The ‘Drug War’ Quotes:
For decades, clandestine foreign military and intelligence operations have been the deadly, destabilizing engine of American foreign policy. Today, as exposed by investigative journalist Seth Harp in his new book The Fort Bragg Cartel, 21st-century Special Forces operations have become their brutal, logical successor. — Drug Trafficking and Murder In the Special Forces (w/ Seth Harp) | The Chris Hedges Report
In Whiteout, Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair finally put the whole story together from the earliest days, when the CIA’s institutional ancestors, the OSS and the Office of Naval Intelligence, cut a deal with America’s premier gangster and drug trafficker, Lucky Luciano. They show that many of even the most seemingly outlandish charges leveled against the Agency have basis in truth. After the San Jose Mercury News series, for example, outraged black communities charged that the CIA had undertaken a program, stretching across many years, of experiments on minorities. Cockburn and St. Clair show how the CIA imported Nazi scientists straight from their labs at Dachau and Buchenwald and set them to work developing chemical and biological weapons, tested on black Americans, some of them in mental hospitals. Cockburn and St. Clair show how the CIA’s complicity with drug-dealing criminal gangs was part and parcel of its attacks on labor organizers, whether on the docks of New York, or of Marseilles and Shanghai. They trace how the Cold War and counterinsurgency led to an alliance between the Agency and the vilest of war criminals such s Klaus Barbie, or fanatic heroin traders like the mujahed in in Afghanistan. — Whiteout:The CIA, Drugs, and the Press
Webb was a great reporter whose best-known work exposed the CIA’S complicity in the import of cocaine into the United States in the 1980s, during the US onslaught on the Sandinista government of Nicaragua. His devastating series Dark Alliance, published in the San Jose Mercury News in 1996, provoked a series of wild attacks in the New York Times, Los Angeles Times and Washington Post, purporting to demolish Webb and exonerate the Agency. The attacks were without merit, but the San Jose Mercury News buckled under the pressure and undercut its own reporter with a groveling and entirely unmerited retraction by its publisher. It was a very dark day in the history of American journalism. We described the entire saga in detail in our book Whiteout: the CIA, Drugs and the Press which sets the story in the larger context of the Agency’s complicity in drug smuggling since its founding. — Gary Webb: a Great Reporter
There is a consensus among U.S. Congressional Investigators, former bankers and international banking experts that U.S. and European banks launder between $500 billion and $1 trillion of dirty money each year, half of which is laundered by U.S. banks alone. As Senator Carl Levin summarizes the record: “Estimates are that $500 billion to $1 trillion of international criminal proceeds are moved internationally and deposited into bank accounts annually. It is estimated that half of that money comes to the United States”. — War on Drugs Dirty Money Foundation of US Growth and Empire Size and Scope of Money Laundering by US Banks (200
There is only one way to wrestle control from the criminal cartls: governments must shift focus away from law enforcement and treat drug misuse as a public health issue. They should also decriminalise personal use and possession and work towards creating legal and regulated drug markets. This will not completely eliminate the illicit market, but it will significantly reduce its share, while bringing choice, transparency and a safer supply to millions of people who use drugs. Alcohol and tobacco have seen consumption decline not because they were banned, but because they were regulated, taxed and accompanied by public education. It is hard to believe that these lessons have yet to be applied fully to currently illicit drugs. — The ‘war on drugs’ has failed. There’s another way to solve the US fentanyl crisis
The complaint also alleged Walgreens “systematically pressured its pharmacists to fill prescriptions, including controlled substance prescriptions, without taking the time needed to confirm their validity”. This practice allegedly continued for more than a decade, between August 2012 and March 2023. “These practices allowed millions of opioid pills and other controlled substances to flow illegally out of Walgreens stores,” the statement added. — Walgreens agrees to pay US up to $350m for illegally filling opioid prescriptions