In the past ten years, we lost hope in American politics, realized we were being watched on the internet, and finally broke the gender binary (kind of). So many of the beliefs we held to be true at the beginning of the decade have since been proved to be false—or at least, much more complicated than they once seemed. The Decade of Disillusion is a series that tracks how the hell we got here.Over the last 10 years, our narcotic landscape has been irreversibly altered. From the online drug trade opening its floodgates in 2010 to Denver decriminalizing magic mushrooms in 2019, this last decade has seen the biggest shifts in the drug trade and drug policy for half a century.
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Some of these changes have been driven by science and technology, others by politics and money. Some have been positive, while others have proved deadly. But when we look back on the 2010s, we will see two forces at play: an increasingly resilient and deadly drug trade and a growing understanding that regulating it, rather than simply trying to annihilate it, could be the best way to stop it from spinning completely out of control.Here’s how the last ten years changed drugs forever.
April 16, 2010: The U.K. Bans Mephedrone, Signaling the Rise of the Online Drug Trade and the New Synthetic Drug Era
November 7, 2012: Colorado and Washington Becomes the First U.S. State to Legalize Cannabis for Recreational Use
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June 6, 2013: Victor ‘Fat Boy’ Burgos Becomes One of the First Drug Dealers to be Charged with Selling Heroin Laced with Deadly Fentanyl
July 2, 2015: The UN Reveals a Big Jump in Cocaine Production in Colombia, Signaling a Global Resurgence of its Use
August 28, 2015: The First Episode of Narcos Airs on Netflix, Cementing a Cultural Fixation with the Drug Crime World
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May 9, 2016: Rodrigo ‘The Punisher’ Duterte is Elected President of the Philippines, Taking the War on Drugs to a New, Deadly level
November 15, 2017: The UN Announced that Poppy Cultivation Had Reached Record Levels, Putting Another Nail in the Coffin of the Global War on Drugs
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