016: 322,761,018
https://www.usnews.com/opinion/blogs/robert-schlesinger/articles/2016-01-05/us-population-in-2016-according-to-census-estimates-322-762-018

2016 total US deaths: 2,744,248
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/deaths.htm

https://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/data_statistics/fact_sheets/fast_facts/index.htm

Toxicology Postmortem

https://www.webmd.com/mental-health/addiction/features/the-truth-about-toxicology-tests#1
https://usaforensics.com/services/

        Government Agencies Goals & Results, or lack of

https://www.gao.gov/assets/80/75786.pdf
https://oig.justice.gov/reports/INS/a0403/results.htm
http://hidtadirectors.org/pdf/2006_Drug_Budget%20appropriations_letter.pdf
https://oig.justice.gov/reports/2014/e1402.pdf
https://www.oig.dhs.gov/assets/Mgmt/2013/OIG_13-49_Mar13.pdf
https://www.justice.gov/jmd/file/821331/download

Federal drug budget fiscal year 2016
https://oig.justice.gov/reports/2017/a1711.pdf

US Population, percent criminals
http://www.politifact.com/texas/statements/2015/oct/06/dan-patrick/dan-patrick-says-all-crime-estimate-committed-15-p/

SWAT raids
https://www.newsmax.com/FastFeatures/no-knock-raids-SWAT-facts-figures/2015/06/19/id/651434/
https://www.aclu.org/issues/criminal-law-reform/reforming-police-practices/war-comes-home?redirect=war-comes-home-excessive-militarization-american-policing
https://freedomoutpost.com/10-facts-about-the-swat-teams-of-america-that-everyone-should-know/
https://the7thpwr.wordpress.com/accidental-police-shootings/
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-watch/wp/2014/02/17/shedding-light-on-the-use-of-swat-teams/?utm_term=.663c4977dc36

Undertreatment of Chronic Severe Pain

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for heartbreaking stories, check out the testimonies in Regulations.gov FDA….https://www.regulations.gov/docketBrowser?rpp=25&so=DESC&sb=commentDueDate&po=0&dct=PS&D=FDA-2017-N-1094

and STAT Magazine article comments threadhttps://www.statnews.com/2017/02/24/opioids-prescribing-limits-pain-patients/#comments