The Trade

This documentary shows all of the angles of the drug trade via a high quality production. Very impressive.

The shor portraits the heroin abuse in an ok way. However, the fight against it seems politically motivated. The unsuccessful war against drugs has been ongoing for 40 years still its presented as heroic when poor abusers and their families are teared apart. Smuggling is high as ever. The series shows the problems but the lack of portraying alternative solutions is frustrating.

These cops bust some poor user over s 20 sack don't ever get big dealers drug war is a was of time. They act like heroes while they destroy lives of for people who need substance abuse classes not jail time. They need medical help not some over bearing. Cop calling them a junkie over a 20 sack f them. Those cops aren't heros they are collection agents for privately funded jails. I quit being a medic because of the crooked crap cops do to people jail on a dime bag out her in rehab. Its a wonder people hate cops lately even a lot of vets and medics like my self they use too much force not enough training and follow the letter of the law not its spirit F Them.

You are NEVER going to change humans and their vices. I could barely get thru a quarter of this first episode. Season 1. Listening to the narration by the white do-gooder. The drug war demonstrated here is such a waste of effort and money. The crime and violence associated is ridiculous. I don't do drugs, but there should be a controlled way of producing and accessing it. Make it all locally, not imported. There is surely an element of control and greed behind the governments everywhere.

Police idol worship. Even Nazis had their followers. This is like the TV series "Cops" where a bunch of cameramen-groupies follow cops around snooping on people and arresting them on the flimiest of excuses to ruin their lives. The first arrest is for running a stop sign in rural LoserTown, USA. Of course, they're all making overtime, and not sweating their lives trying to take down a major gang leader who can shoot back. In the first arrest, almost a dozen cops converge on a poor addict-mother and threaten to take her children away if she doesn't show them where the $20 smudge of heroin is hidden. She shows them, and they arrest her anyway. Easy-peasy. This is how a police state works.

As the Nobel prize winning economist Milton Friedman said, "prohibition is an attempted cure that makes matters worse -- for both the addict and the rest of us." He thought it "absolutely disgraceful" for the state (supposedly our "democratic" government) to be in the position of "converting people who are not harming others into criminals, of destroying their lives, putting them in jail" (and, I might add, destroying their future prospects for work with a permanent prison record which limits future job prospects, which puts a 2-3% damper on our country's GDP, and creates the biggest prison population in the world.

"Repealing drug prohibition is part of a broader problem of cutting down the scope and power of government and restoring power to the people," Friedman said. It would also lower the cost of health care, denying doctors the "monopoly power to prescribe" which has historically been the purview of its citizenry.

Our western frontiers were conquered by ancestors who self-medicated. Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin grew poppy in their gardens. Heroin was over-the-counter until the 1920s, barbituates into the 1950s, codeine until the 1960s. The Afghan opium farmer has more freedom than the average American boomer, dying in agony from bone cancer because he can't reach his doctor to refill his pain medication, or because he can't afford the skyrocketing costs of health care.

The War on Drugs is destroying third world countries with corruption and destroying American freedom with bureaucracy. It must end. That's the inadvertent message of this series.