My hero, Gary Webb, and the narco-economy of our plutocratic, gangster-run Western states.

This topic was mentioned in my recent post.

The gangster nature of the state — from the JFK assassination through Watergate, Iran-Contra, and up to 9/11. The Doomsday Project: a secret government, the deep state.

Peter Dale Scott noted in a fragment I highlighted in this post, “One sees in each of these events the involvement of elements of the international drug traffic, suggesting that our current plutonomy is also to some degree a narco-economy.” In that post, he was referring to the JFK assassination, Watergate, the Iran-Contra affair, and 9/11.

With the JFK assassination, we see a clear connection to the Mafia and the drug trade, as those familiar with my posts will know. In the case of Watergate, there are also links to the Mafia and drug trafficking - some of the burglars had connections to both. The Iran-Contra affair is essentially based on drug trafficking, and its exposure is closely tied to Gary Webb’s reporting.

I know a lot about 9/11, but it’s the only case among these in which I don’t see a clear drug connection - aside from the fact that the alleged hijackers were from al-Qaeda, which has ties to opium and heroin production.

It’s important to remember that this narco-economy is the least understood aspect of our plutocratic, gangster-run Western states. Other elements - such as assassinations and covert operations - can be discussed in policy papers and deep-state documents. However, the narco-economy is the one element that must remain entirely off the books, which is why it is the part we know the least about.

As I’ve mentioned before, Gary Webb can be seen as a precursor to Julian Assange. Webb uncovered the CIA’s role in smuggling cocaine into the United States. He worked for The Mercury News and published a story about it, which was quickly suppressed, and both he and the newspaper faced severe backlash. His story only reached a wider audience thanks to the early days of the internet. The Mercury News had a website, and although his work was suppressed in traditional media, he was able to publish it online - helping it gain traction. In this sense, Webb’s story became one of the first major news stories to spread widely via the internet, much like the releases on Assange’s WikiLeaks site.

A Hollywood film was even made about Gary Webb’s story, Kill the Messenger. Interestingly, as I mentioned in the linked post, Michael Parenti spoke about the suppression of Oliver Stone’s JFK film - Kill the Messenger suffered a similar fate. Despite being a Hollywood production, the film received no significant advertising and was attacked before it was even released - just like Stone’s film. Here is the trailer for Kill the Messenger.

"You believe in conspiracy theories, Gary?"

"No, I don't believe in conspiracy theories. Conspiracies, yes, I believe there's nothing theoretical about them."

“I thought my job was to tell the public the truth, the facts; pretty or not, and let the publishing of those facts make a difference in how people look at things, at themselves, and what they stand for…”

Here is another interview with the real Gary Webb.

“Authentic journalism is telling people something that the government doesn't want them to know.”

Two years after this interview, Gary Webb died from two gunshot wounds to the head. His death was officially ruled a "suicide." I’ll leave it to you to decide - does he sound suicidal, and is two shots to the head a plausible method of suicide?

They ruined his career, tried to destroy his family, and he sacrificed everything to bring us this story - to bring us the truth. That’s why he is one of my heroes.

While Gary’s reporting focused on cocaine and the Iran-Contra affair, there’s also a heroin story to consider. Here is a powerful lecture by Peter Dale Scott on this narco-economy.

I think what I really want to focus on primarily is the extent to which global drug trafficking has been reinforced and increased by right-wing U.S. interventions in other parts of the world, especially since World War II, and how the two of them continue to reinforce each other today.

This has been written about quite a lot. Now, the classic example is Italy, where the Americans in 1948 were frightened the communists might win an election there, and so they went and beefed up all of the right-wing elements, including the Mafia in Sicily, which at the time was almost a completely defeated organization because Mussolini—nobody can be wrong all the time, and one of the things that Mussolini had done had almost crushed the Mafia in Sicily. The Americans were frightened that this would open up Sicily to a communist takeover, and almost everybody knows how powerful the Mafia is in Sicily today. It hasn't always been that way; it is that way today largely as a result of U.S. policies towards Italy after World War II. And that's sort of a paradigm of what I want to talk about generally, in country after country: France, Indochina, Thailand, Central America, you name it. Over and over again, where we see major drug trafficking today, we see over and over that it is in areas where the social structure of that country has been skewed by right-wing U.S. intervention at one moment or another.

Now, also during the Cold War, of course, the United States justified what they were doing by saying, "Well, the communists there, the Kremlin, Stalin, is supporting the communists in Italy, the communists in France, and therefore it's a completely unfair and doomed contest unless we do the same thing on the other side." Without trying to get too severe about what happened during the Cold War, I'd like to say now the Cold War is over. There is no Kremlin in the old sense anymore, certainly no international communist movement. If the Cold War is over and we realize that we have a major drug problem in this country, then one of the things we should stop doing is propping up corrupt, drug-corrupted regimes in other parts of the world, like Peru, like Guatemala, and let those countries work out their own futures and take all that money—over 150 billion, perhaps quite a lot more than 150 billion, which has been spent on hopeless interdiction programs trying to stop drugs from coming into this country that obviously haven't worked, if in some cases may actually have augmented the amount of drugs coming in. Take all that money and apply it to more humane and human-based solutions to the drug problem at home.

7:29

What you may be less aware of, and I'd almost actually like to ask this audience—I assume you're an audience—how many people roughly knew something like what I just told you already? Most people. How many people are aware that perhaps even more dramatically, we had this problem with heroin from the Afghan-Pakistan border which increased from almost no such heroin coming into this country in 1979? That was the year that, under Carter, I may say, the Democratic president, Brzezinski in the National Security Council decided to give support to various guerrilla bands in Afghanistan which he knew were supporting themselves from the drug traffic. And that by official published figures, the heroin in this country from that region went from about 0% of the total in 1979 to over 50% by 1984. But by a secret Reagan document, it had already reached over 50%, maybe 60%, by 1981. That is how dramatic the increase in the flow of drugs into this country was.

It was the same story as Vietnam and the Contras all over again. The same trucks in Pakistan that took the arms up to the frontier were the trucks that brought the heroin back down. And they had heroin labs up there, and that heroin found its way to the United States. In fact, there was a famous Pizza Connection in New York, and there have been books about it, a movie about it. I believe 80 to 90% of that heroin was coming from there. How many people had a vague idea about that? See, almost nobody, far fewer people. There was some publicity to the Contra drug problem in the 1980s, but there was virtually none about the Afghan heroin problem, which in terms of quantity was much greater.

This leads to where I think I'd like to end my talk, and I'd like to also bring it in at the beginning: the problem of the press in this country. I'm going to tell you a lot of things which you may find hard to believe. Some of them I find hard to believe. One of the reasons it's hard to believe them is that there's so little about this in the United States press. And in fact, there's almost an inverse relationship: as the problem gets bigger, more often than not, if there's government policy involved, as there was in Afghanistan, the press coverage drops. So there had been something in the New York Times about the drug trafficking of the Mujahideen in Afghanistan in 1979 and 1980. In fact, there was a warning in the New York Times, an op-ed piece by somebody who was in the White House, supposed to be getting the documents on Afghanistan because he was in charge of drug policy, and he realized suddenly he had been cut out. Again, this was by the Carter Administration, and he warned that we might have a problem on our hands.

Well, I've researched the New York Times index, and there was not a single further story on Afghanistan, Mujahideen, and heroin until the middle of 1986, which is about the time that the Reagan Administration decided that the drug problem was now so bad that they had to disengage from these Mujahideen. So in that crucial six-year period where the heroin went from 0% to 60%, we heard exactly nothing about it in the press. And this is depressing.

14:24

It's very dangerous to try and give figures here, but the CIA itself, back in 1981, came up with an estimate of the size of the global drug trade. Newspapers and periodicals at the time were guessing it was maybe $150 billion a year. The CIA initially told Reagan that it was more like $300 billion a year, and then they discovered one marijuana field in Mexico that this one field had 10,000 hectares in it, which meant they had to double their estimate of marijuana production in Mexico, and they came up with an estimate of $500 billion.

Now, that figure was probably too high because when you go to the DEA and the FBI for estimates of the drug trade, they tend to give very high estimates because that's how they get a bigger budget in next year's thing. So, let's say it may not have been $500 billion; it may only have been $150 billion, so that I think is a bit low. A way of understanding these inconceivably large figures is to consider that in that same year, the total legitimate trade in the world, all of it, every country with every other country, was about a trillion dollars. So that if the CIA had been right, then $500 billion would have represented a figure which was half of the total of all legitimate trade. I'm a little bit comparing apples and oranges here, but I just want to give you the sense that it dominates trade in many, many different ways.

A figure that I think is probably more reliable, also from the CIA in 1981, was that Colombia and Mexico were generating 75% of their foreign exchange earnings—let's say dollars—through the drug trade. Now this was at a time when U.S. banks, the biggest banks, and above all, Citibank, one of the biggest of all, were very overexposed in Latin American debt. And I'd like you to think for a moment, if it's true that 75% of the foreign exchange earnings of Mexico were coming from the drug trade, and Citibank knew that Mexico had to meet its debt payments to Citibank, or not only was Mexico going to go bankrupt, but Citibank was going to go bankrupt. And this was talked about in the early 1980s. You can see that American bankers might have rather ambivalent feelings about the drug trade. The one country that has consistently been able to meet its debt payments without a problem through all the good years and the bad years has been Colombia because cocaine has become the number one export of Colombia. There's nothing like it for it; it beats coffee, and it beats oil, it beats all the traditional things in terms of meeting your balance of payments.

I think it's dangerous to go on too much about the economics. I wanted to have a chapter in Cocaine Politics about this, and my co-author, who's not as crazy as I am, said, "Look, people are going to have trouble believing this book anyway, and we're solidly documented on the politics, and the economics are harder to document just because the CIA says it's true, it doesn't necessarily mean it's true, so let's not put it in the book." And I didn't put it in the book, and that's one reason I'm sharing it with you now. It's the frustration I had at not being able to talk about it in the book because I think that the economics are obviously, even if no one fully understands them, they are extremely important when, for example, marijuana is the number one agricultural product from California, which is an agricultural state, and may be the number one agricultural product in the United States. We're talking about something that's important.

23:06

Now, I should make clear that I am not saying that the CIA and the U.S. military are themselves as agencies consciously drug trafficking or setting out to support the drug traffic. That is not the main problem.

Now, this is the part where I disagree with Peter Dale Scott - a view also expressed by Gary Webb in the main video attached to this post.

28:08

I should point out that the CIA is not the only intelligence agency in the world that has collaborated with drug traffickers. Our problem is not just that they happen to be our agency; it's also that they are certainly at this point the largest such agency and therefore the biggest single influence in this global system that I'm talking about. The CIA did not invent this practice. Largely, the problem we have here is that up till World War II, a good deal of the Third World was dominated by imperial systems from Europe, which, particularly the British and the French, in one way or another, had been founded on the drug traffic back in the 18th and 19th century when the drug traffic was legal. And which, in the case of England, was the foundation of the British Empire.

The sort of root economy of the British imperial system was a triangular trade that went: opium was grown in India. They were very moral; they wouldn't allow it to be sold in India. They would ship it straight out to China. China didn't want it, but they fought an Opium War and forced China to take it in the name of free trade. America, too, you know, John Quincy Adams said that the Chinese were violating the laws of God by trying to violate free trade and keep opium out of China. Those words and that trade have certainly come back to haunt us now in the United States when we are trying to do ourselves what the Chinese did. And then that opium trade to China paid for tea, which was then shipped to England. The tax on tea paid for the entire British Navy and therefore was the financial key to the British imperial system. And then finally, the tea paid for Manchester cotton goods, which were shipped to India and, uh, forced, I think is the word, on the Indian population at the expense of the native Indian industries. That was all legal in the 19th century, and it led to a system where both the British and the French colonies in Asia, in Southeast Asia at any rate, financed their government expenses by controlling what they called the Opium Farm. They, they just saw to it that opium was sold in the colonies and they taxed it.

And when America took over from France and to a lesser extent England in that area, it inherited a system in which drug trafficking was part of that imperial system. The whole social structure reflected this. We chose to preserve that social structure. And so, in 1954, when the French moved out of Saigon and General Lansdale in the CIA moved in, one of the first things they did was, Lansdale did was, capture control of the local drug traffic, which was then run for a decade by Ngo Dinh Diem's brother, Ngo Dinh Nhu and his wife. And that was not a novelty; that was a continuation of an older system.

Our entire Western empires were built on the drug trade. The British Empire was the largest crime syndicate and drug cartel in the world - until America took over and inherited that mantle.

Now, as I mentioned before, I don’t agree with both Peter Dale Scott and Gary Webb when they suggest that America and the CIA were unintentionally connected to the drug trade. This point was very well explained in another video I previously shared from the YouTube channel Eyes Wide Open. Here is the video I’m referring to.

In the 1940s, while the world was embroiled in the Second World War, American intelligence officers worked in the shadows to establish an insanely profitable global alliance between organized crime, brutal warlords, and Western intelligence agencies. The goal of this network was to counter global communism through the smuggling, distribution, and sale of opiates and cocaine across the globe. As the Allies fought the Nazis in Europe and the Imperial Japanese in the East, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the wartime predecessor to the CIA, laid the groundwork for a disastrous illegal empire built on narcotic smuggling, extortion, and human suffering that would continue throughout the Cold War and into our present day. Today, we will begin to untangle this complex web that is deeply rooted in the history of the United States and the world.

2:20

Often, when talking about modern American history, discussion gravitates towards oil as a key driver of U.S. policymaking. Although this is largely true for many recent U.S. interventions, the history of the CIA is undeniably linked to two even more sinister commodities: cocaine and heroin. We will leave cocaine aside for now, as this will only become relevant later on in our story when the CIA becomes heavily involved in Latin America during the Cold War. In the beginning of American intelligence history, the CIA and its wartime predecessor, the OSS, promoted and protected global opium production and smuggling to finance anti-communist allies and illegal activities around the globe.

A Brief History of Opium

So, let's get into a bit of the history of opium. This is going to be a very short history; I think it's important background, though. Opium has been a global commodity since the colonial era when British, Dutch, and French empires controlled opium flows from the Middle East and Southeast Asia to the West. This narcotic became widely popular, firstly as a recreational drug used by European and American elites in opium dens, and eventually by colonial residents in opium-rich regions. In the 1800s, the British fought two successful wars with China to maintain the export and sale of opium, following attempts by the emperor to ban the highly addictive substance in China. This just shows how important opium was as a commodity to the British and to all the colonial empires. By 1900, China's population of 300 million people was made up of thirteen and a half million opium addicts who consumed some 38,000 tons of opium yearly, making China the largest producer and consumer of opium at the time.

As much as the Brits got rich off of opium, Americans also participated in the highly lucrative trade. Illustrious American families gained their fortunes in Shanghai and Hong Kong shipping large amounts of the narcotic to the United States. For example, Franklin Delano Roosevelt's maternal grandfather, Warren Delano, established their family's fortunes by shipping heroin to the United States. This highly lucrative trade gave rise to a global epidemic of opium addicts and later heroin addicts across the globe.

Opium's Economic and Social Impact

Opium was not just a narcotic; it was a global commodity that was essential to building the wealth necessary to create the colonial empires of Europe. Colonial governments were granted monopolies on opium production, and the incredibly lucrative returns from such exploits allowed the colonial regimes to raise massive amounts of capital necessary to expand. Opium became a cash crop, much like coffee, tea, sugar, and nicotine. Before its global prohibition in the 1930s, opium was viewed as an accepted substance in the Western diet. To put this into perspective, in 1900, China's opium crop was comparable in bulk to Japan's tea production—an incredible commodity at the time.

The Rise of Heroin and Prohibition

By the end of the 19th century, opium was replaced by the pharmaceutical morphine and the narcotic heroin, two chemical derivatives of the opium plant. The Bayer Company, one of the six firms that would make up IG Farben, the German chemical firm that we talked about in episode 1, first synthesized heroin in 1898. Subsequently, in the early 20th century, heroin was used to treat a variety of illnesses and could be legally purchased from pharmacies across the United States and Europe. It was believed that the drug was not addictive and acted as a miraculous cure to all pain, although as we know today and they soon discovered at the time, heroin is highly addictive.

In the 1920s, the United States and the rest of the world began the century-long policy of prohibition that would eventually evolve into the War on Drugs in the 1960s. The League of Nations convened in the 1920s and '30s and created a series of global drug conventions to reduce the illegal production and sale of opiates around the world to curb addiction to this horrible narcotic. These measures decimated the legitimate opium industry but had a devastating side effect: prohibition drove all opium and heroin production underground towards organized crime and illegal organizations. Up to today, global heroin consumption and trade has not ceased; it has simply shifted towards the world of organized crime. And of course, this is where American intelligence—the OSS and the CIA—became involved.

As mentioned here, even the founding fathers of America were involved in the drug trade and the Opium Wars against China. In my opinion, this Western deep state involvement in the drug trade has always been intentional - not unintentional, as Peter Dale Scott and Gary Webb somewhat naively claim.

As I’ve written before, this is the part of the deep state we know the least about because these operations are, by necessity, "off the books." That’s why they remain so hidden from public view.

I’ve also said that whenever I hear Trump talk about the fentanyl epidemic and blame China or Mexico, I can’t help but laugh. Similarly, I’ve heard people like Alex Krainer point fingers at the British or Canada. But here’s what we do know:

• The heroin epidemic during the Vietnam War was linked to the CIA and the American deep state.
• The cocaine and crack epidemic during the U.S. interventions in South America and support for the Contras was also caused by the CIA and the American deep state.
• The resurgence of the heroin epidemic during the Afghanistan intervention was again tied to the CIA and the American deep state.

And yet, we’re now supposed to believe that the fentanyl epidemic is the first major drug crisis in American history not connected to the CIA or deep state, but instead caused entirely by external actors like China, Mexico, the UK, or Canada?

Sometimes I truly wonder how people can be so naive. I really wish someone would educate people like Alex Krainer about this history. Maybe then he’d understand what’s actually going on.

Here is a great lecture on this subject by Michael Parenti:

50:28

It's intriguing why right-wing columnists like William Buckley write columns arguing that trying to fight drugs and drug infestation in America is a hopeless situation and you really can't, and you ought to leave it alone. They offer two arguments: one, that the drug problem isn't that serious, and two, that you really can't stop it because it's so big. It's interesting, and I'm saying, "Isn't this funny?" Some of these conservatives have taken such a lackadaisical attitude about what's happening to inner-city communities. These are the same guys who, on other days of the week, are ranting about the destruction of American values and the fabric of our society, community, and family, and all that. But they seem to take a rather languid view when these drugs come pouring in in such abundance into the inner city. And I guess if I were a right-winger, that's the way I'd want it. I'd want them shooting themselves up rather than organizing in social challenges against the oppressions that their communities face.

So I guess what I'm saying is that narcotics are an important instrument of repression and social control. Everybody - I know a number of people here have been focusing on how the police will be used or the war against drugs will be used as an instrument of oppression against our rights. Let me point out that narcotics themselves are being used as instruments to destroy the rights of people. It's not a right to choose. You can't look at the right to choose in a social vacuum; you have to look at rights to choose within the social context and realities they're facing, and that's no real choice these guys are being given.

I mean, this is an issue, of course, that could somehow backfire. We're not to put ourselves against drug enforcement. I would argue we should advocate real enforcement because it's victimizing people in a real and horrible way. In any case, my view is that we should be for the well-being, peace, health, and safety of our communities. We advocate the end of imperialist interventionism and adventurism and global power mongering of the kind we see in Central America and now in the Middle East. We should be for drastic cuts in the military establishment and the intelligence community. The intelligence community still is getting $34 billion a year to wreak misery, violence, and oppression around the world.

And so it goes. George Santayana once said that those who don't learn from history are doomed to repeat it. That quote is repeated so often, quoted so often, quoted reverentially and all that. I don't believe it, at least I don't believe it in regard to our leaders and such. I don't believe they repeat these patterns because they don't read history, but because they know that history all too well. They know how these things happen. They develop these methods through trial and error. They develop new methods too with new situations, and they keep doing the things they do. If empires resemble each other in their lives and their hypocrisy and their violence and their crimes and their homicidal oppressions, if they resemble each other, it's not because the leaders ignored the history and just foolishly repeated the way that guy from America Watch was saying George Bush was doing with the funds to Colombia. It's because those leaders are doing the same things. They are facing the same set of social interests, roughly the same kinds of class conflicts, and they're doing those same kinds of things. And we've got to know that, and we've got to fight it in every way we can. The struggle against the imperialist drug dealers is an important part of the struggle for peace and democracy, and those are the two things we want: peace and democracy. But as much as we want peace, we're not afraid of struggle. Thank you.

Thanks to everyone who stuck with me until the end of my post. And, as always…

“Knowledge will make you be free.”

― Socrates

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“Knowledge isn’t free. You have to pay attention.”

― Richard P. Feynman

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“Freedom is not free, you need to pay attention.”

― Grzegorz Ochman 

Please pay enough attention, or we will all be screwed. God bless you all.

"In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act"

―George Orwell

“In the country of the insane, the integrated man doesn’t become king.” Mr. Bahu’s face was positively twinkling with Voltairean glee. “He gets lynched.”

― Aldous Huxley

"People don't realize how hard it is to speak the truth, to a world full of people that don't realize they're living a lie." — Edward Snowden