For more than two years, The Washington Post has relentlessly pursued the story of how a combination of corporate greed and government inaction fueled the deadliest drug overdose epidemic in recorded history. The causes and conditions of this massive—not to mention preventable—death toll are ripe terrain for a Pulitzer Prize–winning team of investigative journalists with a knack for data and science, who can also navigate the bureaucratic morass of government agencies that, in theory, should have sprung into action to tackle this unprecedented crisis.

The Post’s latest reporting has zoomed in on the ways in which President Obama, President Trump, and Congress failed to contain wave after wave of overdose deaths. A March 2019 investigation into Obama’s administration, titled “The Fentanyl Failure,” was the first hit in a series that revealed that the government had fallen down on the job: “Despite mounting deaths and warnings,” the reporters wrote, “the Obama administration did not take extraordinary measures to confront an extraordinary crisis.”

Two months later, the opioid team ran a lengthy piece, “Fighting Fentanyl,” that declared, “Trump called the opioid epidemic a priority, but fentanyl deaths soar as resources fail to keep pace.” Then, in September, the Post’s third article ran, this one focused on Congress’s inaction. “Flailing on Fentanyl,” another exhaustive, well-sourced investigation, concluded, “Congress failed to act despite dire warnings about the powerful opioid.” Members of Congress, consultants, career staffers, and legislative experts across the Beltway spelled out how powerful people elected to serve their constituents allowed the problem to metastasize.

But what, precisely, did all these powerful people and agencies fail to do? What “extraordinary measures” weren’t taken?

The policy prescriptions in all three Post articles overwhelmingly favor a narrow set of discredited actions, illustrating how conventional wisdom in Washington has perpetuated a dubious War on Drugs approach to addiction that hurts more than it helps. The same way a foreign policy blob of well-paid consultants, think tanks, and entrenched bureaucrats have trapped America in fruitless forever wars, the sources given credence in the Post’s opioid investigations inadvertently expose a fossilized drug policy consensus, one that goes back to the days when Richard Nixon declared “drug abuse” public enemy No. 1.