Martin Luther King Jr. might have turned 96 years old this month if he had not been felled by an assassin’s bullet on April 4, 1968. It is, of course, impossible to know what the United States would look like today if he had lived — or what he would think about the political dilemmas of our own time.

Yet there are certain obvious parallels between his time and ours. The country continues to be bitterly divided along political lines. And many activists and scholars argue that the racist power structure that King fought has re-congealed—this time in the guise of the “War on Drugs” and mass incarceration. His legacy, therefore, holds lessons for those now fighting for cannabis legalization.

Cycles of Repression and Revolution  

Foremost among those scholars is Michelle Alexander, author of the 2010 bestseller The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. Alexander takes a long view of the struggle for racial justice in the United States and paints a grim picture. She illustrates how many of the gains that King won in his life are being reversed after his death — this time in a new “race-neutral” guise that only serves to mask continued institutionalized racism.  

Alexander notes that in 1972, there were under 350,000 people in prisons and jails nationwide. Today there are 2 million. In fact, the US has the most people behind bars of any nation on Earth, in both per capita and absolute terms. This is certainly an irony for the country that touts itself as the “land of the free.” 

Among those 2 million people in prison are 40,000 who remain incarcerated in state or federal prisons on cannabis-related convictions— about half of them for marijuana offenses alone. When those waiting to see a judge in local jails are added in, the figure may approach 100,000 on any given day. And the racial disparity could not be more obvious. A 2013 American Civil Liberties Union report, Marijuana in Black and White: Billions of Dollars Wasted on Racially Biased Arrests, crunched the national data. It found that black people are more than three times as likely as whites to be arrested for cannabis — despite consuming the plant at essentially similar rates.  

And this is not the first time the country has seen significant and hard-won racial progress being in large part (at least) reversed, with the same power structure re-establishing itself in new guise. Slavery was abolished in the aftermath of the Civil War. But, as Alexander quotes historian and early civil rights activist W. E. B. Du Bois, from his 1935 book Black Reconstruction in America, “The slave went free, stood a brief moment in the sun, then moved back again toward slavery.”

In the South under occupation by Union troops after the Civil War, black people for the first time voted, served on juries and held elected office — until the backlash came. In 1877, the federal troops were withdrawn. In subsequent years, without federal interference, Ku Klux Klan terror enforced legal apartheid in the southern states — the system known as Jim Crow. Blacks were often reduced to a state of near-slavery through share-cropping and were barred from the vote by systematic disenfranchisement.  

It wasn’t until nearly a century after the Civil War that this system would be challenged. In his book Why We Can’t Wait, an account of the 1963 Birmingham Campaign to desegregate Alabama’s biggest city, King wrote of “America’s third revolution — the Negro Revolution.” 

By King’s reckoning, the country’s first revolution had been the one we actually call “the Revolution” — the War of Independence, although it left the slave-owning aristocracy of the South thoroughly in place. The second was arguably far more revolutionary — the Civil War, in which the slave system was broken. King’s Civil Rights Movement was avowedly nonviolent, but it was still a revolution — the overturning of a power structure by physical as well as moral opposition.

Despite the violent backlash, both from the police and Ku Klux Klan terrorists, the campaign ultimately swayed the nation, resulting in the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and other landmark legislation that finally ended legal apartheid in America.

But the year of King’s assassination saw the country’s national political establishment embracing the backlash — exactly as in 1877. In the 1968 presidential campaign, Republican candidate Richard Nixon first adopted the rhetoric of a “War on Drugs” (although he would actually coin that phrase three years later, when the Controlled Substances Act was passed). And, in just barely coded terms, Nixon was promoting the rhetoric of racism.

In her book, Alexander quotes Nixon’s special counsel John Ehrlichman explicitly summing up the campaign strategy in his 1982 memoir, Witness To Power: The Nixon Years: “We’ll go after the racists.” Ehrlichman unabashedly wrote how throughout the 1968 race, “subliminal appeal to the anti-black voter was always present in Nixon’s statements and speeches.” 

Alexander did not mention, however, another quote attributed to Ehrlichman in which he just as explicitly made the connection between this subliminal racism and the anti-drug drumbeat. Journalist Dan Baum in the April 2016 edition of Harper’s recalls a quote he says he got from a 1994 interview with Ehrlichman: “The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people… by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”

And the backlash was just beginning.

Birth of the New Jim Crow 

The new order would be consolidated over the next decade. In 1973, the same year the federal Drug Enforcement Administration was created, New York state’s Rockefeller Laws imposed the nation’s first mandatory minimum sentences for drug offenses. In 1977, New York decriminalized cannabis, overturning the harsh Rockefeller Laws where personal quantities of marijuana were concerned — but the draconian provisions for cocaine and heroin remained intact.

With the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980, the “drug war” rhetoric was revived with a vengeance, and the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986 imposed mandatory minimum sentences nationwide. Ten years later, an ACLU report would find that the law “devastated African American and low-income communities.” 

The 1986 law also instated the sentencing disparity for crack and powder cocaine — as crack was flooding black communities and landing people with the far longer sentences. This was also reflected in public perceptions and media portrayals. In the early ’80s, powder cocaine was a status symbol for white yuppies. When crack hit the streets from New York to Los Angeles, it was immediately stigmatized by association with the criminal (read: black) underclass.

This period also saw the rapid militarization of police forces, and the War on Drugs, in Alexander’s words, went “from being a political slogan to an actual war.” The 1981 Military Cooperation with Law Enforcement Act started to erode the firewall that had existed between the armed forces and police since the end of Reconstruction.

The DEA joined with local police forces to instate Operation Pipeline, a program of traffic stops and vehicle searches that was protested by the ACLU as based on systematic “racial profiling.” 

This was enabled by a series of bad Supreme Court decisions — Terry vs Ohio in 1968, Florida vs. Bostick in 1991, Ohio vs. Robinette in 1996 — that dramatically eroded the Fourth Amendment. Alexander writes that these decisions enabled “consent searches” — in which the motorist (or pedestrian, or home resident) verbally consents to the search, but actually does so under police intimidation.

All-white juries were more likely to convict black people, of course — and prosecutors were still able to strike non-whites from serving as jurors despite the 1986 Supreme Court decision Batson v. Kentucky, which barred discrimination on the basis of race in jury selection. As Alexander writes, “the only thing that has changed is that prosecutors must come up with a race-neutral excuse for the strikes.” 

In a vicious cycle, mass incarceration itself served to entrench the system of mass incarceration. Convicted felons are excluded from juries in many states, and only Maine and Vermont allow prison inmates to vote (as most Western European countries do).

Nor did this system turn around when the Democrats returned to the White House. The Bill Clinton years saw a 60% drop in federal spending on public housing, and a 170% boost in prison spending up to $19 billion. Prison construction would finally begin leveling off in the 2000s, but the actual prison population broke new records in 2008, “with no end in sight.”

Alexander writes: “Ninety percent of those admitted to prison for drug offenses in many states were black or Latino, yet the mass incarceration of communities of color was explained in race-neutral terms, an adaptation to the needs and demands of the current political climate. The New Jim Crow was born.” 

And this was utterly out of proportion to any real threat posed by illegal drugs. In the 1980s, there were some 22,000 drunk driving deaths per year, among 100,000 alcohol-related deaths. In Alexander’s words: “The number of deaths related to all illegal drugs combined was tiny compared to the number of deaths caused by drunk driving.”

Among the numberless stories of police terror in the name of drug enforcement, one recounted by Alexander is that of Alberta Spruill—a 57-year-old Harlem woman who died of a heart attack in May 2003 after police officers broke down her door and threw a concussion grenade into her apartment. No drugs or any contraband were found in the apartment. The cops were acting on a bad tip from snitches snared on a marijuana rap. 

A Fourth Revolution? 

Thanks in large part to growing public consciousness, there certainly appears to have been some progress in the fight against the War on Drugs over the past decade. In 2009, following a hard-fought activist campaign, the Rockefeller Laws were finally overturned in New York. Eleven states have now legalized cannabis, and nearly all have at least some kind of provision for medical use of cannabis — significantly lifting the pressure on one federally controlled substance.

But even amid the progress, there are clear and frustrating signs that a mere change in the law isn’t enough. From New York City (where cannabis arrests have been de-emphasized by policy) to Colorado (where cannabis is now legal), overall arrests for pot are significantly reduced — but the stark racial disparity persists in those arrests that continue under various loopholes.

Michelle Alexander concludes with a litany of necessary legal reforms and then states that, ultimately, they are insufficient: “Mandatory drug sentencing laws must be rescinded. Marijuana ought to be legalized (and perhaps other drugs as well)… The list could go on, of course, but the point has been made. The central question for racial justice advocates is this: are we serious about ending the system of control, or not?” 

She quotes from Martin Luther King’s book of collected speeches, A Testament of Hope: “White America must recognize that justice for black people cannot be achieved without radical changes in the structure of our society. The comfortable, the entrenched, the privileged cannot continue to tremble at the prospect of change in the status quo.”

There are many other quotes from the great civil rights leader that shed equal light on the current impasse, in which the limitations of mere legal progress are becoming clear. In his April 1963 Letter from Birmingham Jail, King justified his civil disobedience in these words: “An unjust law is a code that a numerical or power majority group compels a minority group to obey but does not make binding on itself.”

This recalls both the relative impunity for white coke-snorters in the ’80s as black communities were militarized in the name of drug enforcement — and the white entrepreneurs now disproportionately getting rich off legal cannabis, while black users remain disproportionately criminalized.  

In Why We Can’t Wait, King wrote of how the country needed a “Bill of Rights for the Disadvantaged” — anticipating the current demands for drug war reparations, wedding legal cannabis to addressing the harms caused by prohibition and the related matrix of social injustice.

The notion that cannabis legalization is necessary but not sufficient recalls King’s 1967 report to the staff of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the main coordinating body of the civil rights campaign. 

In the “Report to SCLC Staff,” he noted how the 1965 Selma to Montgomery March culminated in passage of the Voting Rights Act later that year — a critical victory. Yet, he wrote: “We have moved from the era of civil rights to the era of human rights, an era where we are called upon to raise certain basic questions about the whole society. We have been in a reform movement… But after Selma and the voting rights bill, we moved into a new era, which must be the era of revolution. We must recognize that we can’t solve our problem now until there is a radical redistribution of economic and political power.”

If cannabis legalization is to truly undo the social harms of prohibition, its advocates may be in for a similar reckoning in the coming period.

The post MLK & Marijuana: How the Civil Rights Leader’s Work Informs the Push for Legal Pot appeared first on Cannabis Now.

EXPERT OPINION — For about a week we experienced significant controversy over the first military attack on alleged narco-trafficker small boats off the coast of Venezuela (and later Ecuador). The controversy began with news that the Secretary of Defense had ordered the Special Operations Command Task Force commander to, “Kill them all.” This was linked to reports that the boat was attacked not once, but twice; the second attack launched with full knowledge that two survivors from the first attack were hanging on the capsized remnants.

Critical commentary exploded, much of it based on the assumption that the “kill them all” order had been issued, and that it was issued after the first strike. Even after the Admiral who ordered the attacks refuted that allegation, critics continued to assert that the attack was, ‘clearly’ a war crime as it was obviously intended to kill the two survivors.

The public still does not know all the details about these attacks. What is known, however, is that Congress held several closed-door hearings that included viewing the video feed from the attacks and testimony from the Secretary of Defense, the Secretary of State, and the Admiral who commanded the operation.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the reaction to these hearings has crystalized along partisan lines. Democratic Members of Congress and Senators have insisted they observed a war crime and called for public release of the video. Republicans, in contrast, have indicated they are satisfied that the campaign is based on a solid legal foundation and that nothing about the attacks crossed the line into illegality.

What is less obvious than the partisan reaction is how what began as a problem for the administration has ended up becoming a windfall. When Senator Roger Wicker, Chairman of the Armed Services Committee, announced after the second closed door briefing that he was satisfied with the administration’s legal theory and saw no evidence of a war crime, it provided a signal to the administration that this Congress is not going to interfere with its military campaign. Democrats will try: they will continue to demand hearings, they have asserted violation of the War Powers Act and propose legislation requiring immediate termination of the campaign, and they will continue to insist the U.S. military has been ordered to conduct illegal killings. But so long as the Republican majority is tolerant of this presidential assertion of war power, there is virtually nothing to check it. This so-called ‘double tap’ tested the political waters, and it turns out they are quite favorable for the President.

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From a legal perspective, the reaction to this incident has reflected overbreadth and misunderstanding from both ends of the spectrum. For example, characterizing the second attack as a war crime – or rejecting that conclusion – implicitly endorses the administration’s theory that it is engaged in an armed conflict against Tren de Aragua, an interpretation of international law that has been rejected by almost all legal experts. Equally overbroad has been the assumption that the second attack must have been intended to kill the survivors from the first attack – an assumption that renders that attack nearly impossible to justify, even assuming it was conducted pursuant to a valid invocation of wartime legal authority. But even release of the video would be insufficient to answer a critical question in relation to this assumption: was the second attack directed against the survivors, or against the remnants of the boat with knowledge it would likely kill the survivors as a collateral consequence? Only the Admiral and those who advised him can answer that question. And if the answer is, ‘the remnants, not the survivors’, other difficult questions must be addressed: what was the military necessity for ‘finishing off’ the boat? And, most importantly, why wasn’t it operationally feasible to do something – perhaps just dropping a raft into the water – to spare the survivors that lethal collateral effect?

But the true significance of this incident and the reaction it triggered extends far beyond the question of whether that second attack was or was not lawful; it is the implicit validation of the foundation for the legal architecture the administration seems to be erecting to justify expanding the conflict to achieve regime change in Venezuela. In this regard, it is important to recognize that the Trump Administration is implicitly acknowledging it must situate its campaign and any extension of this campaign within the boundaries of international law, even as it seeks to expand them beyond their rational limits. Understanding this consequence begins with two essential considerations. First, the Trump Administration’s consistent invocation of international legal authority for its counter-drug campaign - albeit widely condemned as invalid – indicates that any expansion of this campaign will be premised on a theory of international legality. Second, that theory will have to align with the very limited authority of a state to use military force against another state enshrined in the Charter of the United Nations.

That limited authority begins with Article 2(4) of the Charter, which prohibits a state’s threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any other United Nations member state. This prohibition is not, however, conclusive. Instead, the Charter recognizes two exceptions allowing for the use of force. First, military action authorized by the Security Council as a measure in response to an act of aggression, breach of the peace, or threat to international peace and security. Such authorizations have been used since creation of the U.N., one example being the use of force authorization adopted in 2011 to establish humanitarian safe areas in Libya; the authorization that led to the Libyan air campaign. The reason such authorizations have been infrequent is because any one of the five permanent members of the Security Council (the United States, United Kingdom, France, China, and Russia) may veto any resolution providing for such authorization for any reason whatsoever. It is inconceivable the U.S. could garner support for such authorization to take military action in and/or against Venezuela, much less even seek such an authorization.

The second exception to the presumptive prohibition on the threat or use of force is the inherent right of individual and collective self-defense enshrined in Article 51 of the U.N. Charter. That right arises when a state is the victim of an actual or imminent armed attack. Furthermore, the understanding of that right has evolved in the view of many states – and certainly the United States – to apply to threats posed by both states and non-state organized armed groups like al Qaeda.

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From the inception of this counter-narcotics campaign the Trump administration has asserted that the smuggling of illegal – and all too often deadly – narcotics into the United States amounts to an ‘armed attack’ on the nation. This characterization – coupled with the more recent designation of fentanyl as a weapon of mass destruction – is obviously intended to justify an invocation of Article 51 right of self-defense. As with the assertion that TdA is engaged in an armed conflict with the United States, this invocation has been almost universally condemned as invalid. But that seems to have had little impact on Senators like Wicker or Graham and other Republicans who have indicated they are satisfied that the campaign is on solid legal ground.

To date, of course, the campaign based on this assertion of self-defense has been limited to action in international waters. But President Trump indicated in his last cabinet meeting that he intends to go after ‘them’ on the land – ostensibly referring to members of TdA. So, how would an assertion of self-defense justify extending attacks into Venezuelan territory, and what are the broader implications for potential conflict escalation?

The answer to that question implicates a doctrine of self-defense long embraced by the United States: ‘unable or unwilling.’ Pursuant to this interpretation of the right of self-defense, a nation is legally justified in using force in the territory of another state to defend itself against a non-state organized armed group operating out of that territory when the territorial state is ‘unable or unwilling’ to prevent those operations. It is, in essence, a theory of self-help based on the failure of the territorial state to fulfill its international legal obligation to prevent the use of its territory by such a group. And there have been numerous examples of U.S. military operations justified by this theory. Perhaps the most obvious was the operation inside Pakistan that killed Osama bin Laden. Many other drone attacks against al Qaeda targets in places like Yemen and Somalia are also examples. And almost all operations inside Syria prior to the fall of the Asad regime were based on this theory.

By implicitly endorsing the administration’s theory that the United States is acting against TdA pursuant to the international legal justification of self-defense, Republican legislators have opened the door to expanding attacks into Venezuelan territory. It is now predictable that the administration will invoke the unwilling or unable doctrine to justify attacks on alleged TdA base camps and operations in that country. But, unlike other invocations of that theory, it is equally predictable that the territorial state – Venezuela, will reject the U.S. legal justification for such action. This means Venezuela will treat any incursion into its territory as an act of aggression in violation of Article 2(4) of the U.N. Charter, triggering its right of self-defense.

In theory, such a dispute over which state is and which state is not validly asserting the right of self-defense would be submitted to and resolved by the Security Council. But it is simply unrealistic to expect any Security Council action if U.S. attacks against TdA targets in Venezuela escalate to direct confrontation between Venezuela and the U.S. Instead, each side will argue it is acting with legal justification against the other side’s violation of international law.

What this means in more pragmatic terms is that there is a real likelihood a U.S. invocation of the unable or unwilling doctrine could quickly escalate into direct hostilities with the Venezuelan armed forces. At that point, we should expect the administration will treat any effort by Venezuela to interfere with our ‘self-defense’ operations as a distinct act of aggression, thereby justifying action to neuter Venezuela’s military capability.

It is, of course, impossible to predict exactly what the administration is planning vis a vis Venezuela. Perhaps this is all part of a pressure campaign intended to avert direct confrontation by persuading Maduro’s power base to abandon him. But the history of such tactics does not seem to support the expectation Maduro will depart peacefully, or that any resulting regime change will have the impact the Trump Administration might desire. One need only consider how dictators like Saddam Hussein and Manuel Noriega resisted such pressures and clung to power even when U.S. military action that they had no chance of withstanding became inevitable. Or perhaps the administration will bypass the ‘unable and unwilling’ approach and simply initiate direct action against Venezuela to topple Maduro based on an even more dubious claim of self-defense now that he has been designated part of another foreign terrorist organization.

One thing, however, is certain: the options for extending this military campaign to Venezuela are built upon the feeble foundation that the U.S. is legitimately exercising the right of self-defense against TdA. And now, because of an attack that triggered congressional scrutiny, the administration is in a stronger position politically than ever thanks to Republican legislators endorsing this theory of international legality.

The real issue that was at stake during those closed door hearings was never really whether a possible war crime occurred, although the deaths that have resulted from the ‘second strike’ (like all the deaths resulting from this campaign) are highly problematic. The real issue was and remains the inherent invalidity of a U.S. assertion of wartime legal authority and a congressional majority that seems all too willing acquiesce to an administration that seems willing to bend law to the point of breaking to advance its policy agenda.

Nicolas Maduro is a tyrant who has illegitimately clung to power contrary to the popular will of the Venezuelan people. His nefarious activities and anti-democratic rule justify U.S. efforts to force him out of power and enable restoration of genuine democracy in that country. What it does not justify is constructing a legal edifice built on an invalid foundation to justify going to war against Venezuela to achieve that goal. But now that the Trump administration has tested the political waters, that seems more likely than ever.

The Cipher Brief is committed to publishing a range of perspectives on national security issues submitted by deeply experienced national security professionals.

Opinions expressed are those of the author and do not represent the views or opinions of The Cipher Brief.

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OPINION — “There's no doubt that America's adversaries are trafficking fentanyl into the United States in part because they want to kill Americans. If this were a war, that would be one of the worst wars. I believe they killed over the last five or six years, per year, 200-to-300,000 people. You hear about a 100,000, which is a lot of people, but the number is much higher than that. That's been proven.”

That was President Trump in the Oval Office on December 15, explaining why he was signing an Executive Order (EO) designating “illicit fentanyl and its core precursor chemicals as Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD).”

Notice Trump’s use of the word “war,” and the vast exaggeration of numbers of fentanyl drug deaths in the U.S. -- actually 48,000 in 2024. Also, does anyone really think that the cartels are pushing fentanyl into this country “to kill Americans?” Or is the real reason they are doing it is to make money – as is the case with most drug dealers.

I am focusing on this rather odd EO because to me it is another sign that President Trump is bringing the U.S. military into yet another essentially domestic American problem, drug use. I also see it as the Trump administration regularizing employment of the U.S. military to be a normal response to control civil issues.

Remember, President Trump has employed some 9,000 active and National Guard service members on the U.S. southern border to block what he termed an invasion of illegal immigrants. He has also federalized National Guard troops in U.S. cities like Washington, D.C. claiming they were needed to combat crime, and required hundreds of Marines and originally 4,000 California National Guard personnel in Los Angeles to put down protests against immigration raids.

There was even a military atmosphere in the Oval Office on December 15, because the President used that same meeting to make the first awards of a Mexican Border Defense Medal to 13 Army and Marine service members who provided military support to the Department of Homeland Security and U.S. Customs and Border Protection.

In the Oval Office meeting, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth explained that the newly-issued medal exactly replicated the 1918 Mexican Border Defense Medal, but that one went to U.S. troops who patrolled the border during 1916-1917, when fear was of a German-inspired invasion by the paramilitary forces of Francisco "Pancho" Villa as part of the Mexican Revolution.

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While President Trump said that “to kill Americans” was a purpose of trafficking fentanyl, the EO itself said there was a more complex goal. The EO said, “The production and sale of fentanyl by Foreign Terrorist Organizations and cartels fund these entities’ operations — which include assassinations, terrorist acts, and insurgencies around the world — and allow these entities to erode our domestic security and the well-being of our Nation.”

Here, this EO seeks to link up with one of President Trump’s first EOs, signed on January 20, that designated unspecified cartels as Foreign Terrorists Organizations to make them subject to laws Congress passed in the wake of the September 11, 2001, attacks.

The new December 15 EO goes on to say, “The two cartels that are predominantly responsible for the distribution of fentanyl in the United States engage in armed conflict over territory and to protect their operations, resulting in large-scale violence and death that go beyond the immediate threat of fentanyl itself.”

Inexplicably, the EO does not name those two cartels.

However, the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) in its 2025 National Drug Threat Assessment makes it clear who they are by saying, “The Sinaloa and Jalisco New Generation Cartels, in particular, control clandestine [fentanyl] production sites in Mexico, smuggling routes into the United States, and distribution hubs in key U.S. cities.”

Then both the new EO and 2025 National Drug Threat Assessment carry the exact same following sentence: “Further, the potential for fentanyl to be weaponized for concentrated, large-scale terror attacks by organized adversaries is a serious threat to the United States.”

It turns out that back in the 1990s, a number of countries investigated using fentanyl as part of an incapacitating agent, including the U.S. Defense Department. The U.S. dropped the idea because of a margin of safety issue – the difference between a dosage that would incapacitate and one that would kill a person.

However the Russians did create a fentanyl-based incapacitating agent and used it in October 2002, when 40 Chechen terrorists seized Moscow’s Dubrovka Theater and held some 800 people hostage. Russians finally released the fentanyl-based gas to incapacitate those in the theater and it killed some 130 of them.

Fentanyl is an FDA-approved synthetic opioid used medically as a pain reliever and anesthetic. It is close to 100 times stronger than morphine. Two milligrams of fentanyl -- equivalent to 10-to-15 grains of table salt – can be lethal. Unlike other illegal drugs such as cocaine, wholesale traffickers distribute fentanyl by the kilogram, equal to 2.2 pounds.

The DEA has found wide U.S. usage of illicit, manufactured, counterfeit fentanyl pills ranging from .02 to 5.1 milligrams, the latter more than twice the lethal dose depending on a person’s body size, tolerance and past usage.

Fentanyl illegal drug use has been a major problem in the U.S. since 2021 when overdose deaths reached 71,000. But as shown above overdose fentanyl deaths are on the way down. President Trump even recognized fentanyl use had gone down saying in the Oval Office on December 15, “We've also achieved a 50% drop in the amount of fentanyl coming across the border and China is working with us very closely and bringing down the number and the amount of fentanyl that's being shipped…We've got it down to a much lower number.” But Trump added, “Not satisfactory, but it will be satisfactory soon.”

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The term “weapon of mass destruction” has specific legal definitions, typically tied to nuclear, radiological, chemical, or biological weapons that are designed to cause large-scale death or bodily harm.

Under the Trump WMD EO, implementation calls for Defense Secretary Hegseth and Attorney General Pam Bondi to determine if the U.S. military is needed to enforce 10 U.S.C. 282, a post-9/11, 2002 counterterrorism law covering emergency situations involving weapons of mass destruction.

If they agree the military is needed, under 10 U.S.C. 282 Hegseth and Bondi are to “jointly prescribe regulations concerning the types of assistance that may be provided,” and “describe the actions that Department of Defense personnel may take in circumstances incident to the provision of assistance.”

There are provisions in 10 U.S.C. 282 prohibiting the military from authority to arrest individuals, directly participate in searches or seizures of evidence related law violations or collection of intelligence for law enforcement – but those provisions also can also be waived.

In addition, under the Trump EO, Hegseth is to consult with Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem to “update all directives regarding the Armed Forces’ response to chemical incidents in the homeland to include the threat of illicit fentanyl.”

I go into all these details because I believe something other than fentanyl is involved here. Others are questioning the December 15 EO, such as Andrew McCarthy in National Review on December 20.

McCarthy wrote, “President Trump may despise ‘forever wars,’ but he sure seems to like pretend wars. The point of the fentanyl ‘designation’ is to shore up his case for using military force against drug traffickers — although its relevance to high seas around Venezuela is hard to fathom since fentanyl is neither produced nor imported from there. At any rate, fentanyl, a dangerous drug but one with legitimate medical uses, is a narcotic, not a weapon of mass destruction akin to a chemical or biological bomb.”

Yesterday, Military.com pointed out, “The [December 15] Executive Order does not spell out a specific military mission, and Pentagon officials have not yet stated whether the armed forces will take on a direct role under the new designation.”

Nonetheless, the EO creates yet another new, domestic area for military operations within the homeland, and what emerges needs to be watched.

The Cipher Brief is committed to publishing a range of perspectives on national security issues submitted by deeply experienced national security professionals.

Opinions expressed are those of the author and do not represent the views or opinions of The Cipher Brief.

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EXPERT INTERVIEW — Secretary of War Pete Hegseth announced today that the U.S. has carried out three additional strikes on four sea vessels, bringing the total number of attacks on boats to 13, resulting in more than 57 deaths. The Secretary said 14 people were killed and one person survived yesterday’s attacks targeting drug traffickers.

The Secretary posted on X that, “The Department has spent over TWO DECADES defending other homelands. Now, we’re defending our own. These narco-terrorists have killed more Americans than al-Qaeda, and they will be treated the same,” warning of more strikes to come. “We will track them, we will network them, and then, we will hunt and kill them.”

The strikes come amid a major U.S. military buildup in the region, most recently bolstered by Secretary of War Pete Hegseth’s order last week for the USS Gerald Ford aircraft carrier and its escorts to deploy from the Mediterranean to Latin America. President Trump says he is also considering military action against land targets in Venezuela, a sentiment echoed recently by Republican Senator Lindsey Graham.

Experts on the region believe part of the counternarcotics campaign is aimed at pressuring Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro to step down. The U.S. has recently suspended diplomatic efforts with Maduro’s government and the Venezuelan president has been directly accused by the U.S. of involvement in drug trafficking. And in a highly unusual move, President Trump publicly announced recently that he has authorized the CIA to conduct covert action in Venezuela.

Maduro has condemned the U.S. military activity, accusing Washington of “fabricating a new war” while vowing to defend national sovereignty.

The Cipher Brief spoke with former CIA station chief David Fitzgerald, who served in Latin America, at the 2025 Cipher Brief Threat Conference about the implications of the strikes and other forms of pressure on both the cartels and Maduro. Fitzgerald joined the conference live from Panama. Our interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

THE INTERVIEW

Kelly: Dave, you have deep expertise in the region and in understanding the drug cartels. With everything going on in the region right now, what's top of mind for you?

Fitzgerald: Regarding Venezuela specifically, it's an interesting situation and I think President Maduro feels like the pincer movement is coming in on him right now. He's feeling the pressure, no doubt, from the military actions in the Caribbean, and also from some of the declarations by President Trump. He doesn't have the support of his neighboring Latin countries that he would like, specifically Brazil - if you remember back when he was elected during the last time, his main ally in Latin America, President Lula, never recognized the election. So theoretically, none of his counterparts other than the ones from the countries everybody suspected would - Nicaragua, Cuba, and, at the time, Bolivia - had recognized the election and President Maduro as the president elect and now the president.

So he understands very well that if push comes to shove, if there's some type of military action vis-a-vis Venezuela, Russia, China, Cuba, even Iran is not going to come to his assistance. He's going to be out on his own and he's going to be very outgunned and outmatched by the U.S. military. [He has a] decrepit air force and a decrepit army. He also claims to have rallied 4 million militia members that are undergoing training to help defend Venezuela.

Kelly: President Trump has openly said that he has authorized covert activity in Venezuela. What does this mean? If you're Maduro, what is that message that you're taking from that? How does it change the situation?

Fitzgerald: I think we're all a little surprised by that announcement, which is very out of character for the IC to have a covert action finding actually being announced by the president of the United States. I guess on one hand he's just circumventing what would eventually happen, and that's having it leaked, which I think has happened to all of the other covert programs. On the other hand, I think it's part of that pressure campaign that Trump is putting on Maduro and I think he's really feeling squeezed. There have been recent media reports that Maduro has offered to provide natural resources to the United States to try to find a way out of the situation by accommodating President Trump by providing oil and some of the other rich resources that Venezuela has. But I think he [Maduro] understands that his plan B is going to get on a plane and go to Cuba, much as President Chavez was back in 2002 when he had a short-lived coup d'état attempt in Caracas. There are not many options for him at this time.

Kelly: This administration has made clear that part of the policy towards Venezuela is applying pressure which includes the targeting of suspected drug boats off the coast of Venezuela. With your decades of experience understanding what motivates the drug cartels and what doesn't, how do you think these attacks might shift their thinking, if at all? And I also want you to explain to us how the cartels are technology, reportedly, better than most other groups in the world. Is this true?

Fitzgerald: They're very sophisticated and vis-a-vis Venezuela, you actually have kind of a, I hate to use the word state-sponsored, but I will say state-approved cartels working in Venezuela. I don't know if we remember the days of Cartel de los Soles, which in English means the cartel of the generals, and that was so true back in the 90’s. The then head of the National Guard was under indictment [for involvement.] He's still under indictment. He has never left Venezuela since then.

Hugo Carvajal, who was General Carvajal, the head of military intelligence, fled to Spain around 2020-2021 because he had a falling out with Maduro. He was extradited to the U.S. back in ‘23. He pled guilty [to involvement in narcoterrorism and drug trafficking] in June of this year and is going to be sentenced at the end of this month. I know the guy personally, and I remember having these conversations with him and telling him, Hugo, one day this house of cards is going to come crumbling down and there's going to be a price to pay, right? He says, ah, no, no, no, no. And I think it's kind of that same atmosphere in Venezuela right now with the senior military officers. Maduro has done a good job of handling the military in the sense of the stick and the carrot, and they all understand that as long as they're true and loyal to Maduro, they're going to benefit from it, from their illegal activities, either allowing trafficking or corruption to take place or participating in it. So there's going to be more indictments, I think. There's no doubt Carvajal is making a plea with the U.S. attorney right now in order to lower his sentence.

You have that combined with what you see now in Colombia. Trump had called President Petro a narco trafficker and said he's cutting all narcotics assistance to Colombia. That's a blow to him, but it's also a blow to our efforts in the region because Colombia, as everybody knows, has been our strongest ally in this fight, both in the Counter-terrorism fight in the region and also in the counter-narcotics fight. So we're going to watch how this plays out.

Elections in Colombia are in May of next year. All polls indicate Petro really doesn't have a chance. I'm not sure whether this announcement will help him or not. Colombia's not doing well right now. The United Nations just last month announced that they have record cultivation of coca now in Colombia. They're producing more than they ever did even before we started our Plan Colombia back in the 90’s. So it's a worrisome situation.

Kelly: I'm glad you brought up Colombia because I was going to ask you about that.

I’ve also heard recently that the epicenter of the drug problem is in Mexico. Talk to us a little bit about that and about what you have seen work or not work, against drug cartels in Mexico.

Fitzgerald: The question has always been how do you declare victory? Okay, narcotics traffic is going to exist for the rest of time. It always has, right? So the question is how do you define victory over that target? Years back, I had a conversation with [former Colombian] President [Alvaro] Uribe and I said, “we’ve made great strides, a lot of great things have happened. How do you define victory over these trafficking and terrorist groups?” Back then it was the FARC and the ELN where they were a two for one, or both trafficking and terrorist groups.

He looked at me and said victory is when these problems stop being a national security problem, a threat to our national security, and just basically turn into a regular criminal problem. I think he nailed it on the head. In countries like Colombia, Venezuela, Mexico, all through Central America, these are national security problems. The corruption that it entails, the penetrations that the traffickers have made through all society. It is a threat to the region and a threat to national security of all of those countries, and indirectly a threat to our national security, especially along the border and especially with some of the violence that comes with it.

In Mexico, I think President [Claudia] Sheinbaum has done a fairly good job. You've seen all the newspaper articles about the ICS (Integrated Country Strategy) participation in Mexico. It has been a successful program, but again, flying under the radar, you really can't broadcast this. Colombia was very effective at taking out the heads of the cartels. Extradition was key. We have extradition with Mexico, but again, you have pockets of immunity within Mexico. The corruption is rampant. How to get past the corruption? Venezuela is that kind of dark hole where you really can't do much. But there has been some success, and I can't take that away from the Mexican services, to a lesser extent, the Colombian services and all through Central America, but we're not where we need to be right now.

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Question from NBC Reporter Dan DeLuce (in the audience): Let's say Maduro does get on a plane and fly to Cuba. What does he leave behind? What are the scenarios you see unfolding? I know it's highly speculative, but I'd like to hear your thoughts.

Fitzgerald: First of all, he wouldn't be the only one on the plane. He would be joined by his wife, probably half of the general staff and anybody else who could get on that plane. They will all understand that if he goes, they go and that they're going to be left to the hoards to try and figure out their survival. So I think right now that is option B, because militarily, he understands the Russians are not going to come to his assistance. The Chinese look at this as a transactional relationship with Venezuela. They are making money off Venezuela’s oil and the loans they provide. They just want to be paid back. Maduro is pretty weakened right now. Nobody is likely to come to his aid. So I think for him right now, it's a very serious consideration as far as plan B, how to get out of Venezuela and how to get out of Venezuela fast.

Kelly: How do you measure the impact of these strikes against these boats?

Fitzgerald: In two ways. The first impact is the psychological impact, and the second is the actual counter-narcotics effort impact. I think the impact of stopping the drugs from reaching [destinations], whether they're going to San Domingo or Dominican Republic or some other Caribbean island as a transit, that's minimal. The Coast Guard has been doing that for decades. It helps, but in many ways it's a drop in the bucket. The psychological impact, however, is far greater. I doubt there's very few volunteers or crewmen, both from Venezuela and from Colombia, who are happy about getting on some of these fastboats or the submersibles to crew them out to the Caribbean. I think what you're going to see, it's probably already started, is a shift to the Pacific side. This situation is kind of a pendulum and it’s been like this for decades. The US and our allies would focus on the Caribbean. They'd switch to the Pacific. We'd focus on the Pacific. They go back to the Caribbean. They would just change their routes, change their modus operandi of how they traffic drugs.

Kelly: Thank you so much, Dave. I really appreciate you taking the time. I know you don't do a lot of interviews like this.

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OPINION / FINE PRINT — “We have asked the Mexican government to also step up their involvement in stopping these cartels and stopping the huge amount of drugs that are coming across. If the Mexican navy saw a group of American fishermen that they thought were suspicious of potentially moving drugs and they moved in to kill the 15 American citizens without contacting you, without going through any normal procedures, would you be okay with that?...What we do in combat there is reciprocity, and we are concerned about what other militaries will do to us because we have opened the door on this.”

The was Sen. Elissa Slotkin (D-Mich.) speaking back on September 18, during a Senate Armed Services Committee confirmation hearing for Derrick M. Anderson to be Assistant Secretary of Defense for Special Operations and Low-Intensity Conflict and Platte B. Moring III to be the Defense Department Inspector General.

Three days earlier, the U.S. had carried out the second of its attacks on speedboats it said were trafficking drugs in the Caribbean that were destined for the U.S. killing three individuals. The first such attack, on September 1, killed 11 occupants.

Because the jobs both Anderson and Moring were up for would involve them dealing with the Trump administration’s new policy of attacking alleged narco-trafficking boats in international waters, Sen. Slotkin and other Senators raised questions at this hearing that are highly relevant today as these deadly Trump administration attacks have continued in the Caribbean and since Tuesday began in the eastern Pacific.

So far, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has reported nine such attacks resulting in the deaths of 37 individuals.

As I will explore below, last month, Armed Services Committee Chairman Sen. Roger Wicker (R-Miss.) at the close of this hearing made a pledge that remains unfulfilled – in effect to hold oversight hearings on the attacks.

Before that happened, Sen. Slotkin made clear, “I have no problem with these groups being designated foreign terrorist organizations. Fentanyl is killing just as many people, if not more, as any terrorist group we have ever seen. But I do have a problem with the lack of transparency and potential violations of international law.”

The Senator then pointed out, “The U.S. government has a way of interdicting ships. You know this. The U.S. Coast Guard uses patrol boats and helicopters. They are able to shoot out a motor and disable the vehicle, board it, and then indict all those people, grab all those people. Show everyone all the drugs that they have secured.”

As I wrote in my column three days ago, the U.S. Coast Guard announced October 14 that it has seized more than 100,000 pounds of cocaine in the eastern Pacific Ocean since launching Operation Pacific Viper in early August, averaging over 1,600 pounds interdicted daily. These drug seizures, and the apprehension of 86 individuals suspected of narco-trafficking, were the result of 34 interdictions since early August.

I also pointed out in that column, that on the day after the Coast Guard release of the success of Operation Pacific Viper, during an Oval Office press conference President Trump said that Coast Guard interdiction “had been ineffective” for 30 years because “they have faster boats.”

As Sen. Slotkin noted above, and I mentioned in my column, the Coast Guard has helicopter-mounted special long-range rifles that can hit and disable the engines mounted at the rear of narco-trafficker speedboats.

While Trump and Hegseth have publicized videos each time a boat has been blown up, I agree with Sen. Slotkin who at the September 18 hearing said, “I would love it if the Trump administration showed us the full video from that encounter, showed us that these men did not have their hands up, that they were not waving a white flag, that they were not turning around and getting out of there, and then show us the drugs. The President said that there were all kinds of drugs that were in that ship. Show it. Show us the video that he is apparently alluding to.”

Hegseth did show what he said were packages of drugs floating on the water after yesterday’s eastern Pacific action, but then the drugs appeared to have been blown up.

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Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.) followed Slotkin and brought up a series of questions he and 24 other Democratic or Independent Senators had sent to the White House on September 10, and had not received answers. In fact, they have not yet received an answer.

The questions are worth reviewing: “Give us the evidence that these boats were carrying drugs. Tell us who was on the boats. Tell us what your legal authority was to take a military strike that had not been authorized by Congress? The question that I really want to know is why did you decide to attack rather than interdict? If you interdict a drug boat you get evidence. You seize the drugs but you also get evidence by having access to people and often it is that evidence that leads you to be able to go after the kingpins and the real, you know, muscle behind these operators.”

Kaine added, “If you attack a boat and destroy it makes an impact, but you do not get the evidence. It may actually be counter-productive in fighting narco trafficking.”

As I noted above, when Chairman Wicker closed the September 18 hearing, he said, “The questions about what happened in the Caribbean [and now eastern Pacific] are going to have to be answered. This committee has congressional oversight responsibility.”

Earlier, Sens. Wicker and Slotkin had an exchange about what might occur at any future oversight hearing.

Chairman Wicker reminded Slotkin that “each witness has answered in the affirmative to this question, ‘do you agree to provide records, documents, electronic communications in a timely manner when requested by this committee, et cetera.’ So that is on the record.”

Sen. Slotkin asked, “Do you understand that as video? Just to clarify for me, Chairman.”

Chairman Wicker responded, “Documents, records. I think each witness has answered in the affirmative there…and they will be obligated to follow that.”

“Great,” Sen. Slotkin said at one point, “I look forward to the video.”

I think we all do.

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The state of America’s prison system is one of the most pressing social justice issues today, closely tied to the War on Drugs. The staggering statistics surrounding mass incarceration and the privatization of prisons highlight the urgent need for reform.  While the need for prison reform is something we have covered before, the post-era from […]

The post America’s Broken Prison System: A Call for Urgent Reform appeared first on The Weed Blog.

I have been a cannabis advocate since before I began my journey in the cannabis industry, and I can still tie every hat I wear (and have ever worn) in the industry back to advocacy. It is essential that cannabis industry professionals and cannabis consumers are aware of the dark history of the war on […]

The post The War on Drugs and Its Repercussions: A New Era for Cannabis Justice appeared first on The Weed Blog.

Police in the city of Ryazan (a city in Russia) have taken 4 suspected drug traffickers into custody.

According to the information provided by law enforcement agencies, the group worked according to a carefully planned scheme. There are four suspects in total: three men and one woman. As it turned out later, their leader was a 24-year-old man. Responsibilities for processing orders, packaging and delivery of drugs were distributed among the group members. While the group leader was responsible for the operation of the store in the “dark web”, the second member was engaged in the purchase of apartments to use them as a platform for storing and packaging drugs. A third man and a girl were responsible for packaging and order processing, and they packaged drugs in packages according to orders received from the “dark web”.

They quietly conducted their business until January 13, 2023, when they were detained by the police. During the investigation, the apartment they used as a packaging center was searched, and the police also searched the suspects’ apartments. As a result, a large amount of drugs such as hashish, ecstasy, and others were found.

Currently, the criminals have been arrested and are to be tried under the article on drug trafficking in particularly large amounts.

Colby John Kopp, a 23-year-old man living in Connecticut, imagined that he could get away with selling fake oxycodone pills on the dark web.

It all started in August 2020. FBI agents investigating the work of dark marketplaces came across a seller under the nickname “MadHatterPharma” who was conducting his “pharmaceutical activities” on the Empire Marketplace. Having started his work on May 4, 2020, the “entrepreneur” already had 554 successful orders on his account. The only and at the same time quite popular product of this seller was oxycodone pills (as the seller stated, they were made by pressing a mixture of morphine and fentanyl). In order to find the person behind it all, the FBI agent placed an order with MadHatterPharma (10 pills worth $100). After placing the order, the seller provided a bitcoin address to pay for the “goods”. The order was not long in coming, and less than a week later, a package with the USPS Priority Mail logo arrived at the address provided by the agents to receive the order, in which the agents found exactly what they had ordered through the “dark web”. After the successful order, the agents went to the bitcoin address provided by the seller. After analyzing the blockchain, the FBI went to the Coinbace exchange, and from there to a 23-year-old guy named Colby John Kopp.

Then an unexpected situation occurred. At the end of August 2020, Empire Market ceased to exist. This did not hurt the drug dealer’s business; after the old store was closed, he announced on Dread (an analogue of Redit only in the dark web) that he would be making deals on Wickr, and his future customers would be able to find him under the nickname “hatmatter”. The FBI agents did not sit idle, so they placed another order, but this time several times more (100 pills worth $910).

You’re probably wondering how Kopp laundered the money. It’s very simple, he worked with an accomplice (her name is Adriana Beatrice Sutton) who helped him cash out BTC. The scheme went something like this: Kopp sold all the BTC he earned through the exchange and transferred the proceeds to his PayPal account, spent some of the money from his account, and sent some of the money to Adriana’s account, and she, in turn, withdrew cash within a few hours of the transfer (using Coin Cloud ATMs). Continuing the investigation, FBI agents learned that over the past year, the “pharmacist” had purchased various equipment and substances for the manual manufacture of pills several times.

After he was detained on January 11 this year, he managed to share all the details of his “small business”. He is due to be sentenced on April 18, and according to preliminary estimates, he will face 5 years in prison.

Austrian law enforcement agencies detained a 39-year-old man who resold drugs ordered from “DarkWeb”. According to the information provided, the man lived in the city of Linz.

According to the information provided by the police, the accused resold drugs ordered from the “dark web” for 10 years. He sold such drugs as cocaine, ecstasy, marijuana, LSD and others. After his arrest, police were able to identify two more drug dealers, aged 31 and 22. They are known to have sold drugs worth more than 130 thousand euros. The police are also investigating 40 other people accused of buying drugs.

The German Public Prosecution Service confirmed that a bunker functioning as an illegal cyber center had ties to a right-wing dissident movement and possibly to WikiLeaks. These revelations came to light when the main suspect – Herman Johan Verwoert-Derksen (60), also known as ‘Johan X.’ – reacted to his criminal case for the first time.

According to German media, the employees of the cyber center saw the hosting of servers for dissident groups as a lucrative endeavor. One group is specifically mentioned: Generation Identity. That right-wing movement has chapters in several European countries, such as France, Germany, Austria, and the United Kingdom.

Through encrypted messages, an employee of the bunker communicated with a member of Generation Identity. For just thirty euros a month, the cyber bunker would host a cloud server for the group. A very competitive price because other tenants paid hundreds of euros a month for the same service. That may indicate that the employees of the bunker had some degree of sympathy for the ideology of Generation Identity.

The cyber bunker offered a host of IT services, without requiring contracts or personal details. Furthermore, the bunker hosted many websites on the dark web involved in the distribution of drugs, weapons, and even child pornography. The center was also connected to dark web markets such as Wall Street Market, Cannabis Road, and Flugsvamp 2.0. Moreover, massive cyber attacks were conducted from the bunker, sometimes targeting a million routers at the same time.

In 2013, Johan X. – the head of the organization – bought the former NATO bunker located in Traben-Trarbach, a town in Western Germany. In secret, he converted the former bunker into an underground data center. In addition to the main suspect, the police arrested twelve other men, all German and Dutch nationals. They claim to provide a high degree of privacy and thus do not know illegal content was hosted on their servers.

In 2002, Johan X. was involved in a similar case, running a data center in the South West of the Netherlands. His customers were mostly legal pornographers. The police also discovered an ecstasy laboratory in the same building, although he was never convicted in that case.

Johan X. claims to be a victim of political persecution. He believes the German authorities only showed interest because his data center hosted the servers of WikiLeaks. The public prosecutor denies those allegations, stating that investigators did not found any server belonging to WikiLeaks. Furthermore, WikiLeaks is not even mentioned in the indictment.

Regardless of the outcome, (former) employees of Johan X. are already making plans for a new data center. Several countries showed interest, including Bahrain, Moldova, Zimbabwe, and Vietnam.

The post Darknet bunker plot thickens: ties to right-wing dissidents and WikiLeaks appeared first on Rana News.

A 41-year-old man from the Californian city of Martinez was charged with possession of equipment for producing counterfeit drugs. At the time of his arrest, Jeremy Donagal – an old school dark web vendor previously known as ‘Xanax King’ – was on supervised release from a 2015 conviction for manufacturing and selling counterfeit drugs.

According to a federal complaint, Donagal leased a warehouse in the city of Concord as soon as his supervised release began. Inside the building, law enforcement encountered professional medical equipment such as pill presses, plastic trays with punches and dies in them, and materials for packaging and shipping. Furthermore, the building also housed thousands of counterfeit pills, containing markings of Sandoz, a legitimate pharmaceutical company.

Moreover, Donagal was building a dark web vendor site to sell the pills nationwide.

Before his 2014 indictment, Xanax King was one of the largest distributors of counterfeit drugs on the dark web. He was arrested along with eight others for manufacturing and distributing counterfeit drugs, (international) money laundering, and structuring. As soon as Donagal was detained, his moniker ‘Xanax King’ was hijacked by other dark web vendors, hoping to profit from its reputation.

At its height, Xanax King’s operation manufactured and distributed over one million Xanax tablets in a single week, selling them for up to one dollar per pill, depending on the quantity of the order.

In 2015, it appeared Donagal got off lightly, as he was caught making significant cash transfers to China, both for money laundering and promotion purposes. If convicted, that charge could have landed him in federal prison for up to fifty years. However, at that time the judge seemed to show leniency.

If Donagal is convicted again, he could at least spend the next seven years in prison.

The post Dark web legend ‘Xanax King’ arrested again appeared first on Rana News.

Michael Goldberg, a 36-year-old man who sold meth on the darkweb under the name “Drugs R Us,” is going to prison.

As first spotted by Dark Net Daily and detailed in court documents, Goldberg ran a criminal organization with his wife and a few other associates. According to the criminal complaint, Goldberg and his associates purchased drugs from various sources and then shipped them internationally using UPS, DHL, and the United States Postal Service.

Goldberg and company weren’t sneaky and the authorities first figured out something was up in 2018 when they discovered several parcels intended for the Philippines were full of methamphetamine. Goldberg shipped them under fake names but used a phone number registered to his real name.

After the cops arrested him, Goldberg continued to run his criminal empire from a jail. “While detained at the Metropolitan Detention Center…Goldberg has made numerous phone calls to Rabulan, often using other inmates’ phone lines, to discuss drug trafficking, destruction of evidence, and the movement of currency,” the criminal complaint said.

The cops, of course, recorded these phone calls. Which is why we know his dark web store’s name. “I don’t know the login for the other thing…the dark web,” Goldberg’s wife said during a call the cops recorded.

“It’s ‘Drugs R Us,’” Goldberg said. 

Later in the conversation, his wife told Goldberg that the business wasn’t going well. “Babe. I was online yesterday. It was all bad. Oh my gosh, oh my gosh. That’s all I’m going to say,” she said.

“How many did they get? A lot? All of them?” Goldberg said.

“I’ve seen everything that you’ve dinged,” she said. “Like everything. Everything.”

“So, they got every last thing that we’ve sent? That’s crazy,” Goldberg said into an unsecured line while sitting in prison. 

Goldberg was a busy international drug dealer. “I have identified a total of 59 international mail parcels that I believe are part of Goldberg and Rabulan’s scheme to distribute drugs,” the criminal complaint said. “Shippers mailed these parcels to the Philippines, Australia, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, Italy, Poland, and France. Fourteen of the 59 parcels have been seized in the United States containing a total of approximately 22.3 kilograms of methamphetamine and 170 grams of marijuana. Authorities in other countries have seized four of the 59 parcels containing 2.1 kilograms of methamphetamine.”

Impressed with himself, Goldberg told an associate he knew what he’d do once he got out of prison. “I was reading this book about this Cocaine Cowboy [A famous drug dealer that inspired ‘Miami Vice’] and I was like, ‘this fool is fucking weak,’” Goldberg said. “I really want to do a movie and book when I get out. I think I’ll make enough money for everybody to get out of the game. Man, damn, this would be a great fucking documentary.”

More people are buying their drugs on the dark web than any other time in recorded history, according to the findings of the latest Global Drug Survey (GDS). 

Researchers found that in 2020, 15 percent of GDS participants who reported using drugs in the previous 12 months obtained them from darknet marketplaces—either by purchasing them first-hand or via someone else. This equated to a threefold increase of the percentage of people who reported the same in 2014, when the survey first started measuring the trend.

Over the past seven years that number has steadily climbed, but never as significantly as it did in 2020: jumping by four percent of the total respondents compared to 2019 levels. And the global pandemic is only part of the reason.

Dr Monica Barratt, a senior research fellow at Melbourne’s RMIT University and co-lead researcher of the GDS, told VICE World News that cultural trends, shifting taboos, market innovators and a growing population of people who spend more of their lives online are all likely contributors to the significant increase in dark web drug crime.

“If you’re coming of age in 2021—say you’re 18 or 19 years old—this isn’t that odd to you; there’s been 10 years since Silk Road was founded in 2011, so you’ve sort of grown up with it,” Dr Barratt explained over the phone. “Partly, I think, that cultural difference and generational difference may explain why this is happening.

“If you buy everything online, why wouldn’t you also buy your drugs online?”

It is for this latter reason in particular, she suggests, that darknet drug markets may have attracted more new customers in 2020 than any previous year.

“When you think about it, in the last 12 months there were many people who weren’t really keen on buying things online, but who had to buy things online because they had no choice; the shops weren’t open and they were in lockdown and they needed to use the post to get goods to them,” she noted. “I think once they get over that hump some people will decide that they want to continue not going shopping for clothes and only using the Internet—and they may feel the same way about everything.”

There is some anecdotal precedent for this trend of homebody buyers. In 2017, Dr Barratt sought to find out why it was that Scandinavian countries like Finland consistently reported the world’s highest proportion of drug buyers who were using the dark web to purchase their supply. A local source explained that, due in part to the climate and the prohibitively cold weather, Finnish people are typically “more isolated” than other peoples around the world and “tend to stay home”. 

“He said it makes perfect sense to him, culturally, that they would be one of the highest users of the [drug] servers that deliver to home,” Dr Barratt recalled. “And the question is: ‘Well, where else would they buy from?’”

That goes some way toward explaining the cultural patterns. But another factor that’s worthy of consideration is the way in which drug dealers and darknet vendors are diversifying their offering and creating a more reliable service—even in the face of transnational cybercrime crackdowns and rampant fraudulent activity.

Dr Barratt points to a dark web marketplace that introduced multi-signature authentication a few years ago, as a way to insulate buyers and sellers against so-called “exit scams”—when the site administrator runs away with people’s funds—and garner some trust from consumers. Other operators have gone even further, leveraging social media apps and chatrooms to create new channels of illegal commerce: like Televend, the fully-automated system that allows users to buy drugs from bots via the encrypted messaging app Telegram.

“What happens is that everyone innovates: the people who are selling drugs on the darknet, and the people who are producing these new applications, they try to work out what the issues are that mean people aren’t taking up their particular platform,” Dr Barratt explained. “Maybe it’s just a bit too hard to go on the darknet, but people like to use messaging apps. So Televend is sort of like a cross between social media app-purchasing and the darknet. And I’m just fascinated as to whether the future of the darknet might be some other hybrid thing that has only just begun.”

These trends are likely to continue, as online marketplaces become more sophisticated and more people turn to e-commerce outlets to score their illegal products. But this brave new world of darknet drug-dealing is fraught with pitfalls and slippery slopes.

One unsurprising consequence is that it gives consumers unprecedented ease of access to illicit—and oftentimes mysterious—substances. Each year, somewhere around a quarter to a third of GDS respondents say that they’ve consumed a wider range of drugs since using the dark web. The breadth of the darknet’s product offering, combined with the relatively low barrier to entry, creates gateways to novel drug-using behaviours, where people try new substances just because they’ve suddenly been made available to them.

But another worrying knock-on effect is that people who buy drugs off the darknet, rather than through a contact or a friend, may be using those drugs alone.

For that reason, Dr Barratt urged darknet drug users to stay diligent and exercise caution—and, wherever possible, to let someone else know what they’re going to be consuming, as well as when and where.

“It may be that a person’s entire experience of using drugs has actually started through the darknet, and may indeed be confined to the darknet,” she explained. “The risk of that is that they may be using alone—so one of the things to consider is ensuring that if you are going to take something for the first time, even if you’re alone, that somebody out there knows you’re about to do this, and somebody out there has a ‘check-in with me in an hour’ and has your details. 

“That’s hard, obviously; this stuff is mostly illegal and a lot of people are secretive about what they’re doing. But the concern would be that someone buys something, maybe takes the wrong dose or the wrong drug or they're having a bad time, and they don’t necessarily have someone with them.”

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