As a CIA analyst in Shanghai and Pakistan during America’s “war on terror”, Amaryllis Fox was familiar with drawn-out, intractable conflict. She’d studied the compounding effects of redoubling on failed policies, of redundant good versus evil arguments peddled into a quagmire, costing billions and an incalculable loss of life. But the situation in America’s longest military war, now nearing two decades, paled in comparison to the subject of Fox’s post-CIA project for Netflix: America’s costly, decades-longer engagement known as the “war on drugs”.
The Business of Drugs plays like a condensed, updated version of the popular National Geographic series Drugs, Inc (also on Netflix), moving from America’s voracious consumption of illicit substances to the global network of supply evading, or dwarfing, interlocking attempts at enforcement. The series’ six segments are delineated by substance – cocaine, synthetics (such as MDMA, also known as ecstasy), heroin, meth, cannabis and opioids – and explore substances of wildly varying levels of addictiveness, use and geography. Together, the chapters form a loose condemnation of prohibition as both policy and moralistic stance.