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The point about the drug trade is not that the CIA dealt a few drugs during the Contra years to fund the covert operation that Congress didn't want it to engage in. The CIA has dealt drugs for all 50 years of its existence—50 plus years, even before it was the CIA. And the point is that with 250 billion dollars a year in ille- gal drug money moved, laundered through the American econo- my, that money benefits Wall Street. That's the point of having the prohibitive drug trade, which the CIA effectively manages for the benefit of Wall Street. Just before the Contra war, the annual cocaine consumption in this country was about 50 metric tons a year; let's say back in 1979. By 1985, it was 600 metric tons a year. We are still con- suming 550 metric tons of cocaine a year in this country, and the money that's generated from that is used...let's say some drug dealer in Colombia calls General Motors and buys a thousand Suburbans—GM doesn't ask where it came from. Philip Morris is now being sued by 28 departments (the same thing as states) in Colombia for smuggling two billion dollars worth of Marlboro cigarettes into Colombia and getting paid for it with cocaine money! That money boosts Philip Morris's stock value on Wall Street; General Electric the same way...it's documented in the US Department of Justice. So the purpose of the Agency being involved in the drug trade has been to generate illegal cash, fluid liquid capital, which gives those who can get their hands on it an unfair advantage in the marketplace. to a state of passivity where they couldn't actually be a force. Do you see in some way the drugs that come in satisfying a racist goal—with the crack laws especially in black inner city populations? There are a number of ways to look at that. For the British, the introduction of opium into China was a means to an end. China was a homogeneous culture. When the British arrived there, they were these Caucasian heathens. The Chinese didn't want anything to do with them; they didn't want to give up their tea, they didn't want to give up their silk, and the British said "We can't have this". They went to India and grew the opium poppy in east India, in the foothills of the Himalayas, and smuggled it to China. And what they did over the course of a hundred years was they con- verted China from a homogeneous culture that was unified, into a society of warlords fighting for turf to see who had which drug- dealing regions. If you look at what happened in South Central LA in the 1980s, the model is exactly the same; it didn't change. When I talk about narcotics, I come from several different angles. It's not just that I am a former narcotics investigator with the LAPD; I am also a recovering alcoholic who has sponsored men in recovery for 17 years. I've served on the board of directors of the National Council on Alcoholism. Alcohol is a drug. I have written more than 35 articles in the US Journal of Drug and Alcohol Dependence on treatment of addiction, recovery from addiction. The issue with drugs is this: people are going to get addicted no matter what you do, and a certain percentage of any population will always get addicted. What the Agency has done (and I have written specifically on this; it's on my website), through institutions like the Rand Corporation and UCLA's Neuropsychiatric Institute and a number of academic projects which the CIA has funded, is they have deliberately engaged in pharmacological research to find out which drugs are most addictive. For example, in 1978-79, long before the cocaine epidemic hit here in the United States, research scientists from UCLA's Neuropsychiatric Institute, some of whom, like Louis Jolly West, who were very closely tied to the MK-ULTRA program, were doing research in South America where South American natives were smoking basuco, which has the same effect as crack cocaine. And the addiction was so strong that they were performing lobotomies and the people were still smoking the basuco or the paste in Colombia; and they knew that because NI and the Rand Corporation brought that data back. So the CIA knew in 1980 exactly what the effects of crack were going to be when it ~~ hit the streets. So when you hear the term "War on Drugs"... Well, it's not a War on Drugs. It's a War on People. Consider this: Joseph McNamara, a former chief of San Jose from the Hoover Institute at Stanford University, published some really telling figures. In 1972, when Richard Nixon started the War on Drugs, the annual federal budget allocation was 110 million dol- lars a year for enforcement. In fiscal year 2000, 28 years later, the budget allocation was 17 billion dollars a year, and yet, in the year 2000, there are more drugs in this country, they are cheaper, and they are more potent than they were in 1972. That has to tell you that there's some other agenda going on here. Going back to the idea of China and the Opium War, it is described also as a war on the people of China, to bring them Who benefits most from an addicted inner-city population? It's not just who benefits most; it's how many people can benefit on how many dif- ferent ends of the spectrum. We published a story in my newsletter From The Wilderness in May of 1998 that was written by Catherine Austin Fitts, a former Assistant Secretary of Housing [and Urban Development, HUD]. She produced a map in 1996, August of 1996—that's the same month that the Gary Webb story broke in the San Jose Mercury News. It was a map that showed the pattern of single Sorry, sir, it's out of my control. Officially, from now on, you're Big Metre. 36 = NEXUS www.nexusmagazine.com OCTOBER — NOVEMBER 2001