Drug Lords

This week in my blog post I decided to watch the Netflix docu-series I watched Drug Lords. The first three episodes were about Pablo Escobar and I wasn’t feeling like watching those so I skipped straight to the fourth episode. This episode focuses on Frank Lucas and the country boys.

Frank Lucas is an infamous American drug dealer. He is known for revolutionizing the trafficking of heroin but finding a way to cut out the middleman. He would directly buy heroin from the Golden Triangle in Southeast Asia. Under the wing of Bumpy Johnson he began his life of crime in Harlem. After the death of Johnson, he realized that in order to make more profit he would have to cut out the middleman of the Italian mafia in order to make larger profits. Making no less than 300,000 dollars per kilo of heroin sold.

The most astonishing part of all of this is that he has only spent a total of twelve years in prison. He was sentenced to seventy years in prison but only was forced to serve five of those seventy years because he chose to cooperate. The evidence that he was able to provide leads to over one hundred further drug-related convictions. Lucas was then arrested again in 1984 for a drug deal and only served seven years, and was released in 1991.

This episode greatly reminded me of the docu-series that I watched earlier in the semester, Dope. This series focuses more on the beginnings of heroin trafficking, whereas Dope focuses on the modern day epidemic of heroin. What I find most interesting is that not much has changed between now and back then. The dealers are still “cutting” the heroin with other substances and chemicals in order to make the most of their supplies. This is seen in both shows multiple times.

Since watching Drug Lords, I have been pondering the influence of Frank Lucas. Do men like Frank Lucas give the dealers shown in Dope the confidence to continue to do what they do? Frank Lucas trafficked drugs all over the world and made millions of dollars every week and only had to serve twelve years in prison. Yes, twelves years is a pretty decent amount of time, but in the span of a lifetime it really isn’t that long. Also, considering the amount of money he was able to make I would think that the prison time would be worth it. Obviously, you would have to cooperate with law enforcement in order to be able to have that light of a prison sentence. At the end of the day the benefits seem to outweigh the cost, at least in Frank Lucas’s case. Personally, I think that seeing well known guys like Lucas serving light sentences possibly gives them the confidence that they either won’t get caught, or maybe get off easy like Frank Lucas. I may be completely wrong about this, but it’s definitely something to consider.