At a meeting with U.S. law enforcement officials earlier this year, Attorney General Jeff Sessions expressed his dismay at perceived inertia on the domestic drug war front: “Our nation needs to say clearly once again that using drugs is bad … It will destroy your life.”
Plenty of folks would no doubt agree with the latter point—including the victims in the following trivia from American historian Howard Zinn: “[B]ack in the 1950s, [the US Central Intelligence Agency] had administered the drug LSD to unsuspecting Americans to test its effects: one American scientist, given such a dose by a CIA agent, leaped from a New York hotel window to his death.”
When President Richard Nixon launched the War on Drugs in 1971, he denounced drug abuse as “America’s public enemy number one,” but various sectors of the American public have long faced a more formidable enemy in the government itself. Consider, for example, the diary entry from Nixon’s former chief of staff noting that the president had “emphasized that you have to face the fact that the whole problem is really the Blacks. The key is to devise a system that recognizes this while not appearing to.”
The drug war, it seems, was one way to do it — at least judging from the institutionalized discrepancies in drug-related sentencing and the general enthusiasm for throwing Black people in jail.
Of course, the U.S. War on Drugs has also been great fun for the rest of the world, particularly the countries lucky enough to be located in the United States’ “backyard,” where the drug menace has justified all manner of militarization, arms sales, and support for right-wing governments and movements.
It’s no coincidence that Venezuela, Bolivia, and other contemporary obstacles to the desired hemispheric order are consistently lambasted with narco-charges, while ultra-right-wing characters like former Colombian President Álvaro Uribe are hailed as exemplary political specimens — despite, you know, appearing on a 1991 U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency list of “the more important Colombian narco-traffickers contracted by the Colombian narcotic cartels.”
The United States’ own complicity in the international drug trade is a rather well-kept secret, thanks in large part to a useless mainstream media, in which deviation from the establishment line can result in ridicule, ostracization, and — as in the case of former San Jose Mercury News reporter Gary Webb — ruin. In a series of reports in 1996, Webb suggested that there had been a connection between the crack cocaine epidemic that had devastated black communities in South Central Los Angeles in the early 1980s and the fact that CIA-backed Contras had at that time been engaged in drug running to the US. Thoroughly maligned and discredited, Webb went on to kill himself in 2004. READ MORE AT UPSIDE DOWN WORLD.