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vehicle they had stopped on the highway. At that time the media equated marijuana with heroin and cocaine; and the majority of the public hardly knew the difference between one drug and another. Marijuana seizures were the first drug interdictions that the police could count in the thousands of pounds but to the public drugs were drugs and a thousand pounds was an awful lot of drugs this also made the drug problem appear much more important than it actually was at the time. There have been many unintended consequences in the war on drugs. One of the unintended consequences of the successful interdiction of large amounts of marijuana was that it caused many marijuana dealers to switch to harder drugs that were less detectable and far more profitable, pound for pound. Among those drugs were heroin, cocaine, and methamphetamine. An even worse consequence was that in a few short years the price of marijuana increased by 2,500 percent, from $160 a pound to $4,000 a pound, causing many users to switch to harder drugs, which were less detectable, more plentiful and were becoming ever cheaper. The war on drugs actually increased drug usage and made it more likely that those using soft drugs would choose harder drugs such as heroin and cocaine. Political motivation has always been evident in many of the drug arrests made by police. Holdovers from the "turn -on and drop -out" flower children of the late 1960s, most of whom also protested the United States' involvement in the war in Vietnam, were among the first groups we concentrated on but we quickly included activist groups from racial and ethnic minorities, such as the Black Panthers. After all, H.R. Haldemann, Richard M. Nixon's Chief of Staff, recorded in his 1969 diary entry that Nixon emphasized, "You have to face the fact that the whole problem is really the blacks. The key is to devise a system that recognizes this all while not appearing to." The system they devised was the war on drugs and for Nixon's purposes he could have hardly hoped for more. The war on drugs has spawned the most racist laws seen in the United States since slavery. Indeed, there are more black and brown men in prison in the United States today (1,300,020) than the total number of male slaves populating this country in 1840 (1,244,384). By three years into the war, we were actually arresting some real mid -level dealers of other drugs, such as, the members of "The Breed" Motorcycle Gang who were selling methamphetamine out of the Philadelphia, Pennsylvania area. In 1977, seven years into the drug war, I kicked down a door in the Corona section of Queens, New York and seized around 350 thousand dollars and what was touted by the newspapers as "the largest shipment of Mexican brown heroin ever confiscated in the United States." We were in the newspapers over a week on that case the heroin seizure, which is a little embarrassing to mention today, amounted to nineteen pounds. But the "drug problem" kept right on expanding, to the point that by 1978 I was working on Billion - Dollar, international, cocaine and heroin trafficking rings. Then in 1982 I was assigned to a deep cover investigation, living nearly two years in Boston and New York City, posing as a fugitive drug dealer wanted for murder, while tracking members of a terrorist organization that robbed banks, planted bombs in corporate headquarters, court- houses, police stations, and airplanes and ultimately murdered a New Jersey State Trooper. It took me two years to finish that job and when I returned to New Jersey in 1984, I never worked another narcotic case. I was very happy about that. This is the reason why. This "Heroin Price and Purity" chart was created by the Federal Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) and placed on their Internet web site in what they called "The DEA Briefing Book 2001." The chart depicts the cost and purity of heroin by year from 1980 to 1999. The 3