Collateral Damage from The Intercept

In 1992, Donald Scott, the eccentric owner of a large Malibu estate, was killed in his home by an ad hoc team of raiding cops. The Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department led the raid, but a panoply of state and federal police agencies participated too. Police claimed Scott was operating a large marijuana grow on the property. Scott, who always feared the government would take his land, actually r...

In 2004, New York narcotics officers raided Alberta Spruill’s home, shattering her door and detonating a flash grenade. Spruill, a 57-year-old city worker, went into cardiac arrest and died two hours later. The raid was based on faulty intel from a discredited informant, and the suspect they were searching for was already in custody. Spruill’s death came amid a surge in New York City Police Depart...

Veronica and Charity Bowers, a young Christian missionary and her daughter, are killed when the Peruvian Air Force shoots down a small passenger plane in 2001. The plane had been mistaken for a drug smuggling plane and was shot down as part of a joint anti-drug agreement between the CIA and the Colombian and Peruvian governments. President Donald Trump has made the Bowers's deaths newly and urgent...

In June 2010, Las Vegas police conducted a no-knock raid on Trevon Cole’s apartment, where he lived with his nine-months-pregnant fiancée. Cole, who occasionally sold small amounts of marijuana, rushed to the bathroom to flush a bag down the toilet. An officer followed and shot him in the head, killing him. Cole was unarmed. The officer claimed Cole made a “furtive” movement, but others present, i...

Peter McWilliams was an optimist, activist, poet, and advocate for personal freedom. His book “Ain’t Nobody’s Business If You Do: The Absurdity of Consensual Crimes in Our Free Country” resonated across the political spectrum. After contracting AIDS and being diagnosed with AIDS-related non-Hodgkin lymphoma in 1996, McWilliams turned to medical marijuana to manage his nausea and keep down his medi...

When LeBron Gaither was 17, he got into an altercation with a staff member at his school that resulted in assault charges. As Gaither faced the possibility of a criminal record, a Kentucky State Police detective offered him a deal: Charges would go away if Gaither agreed to become a drug informant. At the time, such an agreement was illegal without consent from Gaither’s parents or guardian. But G...

In January 2008, Ryan Frederick, a 28-year-old who worked the night shift at a Coca-Cola plant in Chesapeake, Virginia, found himself at the center of a tragedy. Just days after his home had been burglarized, Frederick was jolted awake by the sound of his dogs barking and someone breaking through his front door. Grabbing his handgun, he cautiously approached the noise. A lower panel of the door ha...

In 2006, a 92-year-old Atlanta woman was gunned down in her own home by police during a drug raid. The police initially claimed the woman was a marijuana dealer who fired a gun at them. The story might have ended there. But an informant bravely came forward to set the record straight. Subsequent investigations and reports revealed that the police had raided the wrong home, killed an innocent woman...

From Afghanistan to Iraq, the United States has long used drone strikes to take out people it alleges are terrorists or insurgents. It’s a legacy that started under President George W. Bush and greatly expanded under President Barack Obama . President Donald Trump has taken this tactic to new extremes, boasting about lethal strikes against alleged drug boats in the Caribbean and declaring the U.S....

Collateral Damage is a new investigative podcast series examining the half-century-long war on drugs, its enduring ripple effects, and the devastating consequences of building a massive war machine aimed at the public itself. Hosted by Radley Balko , an investigative journalist who has been covering the drug war and the criminal justice system for more than 20 years, each episode takes an in-depth...