The above image was made with stable diffusion using the prompt 'a soldier carrying white bricks through a city at sunset.'
The War on Drugs has always been a farce. On the supply side, government entities like the CIA have long protected drug traffickers and profited from the drug trade. At street level, prohibition has fed countless people to the incarceration industry, with the evidence against them sometimes falsified. The history of this subject is shocking. Some of it is unbelievable.
Consider this statement from 25-year veteran of the DEA Michael Levine:
"The CIA and the Department of State were protecting more and more politically powerful drug traffickers around the world: the Mujihadeen in Afghanistan, the Bolivian cocaine cartels, the top levels of Mexican government, Nicaraguan Contras, Colombian drug dealers and politicians, and others. Media's duties, as I experienced firsthand, were twofold: first, to keep quiet about the gush of drugs that was allowed to flow unimpeded into the US; second, to divert the public's attention by shilling them into believing the drug war was legitimate by falsely presenting the few trickles we were permitted to indict as though they were major "victories," when in fact we were doing nothing more than getting rid of the inefficient competitors of CIA assets."
The CIA didn't just support trafficking, it fed drugs to unsuspecting victims with sometimes tragic results. When the CIA was experimenting on people in its MKULTRA program, it enlisted a former federal narcotics agent named George White to run Operation Midnight Climax. In a letter to his former employer reflecting on his career, White is quoted as saying, "It was fun, fun, fun. Where else could a red-blooded American boy lie, kill and cheat, steal, deceive, rape and pillage with the sanction and blessing of the all highest." The full scope of MKULTRA is unknown as the CIA destroyed most of the program's records in the 1970s.
Statements by cocaine kingpin Pablo Escobar's son suggest that the kingpin was working for the CIA all along. And way back in 1972 it came out that the military had been smuggling heroin into the US using the corpses of fallen soldiers. But the public didn't get a glimpse into the full scope of government drug trafficking until 1996, when Gary Webb's Dark Alliance series was published by the San Jose Mercury News.
Webb's reporting drew a straight line from the crack epidemic in California to CIA-backed militants in Nicaragua. Behind closed doors, according to The Intercept, the CIA saw the situation as a "nightmare." But they didn't have to do much damage control directly, as the mainstream press ferociously went after Webb's reporting. Here's a quote from the Intercept piece about it:
"Thanks in part to what author Nicholas Dujmovic, a CIA Directorate of Intelligence staffer at the time of publication, describes as “a ground base of already productive relations with journalists,” the CIA’s Public Affairs officers watched with relief as the largest newspapers in the country rescued the agency from disaster, and, in the process, destroyed the reputation of an aggressive, award-winning reporter."
Once his reputation was destroyed, Gary Webb died. His death was reported as a suicide, which many people found fishy, because he'd been shot twice in the head. Government efforts to investigate Webb's claims all look like textbook cover-ups to me. Whether he took his own life or not, the powers that be were clearly allied against him.
Using 9/11 as a pretext for invasion, the US government transformed Afghanistan from a place where heroin production was banned by the Taliban into a total narco state. Once this happened, the crack epidemic gave way to the opioid epidemic, and I'm not sure that's a coincidence. Meanwhile, the drug war marches on.
As a matter of routine, police use drug test kits known to produce a high percentage of false positives to "prove" that criminal defendants possessed drugs. And law enforcement labs have been embroiled in major scandals when they've been found systematically falsifying evidence. A single case in Massachusetts involved the falsification of 23,000 tests which led to drug convictions. That might not be as bad as the FBI faking an entire branch of forensic science to secure convictions, but it's still pretty bad.
The War on Drugs is a racket designed in part to increase the price of drugs so intelligence agencies can fund black budget projects. Prohibition obviously doesn't work, as more people than ever before are dying of overdoses in the US. Portugal long ago decriminalized all drugs. According to The Guardian:
"Portugal’s policy rests on three pillars: one, that there’s no such thing as a soft or hard drug, only healthy and unhealthy relationships with drugs; two, that an individual’s unhealthy relationship with drugs often conceals frayed relationships with loved ones, with the world around them, and with themselves; and three, that the eradication of all drugs is an impossible goal."
This policy has led to good public health outcomes, but I don't think it goes far enough. If the goal is to stop the murderous cartels and their CIA associates, then I think legalizing all drugs should seriously be considered. Legalize the drugs and regulate the industries, forcing cartels to either turn legit or go out of business. In this respect, the legalization of cannabis in many states is a small step in the right direction.
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