A New York Times podcast on the global drug crisis raises urgent concerns, but leaves the most important questions unasked.
There is something almost cinematic about the way The New York Times framed its recent investigation into the synthetic drugs crisis. A mysterious death in a Chicago jail. A criminal investigator who says “keister” instead of something cruder. A “Rosetta Stone” of ten overlapping substances on a single sheet of paper. Drug-soaked mail laundered through Amazon packaging. A paper baron operating out of the South Side.
The episode of “The Daily” features NYT international investigations correspondent Azam Ahmed in conversation with host Natalie Kitroeff. It is gripping journalism. Ahmed spent more than a year embedded in the world of synthetic drug trafficking, and his reporting is serious, detailed and built on sustained access. The Cook County jail investigation is a genuinely revelatory piece of work.
But what the episode reveals about contemporary drug-policy thinking is, in some respects, more troubling than what it reveals about the drugs themselves. It is worth examining closely, because the gaps are not random – they follow a concerning pattern.
The Reporting at the Heart of the Episode
The conversation covers substantial ground. Ahmed describes a paradigm shift in global drug markets: the move from plant-based substances to synthetically manufactured ones. The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime has catalogued more than 1,450 new psychoactive substances, a figure that has tripled in a single decade. As Ahmed puts it, making a new drug is now “like chefs testing new recipes,” because the chemistry can be altered endlessly in a lab.
He traces the Cook County jail story from a 2023 death that left no visible contraband, only burned paper fragments. Investigators eventually found that people were smuggling synthetic drugs by dissolving them into liquid and soaking sheets of paper. Mail, personal visits and Amazon third-party sellers all served as entry points. One sheet recovered in August 2024 carried ten different synthetic compounds, from cannabinoids to opioids to substances found in rat poison.
Ahmed also discusses nitazenes, a class of opioids developed in the 1950s but never brought to market because of their extreme potency. He says they can be 20 to 40 times stronger than fentanyl, and that authorities now find them across Europe and the United States. Methamphetamine production in Southeast Asia, he reports, operates at a scale that dwarfs cartel output in Mexico. Enforcement pressure on fentanyl precursor chemicals, he argues, simply pushed criminal networks toward even more dangerous alternatives.
From this, Ahmed draws his own clear and not unsurprising conclusions:
- Enforcement-focused approaches have failed and may have made the crisis worse.
- Harm reduction, he suggests, must form part of any serious response.
- The policy conversation, in his view, should move away from what he calls “retrograde rhetoric” about cracking down.
That is the frame – the lens this ‘investigation’ wants us to look at and through, Ah, but this deserves closer examination than the episode gives it.
“The War on Drugs Has Failed”: A Claim, Not a Finding
Throughout the episode, Ahmed treats the failure of the war on drugs as the starting point rather than the conclusion. He says it plainly: “We all know the war on drugs has failed. We also know it not only failed, it kind of made things worse.”
That is a significant claim to present as settled fact, and not unsurprisingly with confirmation bias leaning investigations, the episode never tests it.
What evidence does it actually offer?
- Enforcement operations that failed to permanently disrupt drug markets.
- The arrest of a South Side paper baron that did not reduce overdoses at Cook County.
- Cartel crackdowns that did not stop fentanyl.
- Precursor restrictions that appear to have driven innovation toward nitazenes.
These observations are real, however, all these examples do is show the limits of supply-side enforcement in isolation. They do not show that the entire framework of drug control made things worse, and no one in the room considers what conditions would look like with no enforcement infrastructure at all.
There is also a circularity that this conversation never challenges. The argument runs: Enforcement suppressed fentanyl, so criminals built something worse, therefore enforcement made things worse. Apply that logic to any regulation and it collapses. Restricting dangerous products sometimes drives innovation toward replacements, but that is not an argument for ceasing to restrict dangerous products.
The War FOR Drugs
Here is the larger omission. The episode scrutinises the “war on drugs” relentlessly, while ignoring its mirror image entirely: the war for drugs being actively, no, assiduously and relentlessly being waged.
If there has been a fifty-year campaign to suppress supply, there has also been a sustained, well-resourced and increasingly successful campaign to expand demand, normalise consumption and lower the social and legal cost of using. It has commercial backers, advocacy organisations, lobbying budgets, friendly media framing and a cultural tailwind. The legal cannabis industry, growing rapidly across multiple jurisdictions, has a direct financial incentive to enlarge its user base. Organised pro-drug movements actively work to expand the acceptability of a range of substances, influencing legislation and public opinion. Entertainment, music and social media steadily frame intoxication as ordinary, even desirable, particularly to the young.
That campaign has arguably been far more effective than the constantly undermined enforcement effort it is so often contrasted with. Yet it appears nowhere in the episode as a named actor. When you examine one side of a conflict with forensic attention and treat the other as if it does not exist, the analysis is incomplete by definition. The honest question is not only whether the war on drugs failed – it is whether the war for drugs has been quietly winning.
The Demand Nobody Discussed
This points to the deeper gap. Why do so many people, in so many societies, actively want these substances?
Half an hour on one of the most serious public health crises of the modern era produced almost no examination of the forces that create and sustain demand. To the episode’s partial credit, Kitroeff does eventually raise the consumption side, asking about “the alternate route here… addressing demand.” But watch what happens next. Ahmed immediately reframes the question as “legalisation, or decriminalisation,” and from there moves to harm reduction. Demand is raised, and then redirected, away from any discussion of reducing it.
That redirection is the whole problem in miniature. Demand reduction received no real attention. Early intervention did not feature and school, community and family-based prevention went unmentioned. Recovery appeared only briefly, framed through harm reduction of course. Nobody asked why people begin using, or what might reduce initiation or facilitate active recovery. The cultural normalisation of drug use, the commercial expansion of markets, the social conditions that make chemical escape attractive: none of it was scrutinised.
Inmate Rashad Rowry came closest to the heart of it when he described becoming “addicted to not caring,” to the drug’s power to make him indifferent to his circumstances, his future and the deaths around him. That is profound hopelessness, and it is a demand-side statement of the first order and it deserved far more than a passing moment of reflection. The question it begs, what produces that hopelessness and how might it be prevented, is precisely the one the episode does not ask.
Drug-Soaked Paper Is Not New
The episode presents drug-soaked paper as an apparent startling recent innovation, encountered with bewilderment, defeating existing detection methods. The framing suggests a genuinely novel threat. The chemistry is new, however, the method is not.
Drug-infused paper has been a street staple for more than half a century. LSD was distributed on absorbent sheets so commonly that one of its enduring street names was simply “blotter.” It was also known as “sacrament,” because users would soak it into wafers, sugar cubes, or any medium that would hold the liquid, and then consume it. The principle, dissolve a potent compound into liquid and carry it on an absorbent material, is decades old. What is genuinely new is the range of synthetic compounds now being used, and the deployment of the method in jails specifically to defeat detection of more conventional contraband.
That distinction matters for policy. If drug-soaked paper looks entirely novel, it seems to demand entirely novel responses. Seen accurately, it is a modern chemistry applied to an old smuggling method, one more turn in a long cycle of adaptation and counter-adaptation. Emphasising novelty at the expense of that history distorts the conclusions that follow from it.
Harm Reduction and the Assumption of Inevitability
When Kitroeff asks what can actually be done, Ahmed centres his answer on harm reduction and wheels out an increasingly misrepresentative ‘chestnut’. He parrots a well worn pro-drug activist mantra in describing the issue as a public health matter rather than a criminal one, something “Europe is really focused on.” That can be a legitimate perspective, but again, only half the story, but the episode simply never interrogates the assumptions inside it.
If you listen to the interview you will hear how Ahmed defines the approach: “We understand people are going to use drugs. We understand that we’re never going to be able to fully reduce all of the demand.” There is that sabotaging apriori assumption – that sentence does a great deal of quiet work. It accepts as given that drug use is permanent and that reducing demand is a lost cause. From there, the only sensible goal becomes managing the consequences. That is a coherent position. It is not a neutral one, and it is not the only one available.
Three assumptions sit inside it, each worth the same scrutiny the episode reserves for enforcement.
- First, that abstinence and recovery are unrealistic for most users, a claim that research on natural recovery from substance use disorders directly challenges.
- Second, that reducing initiation will not work, which effective school-based prevention and the long decline in tobacco and drink-driving both contradict.
- Third, that the cultural forces driving demand are beyond intervention, which the public health practitioners who turned the tide on smoking would dispute.
There is a subtler risk too. A comprehensive harm reduction framework can function as a “permission model,” accommodating drug use as normal and ongoing in ways that lower the perceived cost of starting. E.g Needle exchange cuts HIV transmission – Naloxone saves lives. These tools have a genuine evidence base and a real place, but a framework that manages the consequences of use while showing little interest in reducing the number of people who start is not a comprehensive public health strategy – it is at best, containment. And containment, as the jail reporting itself shows, tends to fall behind the adaptive capacity of the thing it is trying to contain.
The Question Nobody in the Room Asked
Investigative journalism is most credible when it applies its scepticism consistently, including to the views it finds congenial.
Early in the episode, Kitroeff notes, in passing, that she has “a special interest reporting experiences in this world.” The phrase is left to hang – no elaboration, no clarifying question. In a half-hour conversation about who uses drugs and why, that is a curious thing to skip past.
It raises a question the episode never asks of itself; Contemporary drug-policy discourse leans heavily on the “living experience” of drug use as a source of insight and authority. If living experience is treated as a qualification when it belongs to the people being studied, then transparency about the living experience of the people doing the studying matters at least as much. Did anyone in that room, the guest, the host, the producers shaping the framing, use these substances recreationally? It is not an accusation, it is the obvious question, and its absence from a conversation that prides itself on “dispassionate, brutal honesty” is conspicuous. A genuinely sceptical investigation would have asked it of everyone present, not only of the inmates.
A War FOR Sobriety
Ahmed’s reporting, on Cook County, on nitazenes, on Southeast Asian meth, on the sheer adaptive sophistication of these networks, is serious and important. The reporting is far more rigorous than the policy analysis wrapped around it.
The “war on drugs has failed” narrative functions as settled truth rather than a contested claim. The war for drugs, the organised commercial, cultural and political effort to expand use, goes unmentioned. Demand is raised once and immediately redirected into legalisation and harm reduction. Prevention, early intervention and demand reduction are essentially absent. Harm reduction receives sympathy but no scrutiny. And the most basic question, why so many people in so many societies are reaching for these substances at all, goes almost entirely unasked.
That omission is not incidental. When demand is treated as a fixed constant rather than something that can be reduced, prevention disappears and containment becomes the only strategy left on the table. And containment, as this episode’s own reporting demonstrates, tends to generate the very innovation it is trying to suppress.
The real crisis may not be that the war on drugs has failed. It may be that no one has yet seriously attempted a war for sobriety.
Dalgarno Institute (WRD News)
Source: How A Drug Cocktail Made of Paper Is Killing Inmates