El Chapo's trial continues this week, brimming with sordid tales of kingpins and cartels. But what the media spectacle can't justify is a failing “war on drugs” that has taken the lives of hundreds of thousands of people.
In the 1980s Ronald Reagan’s administration illegally defied Congress. What came to be called the “Iran-Contra Scandal,” a nexus of drugs, terror, Latin American proxy conflict, and covert operations involving the United States and Iran, seems this week to have been sampled and remixed for the twenty-first century.