drug war

TalkingDrugs conducts an exclusive interview with Tom Feiling, a writer, journalist and documentary filmmaker who is the author of The Candy Machine: How Cocaine Took Over the World, published by Penguin in 2009. Tom spent a year living and working in Colombia before making Resistencia: Hip-Hop in Colombia.

On Wednesday four severed heads were found beneath a statue of the Mexican president in Apatzingan, Michoacan, the bodies have yet to be found.  Apatzingan in Western Mexico is where Mexican leaders once gathered to write the first constitution however now the city of about 100,000 is becoming famous for another reason; a gruesome spate of decapitations perpetrated by local drug cartels. The heads found on Wednesday make it 18 decapitations in 2010 for that city alone.

Litigator-turned-legal-scholar Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow, argues that we have not ended racial caste in America, we have simply redesigned it: The U.S. criminal justice system functions as a contemporary means of racial control, even as it formally adheres to the principle of color blindness. Her provocative new book challenges the civil rights community—and all of us—to place mass incarceration at the forefront of a new movement for racial justice in America.