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 repudiated the use of illegal drugs.

No marijuana or any illicit drugs were found on his property. A subsequent investigation by the local district attorney confirmed Scott wasn’t paranoid: The LA County Sheriff’s Department was motivated by a desire to take Scott’s property under civil asset forfeiture laws, auction it off, and keep the proceeds for the department. Bizarrely, Scott’s home wasn’t even in LA County. Despite recent reform efforts, the promise of forfeiture continues to be a major motivating force in drug policy across the country.

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 Department raids, which had skyrocketed from 1,400 in the mid-’90s to over 5,000 by the time she was killed, nearly all no-knock.

Despite repeated warnings that these reckless raids would end in tragedy, few listened. This episode of Collateral Damage, hosted by Radley Balko, explores how Spruill’s death catalyzed the political rise of Eric Adams, a young Black NYPD officer who would later become mayor. It also examines how promises of reform quickly faded, and the NYPD returned to business as usual.

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 urgently relevant since he began ordering the U.S. military to strike down alleged drug smuggling boats in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific Ocean in September 2025. By early November, the U.S. had launched a total of 17 strikes, killing at least 70 people, and those figures seem to grow almost by the day. The attacks are illegal under both U.S. and international law. The administration also provided no documentation of the alleged drug trafficking.

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, including Cole’s fiancée, never heard any warning.

Cole had no prior criminal record, but police secured the warrant by falsely linking him to a different Trevon Cole with a criminal history in Texas. Despite the clear misidentification and Cole’s lack of threat, a coroner’s inquest cleared the officer, who had previously shot two other men, killing one. This episode of Collateral Damage, hosted by Radley Balko, examines how the courts have failed to protect the Fourth Amendment in drug cases, featuring interviews with constitutional law scholars, Cole’s fiancée, and the daughter she was carrying during the raid, now a teenager.

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 medication. He became a vocal advocate for medical cannabis, but in 1997, he was arrested by federal authorities for running a grow operation, despite California creating some protections for medicinal use at the time.

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 Gaither agreed. In 1996, Gaither’s body was found in the woods. Gaither had helped police build a case against a local drug dealer, and a grand jury member had tipped off the dealer that Gaither had testified against him. An autopsy revealed Gaither had been tortured before he was murdered. This episode revisits Gaither's case and others in which police were reckless and careless with the lives of those they pressured to become informants.

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 had been shattered, and an arm was reaching through, fumbling for the handle. Frederick fired. The arm belonged to Detective Jarrod Shivers, who died from the gunshot wound. Frederick was arrested and initially charged with capital murder, with prosecutors even considering the death penalty. This episode revisits the night that changed Frederick’s life forever and ended Shivers’s. We hear from Frederick himself as well as veteran narcotics officer Neill Franklin.

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, then planted marijuana in her basement to cover up their mistake.In the ensuing months, we’d learn that the Atlanta Police Department’s narcotics unit routinely conducted mistaken raids on terrified people. The problem was driven by perverse federal, state, and local financial incentives that pushed cops to take shortcuts in procuring warrants for drug raids in order to boost their arrest and seizure statistics. Most of those incentives are still in place today.

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. is in a “non-international armed conflict” with narcotics traffickers.

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.