Crumbs, Cages, and DEA

This essay is published in its original form without editorial input.

Winston Churchill once said,“America will always do the right thing—after it has exhausted all the alternatives.” ¹

Churchill wasn’t even American, but he might as well have been writing the DEA’s mission statement.

This country runs on crumbs. From scraps tossed to enslaved people to the Affordable Care Act’s fine-print coverage, the pattern is survival, not flourishing. Starve the people, toss them crusts, then demand applause.

Enter the Drug Enforcement Administration, the empire’s most loyal crumb dispenser. Its role isn’t to protect health; it’s to guard the cage. Healing plants are criminalized, profitable pills are handed out like “mother’s little helpers,” and the crumbs we get are called reform. When the DEA pretends at progress—like considering psilocybin for rescheduling—it isn’t mercy. It’s Theatre.

I know what addiction does. I’ve seen it in my family and community: uncles dead from alcohol and pills, cousins swallowed by opioids, friends lost to heroin. So when the DEA waves crumbs in the air, it feels like mockery.

The DEA didn’t wake up compassionate one morning. It was dragged by the courts. The National Psychedelics Association and Dr. Sunil Aggarwal sued after the agency denied psilocybin for dying patients. The Ninth Circuit ordered the DEA to seek a review from Health and Human Services. ^1,2.

As Dr. Aggarwal said, “We’re not asking for legalization—we’re asking for medicine for the Dying.”²  Therefore progress seemed possible—but only because the DEA lost in court, clawing its way toward reform like a toddler forced to share. Meanwhile, studies show psilocybin can ease depression, PTSD, and addiction in just a few sessions.³ SSRIs and opioids, though medically useful, rake in billions because they’re patentable and endlessly consumed. As pharmacologist David Nichols put it, “Psychedelics do not lend themselves to the pharmaceutical business model.”³ Therefore healing is possible— but profit isn’t. And what does the DEA guard? Not health. Profit.

Washington’s playbook never changes. ObamaCare offered “coverage for all,” until the bills arrived wrapped in bureaucracy so thick Kafka would’ve tapped out.⁴ As Nancy Pelosi boasted, “We have to pass the bill so you can find out what’s in it.”⁵ Therefore, people thought they had care—but what they got was managed scarcity. The DEA plays the same game. Toss a crumb, call it compassion. Sprinkle birdseed in the cage, insist it’s nourishment. Count on exhaustion to keep us docile. Take cannabis. Over half the states now have legal recreational markets, and yet at the federal level, cannabis remains a Schedule I drug “with no currently accepted medical use.”⁶ Therefore, cannabis might be normalized in your local dispensary—but federally, it’s still treated like heroin. Meanwhile, legal sales topped $33 billion in 2023.⁷ Entrepreneurs and corporations are cashing in, while people remain locked up for doing the very same thing. As the Last Prisoner Project reports, “tens of thousands of individuals remain incarcerated for cannabis offenses, while others are profiting in the regulated market.”⁸  In 2022 alone, nearly 170 000

Americans were arrested for cannabis-related violations.⁹ Even President Biden, when announcing limited pardons in 2022, hedged: “No one should be in jail just for using or possessing marijuana” ¹⁰. A nice line—but it didn’t apply to distribution or so-called “violent drug offenses.” Therefore, people might believe reform has arrived—but thousands remain behind bars, their lives erased while cannabis stocks are traded on Wall Street. This is crumbs by design. A spectacle of progress dangled like keys in front of a restless child, while the cage itself never opens. Unity, though—that’s the one thing they can’t outlaw. So they legislate and police around it.

The DEA didn’t appear out of nowhere; it was born of paranoia and repression. Harry Anslinger declared in 1937, “Marijuana is the most violence-causing drug in the history of mankind” ¹¹. William Randolph Hearst plastered “reefer madness” across his papers, linking cannabis to Mexican immigrants and striking farmworkers ¹². In California, Filipino, Mexican, Japanese, and white workers were building multiracial solidarity in the fields. Therefore, workers might have secured justice—but they were branded narcotics fiends, their strikes smeared as criminal Conspiracies.

By the 1940s, jazz was the heartbeat of the Harlem Renaissance. Anslinger sneered, “Reefer makes darkies think they’re as good as white men.” His number-one target was Billie Holiday, stalked and arrested until her death for daring to sing “Strange Fruit” against lynching ¹¹. Therefore, jazz might have been solidarity in sound—but narcotics policing turned artists into criminals, ensuring culture itself was caged.

In the 1950s, heroin ravaged Harlem. Politicians thundered about addicts while ignoring poverty and racism. Whole neighborhoods were branded “addict colonies” ¹³. Therefore, Black solidarity may have persisted riding on the back half of the Harlem Renaissance that had manifest iconic artists, thinkers, and civil-rights leaders like Marcus Garvey, Billie Holiday, and Langston Hughes, Harlem was the beacon for Black resilience and resistance that blossomed into the civil-rights movement—but heroin panic justified more policing and less investment.

The 1960s brought psychedelics into the spotlight. Timothy Leary urged people to “turn on, tune in, drop out,” and Nixon branded him “the most dangerous man in America.” Nixon’s aide John Ehrlichman admitted: “The Nixon campaign ... had two enemies: the antiwar left and Black people. ... By getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and Blacks with heroin ... we could disrupt those communities” ¹⁴. Therefore, psychedelics might have fueled solidarity—but Nixon reframed them as chaos, birthing the DEA in 1973 to stomp out both trips and movements.

The 1980s perfected the formula. Reagan and Nancy beamed with “Just Say No” ¹⁵. Crack flooded Black neighborhoods, often with government complicity ¹⁶, while cocaine powdered Wall Street noses. Reagan railed against “welfare queens” ¹⁷. Bush Sr. held up a bag of crack on TV, declaring, “This is crack cocaine seized across the street from the White House” ¹⁸.

Therefore, solidarity might have grown through community survival programs—but the War on Drugs painted Black neighborhoods as dens of crime, justifying militarized raids. The 1990s doubled down. Clinton’s allies warned of “super predators ... kids that have no conscience, no empathy” ¹⁹. His 1994 crime bill caged a generation ²⁰. Therefore, poor Black and Brown communities might have organized—but they were too busy surviving mass incarceration that was brought on by the administration's dogmatic focus on Law & Order, continuing the drug war. These efforts broke apart unity in families, disproportionately imprisoning Black and Latino men, many who were fathers, as well as male teens, creating a school-to-prison pipeline.

The 2000s exposed the global drug pipeline. Afghanistan produced over 90% of the world’s heroin. As Alfred McCoy wrote, “The CIA tolerated ... the drug trade because of the alliance with Afghan warlords” ²¹. Therefore, the U.S. might have fought addiction—but instead fueled the supply while the DEA cracked down on addicts at home. While the suburban and rural white folks were perceived as victims of the opioid crisis, Black and Brown peoples were suspected.

Although at first under-prescribed due to a manufactured belief in a myth by the medical industry that Black and Brown communities had higher pain thresholds coupled with a lack of public treatment-facility access, as the decade wore on a dramatic spike in heroin and fentanyl use rose while largely ignored as a public-health concern many became addicts—the same ones the DEA swept up and imprisoned.

And today? Black Lives Matter carries the torch. Alicia Garza said, “Black Lives Matter is not a movement for Black people only. It is a movement for all of us” ²². Therefore, America might finally reckon with systemic harm—but the state smeared BLM as extremist, surveilled its

leaders, and unleashed riot cops in response to protests. This reactionary backlash reframed this movement of Black unity and empowerment, and used it as a vehicle to further demonize Black bodies like in NYC and Baltimore with stop-and-frisk policies, that often led to wrongful convictions and drug charges due to officers interpreting the plain feel doctrine as reason to seize drugs and other contraband without proper probable cause.

The Trump years only recycled the oldest tricks. Stephen Miller spat, “I couldn’t pay you to live next door to MS-13 ... no ounce of sympathy” ²³. Trump thundered that gangs were “infesting our country” ²⁴. Venezuelan migrants were detained for tattoos, Haitians and Latinos branded cartel proxies ²⁵. Therefore, immigrants might have been seen as neighbors—but scapegoating painted them as narco-terrorists, justifying ICE raids, cages, and deportations.

The DEA destroys families, weakens communities, and steals healing. The cost for the war on drugs hits all of us, and the price is high. In its wake life is lost, thrown into a jail cell, cast to the streets, or mentally wounded sometimes beyond repair. No reconciliation will bring back our loved ones, the tears we’ve wept or the pain that stabs so deep it wakes us in the middle of the night.

So when the agency trots out a press release about maybe moving psilocybin, don’t clap. Don’t thank them. This is the least they could do.  We deserve better. We need better. Part of the way forward is unity—a medicine the DEA cannot regulate, cannot schedule, cannot cage. The other part should be divestment from the DEA and reinvestment in us, the people. Put that misspent money into teachers’ salaries and SNAP food benefits. Invest it in healthcare, treatment centers, and publicly funded hospitals in melanated and low-income communities. Use the money to build back what has been destroyed and not let it feed the beast that has stolen so much from us. The DEA deserves nothing from us, not even our crumbs.

References

1. U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. Aggarwal v. DEA, No. 22-1568, 2025.

2. Vicente LLP. “A Potential Breakthrough for Psychedelic Treatments.” 2025.

3. Bloom, Joshua & Waldo Martin. Black Against Empire. UC Press, 2013.

4. DEA. “Drug Scheduling.” 2024

5. Pelosi's full quote was, “We have to pass the bill so you can find out what's in it away from the fog of the controversy.” Perticone, J. “We have to pass the bill so you can find out what to regret.” The Bulwark. (2025, June 5)

6. Carhart-Harris, Robin L., and Guy M. Goodwin. “The Therapeutic Potential of Psychedelic Drugs.” Neuropsychopharmacology, 42, 2017.

7. Forbes. “U.S. Cannabis Sales Hit $33 Billion in 2023.” Jan 2024.

8. Last Prisoner Project. “The Cannabis Justice Report.” 2023.

9. Daut, Marlene. “Haiti and the Reparations Debt.” The Conversation, 2020.

10. Webb, Gary. Dark Alliance. Seven Stories, 1998.

11. Hari, Johann. Chasing the Scream. Bloomsbury, 2015. 

12. Bonnie, Richard J., and Charles H. Whitebread. The Marihuana Conviction. UVA Press, 1974.

13. Musto, David F. The American Disease. Oxford UP, 1999.

14. Baum, Dan. Smoke and Mirrors. Little, Brown, 1996. 

15. Hartman, Andrew. A War for the Soul of America. UChicago Press, 2008. 

16. Stannard, David. American Holocaust. Oxford UP, 1992

17. Gilman, Sander. Difference and Pathology. Cornell UP, 2014.

18. Frontline. Drug Wars. PBS, 2000. 

19. DiIulio, John J. “The Coming of the Super-Predators.” Weekly Standard, 1995.

20. Alexander, Michelle. The New Jim Crow. New Press, 2010.

21. McCoy, Alfred. The Politics of Heroin. Lawrence Hill Books, 2003.

22. Garza, Alicia. “A Herstory of the #BlackLivesMatter Movement.” The Feminist Wire, 2014.

23. Fox News. “Stephen Miller Rails Against Reporters Over MS-13 Coverage.” June 2018

24. CNN. “Trump Says MS-13 Is ‘Infesting’ the US.” May 2018.

25. FBI. Uniform Crime Report, Arrest Data for 2022.