Where do you get your drugs? Your pharmacist? Your momma? The CIA?
Imagine you've got a problem. The commies just booted out your favorite dictatorial regime, but you just don't have $100,000,000 in cash to blow on the freedom struggle. What is a poor reactionary thug to do? Fortunately for you the CIA figured this out decades ago. Agriculture. Well, to be a little more specific coca leaves and opium poppies.
No one really even has to know how your secret war is being funded. The CIA has that covered too. They'll just cut a deal with the Attorney General to make it OK to not pass any information about your drug smuggling assets to anyone at the DEA or Customs who might not understand the greater goal.
What about the press you say. Not to worry, Walter Pincus and friends are on the beat, and the Fourth Estate is in retreat. Anyone dumb enough to bring this stuff up in the mainstream media will be discredited before anyone in power really has to take the CIA to task. Just ask Gary Webb formerly of the San Jose Mercury News. Webb's "Dark Alliance" series of articles published on August 18, 19 & 20, 1996 by the San Jose Mercury news showed home big time drug smugglers Danilo Blandon and Norwin Meneses used the proceeds of the trade to fund the CIA's Contra War in Nicaragua during the Reagan years. The same drugs that we funding an illegal war in Nicaragua (remember the Boland Amendment?) were fueling the crack epidemic in South Central Los Angeles and other inner city neighborhoods throughout the United States. This is the kind of stuff that should win the Pulitzer Prize, but instead it got Webb denounced as a liar by the the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times. Nevermind the facts, even the paper that printed it all in the first place withdrew their support and transferred Webb to a beat they knew would make him quit. You can still get these stories off of the Mercury News website at http://www.mercurycenter.com/, but they charge you money for them now. A better way to get the whole story is to get a copy of Webb's book called "Dark Alliance: The CIA, The Contras, and the Crack Cocaine Explosion" published by Seven Stories Press (http://www.sevenstories.com/).
Webb's stories did cause quite a stir despite the best efforts of the mainstream press and the CIA. Representative Maxine Waters of Los Angeles definitely took notice. She took then CIA Director John Deutch to task to explain the Agency's role in the crack epidemic. After stumbling his way through a townhall meeting in South Central L.A., Deutch took the radical step of having the CIA investigate itself. What is not a surprise is that Inspector General Frederick Hitz claims that the CIA did nothing wrong in the introduction to his report. What is more surprising is how many of Webb's claims are actually backed up by the contents of his report. Read it for yourself at http://www.odci.gov/cia/publications/pubs.html.
Another great resource on this issue is the book "Whiteout: The CIA, Drugs and the Press" by Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Claire published by Verso in 1998. Dr. Ben Attias, Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication Studies College of Arts, Media, and Communication at California State University Northridge has created a very useful comprehensive website at http://speech.csun.edu/ben/news/cia/ which a lot of useful information and links. However, it does not appear to have been updated for awhile.