HaCKeRz Kr0nlcKLeZ 1/HaCKeRz Kr0nlcKLeZ.iso/drugs/duplicity

Internet Message Format | 1996-05-06 | 62.4 KB

From: [e-mail] (Lee Rodgers)
Newsgroups: alt.drugs
Subject: War on Drugs Psy-War Essay
Date: 15 Aug 1994 13:21:06 GMT
Message-ID: <32nq42$[e-mail]>

PREFACE: Sorry its so long-winded & dated, but I hope its
useful...never published or copyrighted, it was headed for the circular
file. So if you like it and don't mind, feel free to post this elsewhere.
- leebert.


THE DUPLICITY OF THE WAR ON DRUGS
"The first casualty when war comes is the truth" - Sen. Hiram Johnson - 1917

Engaging in polemic against perceived machinations of government is always
a difficult task, since the writer must constantly question his own
credulity.  Also, it can be an intimidating task detailing evidence of
impropriety by heads of state. Moreover, addressing the myriad propaganda
found in those journals who act as proxies for those in power is even more
daunting, requiring the writer to keep current with the various media. The
intent of this essay is to demonstrate that the War on Drugs was America's
first great psy-war campaign perpetrated against it's own people and that
such abuse of power is likely to happen again. To demonstrate that
psychological warfare techniques were employed requires understanding
subtle sequences of disparate, but related, events. It involves asking
questions as to the motivations, skill, expertise and knowledge of those
involved.

At the height of the war on drugs, President George Bush held up a bag of
cocaine in his first televised speech to the nation in September 1989. In
December 1989, George Bush ordered the invasion of Panama in - to
overthrow its narco-militarist dictator, Gen. Manuel Noriega.  In the July
16, 1990 Newsweek, the scope of the war on drugs seemed read to expand
from Panama into future military actions against the powerful Colombian
drug cartels.  At face value, indeed the war on drugs seemed to be
stemming the flow of cocaine into the United States.  However, as a matter
of fact, for the whole decade of the 1980's, casual and popular use of
cocaine fell out of favor, and over-all use steadily decreased.  Yet as
over all American consumption of cocaine in the mid '80's dwindled, the
Reagan and Bush administrations were calling for an escalation in fighting
drugs, declaring that America was awash in illegal drugs.  The 1980's was
a remarkable decade in international events:  the Cold War was coming to
an end, and the U.S. military-industrial complex was facing spending cuts,
with myriad economic ramifications.  The U.S. had gone through its longest
period of peace since the end of World War I, and many Americans were
calling for a Peace Dividend.  While it may seem coincidental that the war
on drugs was contemporaneous with the end of the Cold War and was
punctuated by the Iran-Contra affair, a closer look at the war on drugs
reveals disturbing patterns.

Critics of the Cold War have long pointed out that the Cold War was a
convenient vehicle for the military-industrial complex to acquire an
increasing share of the federal budget, regardless of the decline in
threat posed by the Soviet Union.  The war on drugs, it has been noted,
arrives with all the familiar rubrics of constant threat and ceaseless
terror, the difference being it is an internal war.  Other Western
countries have drug addiction problems, addressed by doctors and treatment
clinics, but only the U.S. has a war on drugs.  As ex-DEA (Drug
Enforcement Agency) agent Michael Levine has commented, "with the fade of
communism, (the Pentagon and CIA) are building a pretext for maintaining
their budgets." (Esquire March 1991, pg. 136) Indeed, after Iraq invaded
Kuwait in August 1990, the rhetoric of the war on drugs changed, with the
Bush administration declaring victory in the war against drugs late that
year. Only mere coincidence, or had the Bush administration found it no
longer needed the War on Drugs, having found the Butcher of Bagdhad?
During the Reagan years, as the Cold War started to wind down, the
administration was pursuing the Contra covert war in Central America
against Nicaragua and the leading Marxist Sandinista party.  While this
covert war was being waged by the CIA and the U.S.-supported Nicaraguan
Contras, there were reports, as early as 1986, of the CIA and Contras
being involved in drugs-for-guns barter arrangements.  There is a wealth
of evidence there was an even more unseemly side to the already patently
corrupt Iran-Contra affair.  Investigations paralleling the Iran-Contra
hearings have delved further into the accumulated evidence of Contra
involvement in drugs-for-guns deals and alleged monetary transfers to the
Contras from the drug cartels.  It has been documented by Senator John
Kerry's Congressional Committee investigation that while the interdiction
efforts were increased, illegal drugs, especially cocaine, were being
smuggled into the U.S. by CIA - Contra airplanes and boats under the cover
of gun running operations.  The Colombian cartels, confronted by the
escalation of the "War on Drugs", were able to continue trafficking,
despite increased U.S.  interdiction efforts.  The corresponding increases
in interdiction efforts and the availability of cocaine has not escaped
the mention of Princeton University Prof. Ethan Nadalmann,
      "Indeed, if (the interdiction and enforcement) efforts
      have accomplished anything in recent years, it has
      been to make marijuana more expensive and scarcer and
      to make cocaine cheaper, more potent, and more available."
      (Foreign Policy Magazine, Summer 1988) The Nicaraguan Contra
civilian leadership chose their base in Miami in the 1980's, where the
cocaine cowboys were already established and renown during the 1970's for
the violence that is associated with the illegal cocaine trade.
 Southern Air Transport (S.A.T.), a CIA-affiliated freight airline
operating out of Miami has been implicated in drug running, evidence of
which comes from many sources.  Notably, in Congressional testimony Wanda
Palacio, an FBI informant, has stated that she witnessed drugs being
exchanged for guns on an S.A.T. plane in Barranquila, Colombia.
Corroborating this testimony is an Associated Press story of Jan. 21,
1987, which states the October 1986 S.A.T. plane crash in Nicaragua
revealed flight logs indicating that the pilot, Wallace Sawyer Jr., had
been flying from Barranquila, Colombia to Miami, Florida in early October
1985.  Eugene Hasenfus, an Air America veteran and sole survivor of that
crash, filed suit against White House National Security Council (NSC) aide
Richard Secord and S.A.T. for expenses and damages, claiming S.A.T. and
Secord were his employers.

 Secord in turn contends that Mr. Hasenfus' real employer was Ronald
Reagan - and the actual chain of command was
Reagan-Poindexter-North-Secord.  Then there were the allegations coming
from Costa Rica regarding White House involvement in the drug trade.  The
Central American country of Costa Rica lies on Nicaragua's Southern
border, which made Costa Rica strategically important during the Contra
insurgency in Nicaragua.  In that time, the Northern region of Costa Rica
bordering with Nicaragua was the site of extensive CIA and Contra
activity.  In the wake of the Iran-Contra affair, White House NSC staff
members Lt. Col.  Oliver North, John Poindexter, and Richard Secord were
banned-for-life from entering Costa Rica in 1989, after the Costa Rican
legislature implicated the NSC staff members in guns and drug smuggling.
Former Contra leader Eden Pastora has said "I knew that much of what went
through (CIA operative John Hull's northern Costa Rica ranch's) airstrips
was related to narcotics trafficking" as part of a "Colombia-Costa Rica,
Costa Rica-Miami"  connection."  (Cockburn, p. 177) These White-House NSC
members, along with John Hull, were indicted in a Costa Rican court as
accessories to murder in the La Penca assassination attempt bombing on
Eden Pastora's life which resulted in the death of an American journalist.
North, Poindexter and Secord were never extradicted or arraigned in Costa
Rica.

Evidence of White House premeditated involvement in drug
trafficking is provided by examining the unusual covert action background
of key Iran-Contra players, dating back to American involvement in Laos.
Air America - the CIA's Thailand-based Vietnam-era airline - was notorious
for its participation in heroin trafficking as a part of funding and
supporting the CIA's secret war in Laos during the Vietnam war.  This
profound bit of history has been the focus of much commentary by
historians, and has been confirmed by many sources (regarding the recent
controversial August 1990 comic movie Air America, former Air America
pilot Jack Smith spoke out on Entertainment Tonight, substantiating the
essential truths in the movie).

Since controlling the Laotian opium
fields determined who would control Laos, the CIA put all of its support
behind their chosen drug lord, Vang Pao, and the amount of opiates that
came out of Laos tripled.  As it turns out, Richard Secord (CIA Special
Operations Group Deputy Wing Commander in Laos), Lt. Col. Oliver North,
Richard Armitage, and John Singlaub were all veterans of the secret war in
Laos (Cockburn).  The presence of several Laos secret-war veterans who
emerged as key NSC players in Iran-Contra exceeds the realm of mere
coincidence.  In the October 1986 S.A.T. plane crash which yielded Eugene
Hasenfus and the U.S. Government embarrassment, an old Air America
operations manual was found. (Cockburn p. 221)


Public record documents that General Manuel Noriega was on the CIA payroll
in the early to mid 1970's, as well as the 1980's.  An important point
mostly ignored in the mainstream press, however, is the Congressional
testimony by George Bush's own NSC advisor, Donald Gregg, that George Bush
(then Pres.  Gerald Ford's CIA Director) met with Noriega and other
Panamanian officials sometime in 1976.  This meeting with Noriega took
place well after Noriega had been implicated in the intelligence community
as a drug trafficker in the DEA's June 1975 DeFeo report.  Meeting with a
foreign official, CIA Director George Bush would have been fully briefed
on Noriega's dossier.  Later, Jimmy Carter's CIA director, Adm. Stansfield
Turner, ended payments to Noriega; however, Noriega's CIA pay checks
resumed when Reagan/Bush took office in 1980.  (1990 PBS Frontline on
Noriega)

It is interesting to note at this point that George Bush was the Drug Czar
during his tenure as Vice President under Pres. Ronald Reagan.  In NSC
memos discovered in the Iran-Contra investigation, it has been revealed
that George Bush's NSC advisor Donald Gregg was aware early on of Contra
involvement in the drug trade.  Could ex-CIA chief George Bush, at that
point Vice President and Drug Czar, be unaware of such goings-on when his
reporting subordinate was quite aware of Contra involvement in the drug
trade?

And the pattern continues: during the first two years of the Bush
presidency, William Bennett, Bush's first Drug Czar, was criticized by
members of Congress for his apparent indifference to Federal judicial and
legal loopholes which permitted U.S. companies to export unusual volumes
of cocaine processing chemicals to Latin American countries harboring
cocaine production laboratories.  Mr. Bennett had been an outspoken
proponent of escalating the war on drugs, and yet on this important front
of anti-drug policy, Mr.  Bennett was apparently negligent. (Rolling
Stone, Between the Lines, October - November 1990)

It's dubious that the concurrence of the Contra war in Nicaragua with the
emergence of crack cocaine were mere coincidences.  It has been long
aknowledged that heroin's prominence and availability during the Vietnam
war was contributed by the trafficking of opiates in Laos and Southeast
Asia.  Sadly, covert wars and drug trafficking go hand in hand.

Ex-CIA field officer John Stockwell has commented,

       "We cannot forget the Senate Kerry Committee findings of
       cocaine smuggling on  CIA/Contra aircraft, the DEA reports
       on the number of prosecutions in which the CIA has
       intervened to block prosecution of drug smugglers,
       the note that escaped Lt. Col. Oliver North's shredder
       that $14 million of drug money had gone to the Contras,
       or the CIA's 20-odd year relationship with Manuel Noriega."
       (Austin American-Statesman op-ed editorial)


Nor has this escaped the comment of ex-DEA agent Michael
Levine:

       "God knows how many secret elements are out there
       working under the guise of the drug war.  Oliver
       North was the latest example.  His operation was
       hip-deep in Contra drug smuggling.  He was banned
       from Costa Rica for his involvement with drug runners.
       The DEA documented fifty tons of Contra coke that was
       being routed into the U.S. by a Honduran connection.
       An agent bought two kilos in Lubbock, Texas, and made
       the arrest.  The CIA comes quickly to the rescue.
       A closed hearing is held.  Case dismissed."
       (Esquire, March 1991, p 136)

Leslie Cockburn has documented that since drug trafficking was facilitated
via an unhindered CIA - Contra network unencumbered by increased U.S.
border interdiction efforts, the effect was "...involvement of the CIA and
the related White House covert operations network in drenching America in
cocaine and other narcotics..." (Cockburn p 187).  And since overall
cocaine use declined in the '80's, it was the cheaper and more-addictive
Crack cocaine that came into prominence.  As the shipments of South
American marijuana declinced as a result of increased interdiction
efforts, cheap cocaine came to the fore to replace marijuana as the drug
of choice for drug users and drug smugglers alike.

Ronald Reagan's Secretary of State George Schultz, Reagan's former U.N.
Ambassador Jeanne Kirkpatrick, conservative economist Milton Friedman, and
columnist and editor of the National Review, William F. Buckley, Jr., all
sharply departed from the administration's anti-drug cant by arguing the
brief for decriminalization of drugs.  At the height of the war on drugs
rhetoric, these orthodox conservatives apparently intentionally diverted
the course of the drug war rhetoric by proposing the opposite extreme of
what the Bush administration was promoting.  What could prompt a handful
of GOP party loyalists to not only depart from lip-syncing the party line,
but also to voice an opinion 180°degrees opposite of the Bush
administration's declared policies?  Was there something about the war on
drugs that bothered them, that would lead them to propose something
radically different?

Surely the knowledge of the Contra drug smuggling of the late 1980's and
the emergence of crack cocaine in 1985 would have led the Reagan-Bush
administration to anticipate the wave of cheaper drugs and drug-related
violence similar to what occurred in Miami in the 1970's, difference being
that crack cocaine is appropriate for down-scale markets (i.e.  poorer
neighborhoods).  While the mass media increasingly emphasized minority
drug use and drug-related crimes in the mid- to late-1980's, the CIA and
Contras freely smuggled cheap and potent crack-cocaine for down-scale
markets while border interdiction efforts escalated, increasingly limiting
drug cartel trafficking to less-bulky and more-easily smuggled cocaine.

This suggests that the Reagan administration, with prescience and malice
aforethought, conspired in feeding Americans both the cocaine and the
cocaine hysteria, and that psy-war intrigues have now become tools to
manipulate American politics (remember the use of disinformation in the
Reagan years).

Looking at the accumulated evidence that the Contras and the CIA engaged
in cocaine smuggling so to fund the covert war in Nicaragua, suspicion
arises concerning the apparent coincidence that CIA - Contra drug
smuggling was contemporaneous with the "war on drugs."  From a CIA covert
action in Latin America the cocaine has made its way NORTH (ala Oliver
North) to the American consumer, who is consistently portrayed as African
American by the mass media, even though the majority of cocaine
consumption is by whites.  The disturbing prospect arises that this "war
on drugs" was nothing more than CIA-style psychological warfare which
sought to acquire as much as possible of the sum total of our civil
liberties while particularly targeting minorities.

Even though over-all cocaine use steadily decreased throughout the past
decade, our government and press declared a drug epidemic requiring a
crackdown, while the Reagan administration's covert war pumped crack
cocaine into the inner cities, thus further destabilizing communities
already afflicted by poverty and violence.  If one assumes that the
Reagan-Bush administration understood the consequences the of CIA and
Contras smuggling cheap and potent cocaine into America unhindered, then
one should look at the effects this activity had directly upon the
poverty-stricken com- munities afflicted by the drug trade.  The drug
trade directly exacerbated the effects of inner city crime and made the
cities increasingly unstable and unsafe.

If the ghetto drug dealers are the young capitalists who could, under
better circumstances, become community leaders, the influx of cheap
cocaine and the increasing poverty makes these possible ghetto leaders
emerge faster as outlaws, the result being that they are eliminated.  What
better way to undermine your enemies?  What better way to fund covert
actions?  And what better way to grandstand about crime, morality, and
values?

THE WAR ON DRUGS, THE MEDIA, AND RACE:  But as the White House
covert war went about poisoning Americans with drugs, the burden of
addiction belonged to a relatively small number of Americans, and the
media reported the melodrama of a war waged by politicians and policemen -
not by scientists and doctors.  All-too frequently the rhetoric of the war
against drugs played to the prejudices and fears of a society beset by
racial frictions.

One need not look far to see the pattern of miscasting the focus of the
war on drugs on African Americans.  Almost every time one opens up one of
the major weekly magazines, or watches network news, the story of the war
on drugs is supplemented with pictures of African-Americans being arrested
by the police.  At times, the script of the war on drugs is insidious, as
in a Dec 3, 1990 TIME Magazine article on the war on drugs:

        "Recognizing that the war on drugs has singled out
        the poor, Bennett has urged state and federal
        authorities to come down harder on middle-class
        users...He considers `casual' drug users `carriers'
        who are even more infectious than addicts because
        they suggest to young people `that you can do
        drugs and be O.K.'" (pg 48)

In this article, the equation is made that middle-class users are "casual"
users and the poor are the "addicts."  While Bennett admits to bias
against the inner-city poor, immediately adjacent to this paragraph is a
photograph of a downcast black woman in handcuffs with the caption "...the
myth is that drug use is primarily a ghetto habit."  Every photograph in
the article is of African Americans - dead, imprisoned, or injecting
drugs.  Nowhere in the article to be found are photographs of white drug
users.  On pages 46 and 47 of the TIME article, the charts show that as
crack-cocaine prices decreased during the 1980's, arrests increased -
again making the association with more affordable drugs and crime.

However, no charts are to be seen indicating the decrease in overall drug
use throughout the decade.  But again, on page 46, TIME makes the
association between "hard-core addiction," poverty, and race:

         "While the U.S. has made significant progress in
         curbing casual drug use, it has made far less headway
         on the problems that most trouble the public, hard-core
         addiction and drug-related violence.  Last year the
         National Institute on Drug Abuse estimated that the
         number of current users of illegal drugs had fallen
         to 14.5 million from 23 million in 1985.  But while
         there was a dramatic decrease in the number of
         occasional users, the number of people who used
         drugs weekly or daily (292,000 in 1988 vs. 246,000
         in 1985) had escalated as addiction to crack soared
         in some mainly poor and minority areas."

Now in examining these statistics, the article does mention that in the
period 1985 - 1990, there were 8,500,000 fewer users of illegal drugs, but
between 1985 & 1988, there were 46,000 more daily & weekly users of drugs,
which TIME, again, attributes to crack.  The TIME article attributes the
upward trend, which differs from the downward trend by 2 orders of
magnitude, to "crack...in some mainly poor and minority areas."

The bias of the TIME article is clear:  even though the increase in
frequent users is a mere 0.5% of the overall decline in drug use, TIME
blurs the distinctions between kinds of illegal drugs and the difference
between drug use and drug abuse.  Without even backing up these claims
with any statistics, TIME exaggerates the increase in frequent drug use
and portrays minorities and ever- cheaper crack cocaine as the source of
the presumed drug scourge.  The TIME article admits that whites account
for 69% of cocaine users, but buries that important little factoid in the
middle of the article and doesn't even delve into cocaine use by whites.
Might drug consumption be the same for both whites and blacks of the same
socio-economic groups?  One study indicated that drug use is higher among
white high school students, for the very simple reason that the white
teenagers have more money to spend on drugs than black teenagers.  It is
disturbing that the media consistently break down drug use and abuse
statistics into racial groups, rather than economic groups.  Black
community leaders have decried the apparent media bias in over-reporting
"drug-related" crimes in black communities and under-reporting the illicit
drug trade in white communities.  They note that when the economics of the
illegal drug trade is analyzed it is readily apparent that black
communities could not possibly be the locus of America's drug trade, for
the very simple reason that these communities do not have the kind of
disposable income required to support America's illicit drug habit.

According to a 1989 National Bureau of Economic Research survey,
two-thirds of all inner city male youth, both black and white, believe
that they can make more money from crime than from legitimate work -
double the percentage of a survey conducted 10 years earlier.  But since
young minority males have been disproportionately targeted by the war on
drugs, they are the ones serving increasingly long prison sentences for
drug offenses.

Minority leaders understand all too well that casting
their communities as major centers of the drug trade perpetuates the
notion that minority neighborhoods are plagued by poor welfare- dependant
rabble who waste public assistance on instant gratification rather than
attempting to better themselves.  In media over-emphasis upon inner-city
drug problems, people in minority neighborhoods are disproportionately
portrayed as threats and dangers to society.  Tax payer anger and
resentment, already expressed in disastrous cuts in social and education
programs, is further inflamed and aggravated by media images of minorities
engaged in violence and self-destructive behaviors.


DISMANTLING THE ASSUMPTIONS ABOUT RACE:  Even though the association
between crime and poverty have been long established, the media report
crime rates and social problems as though the white majority and racial
minorities are on an equal socio-economic playing field.  Reporting these
statistics according to race, the media represents by default that crime
and other social problems are correlated with race.  But if the media were
really interested in a fair and unbiased presentation of crime in America,
the media would ask whether a significant difference exists between the
crime rates and public assistance incidences of both impoverished
minorities and poverty-stricken whites.  It may be more revealing to
compare economic groups rather than racial groups, since the comparison
would reveal a stronger relationship between social problems and economic
strata as opposed to social problems and race.  One would think it
incumbent upon the media to inquire as to whether whites living in poverty
behave any differently than their minority counterparts who find
themselves in equal economic straits.

The media persist in reporting the relatively higher public assistance and
incarceration rates of the minority populace beleaguered by poverty as
though economics has nothing to do with social problems, leaving the
audience to assume the overriding contributing factor to crime and
dependence upon public assistance is race.  When one accounts for the
acknowledged fact that a vastly greater proportion of minorities live in
poverty than whites, a lower crime rate will be attributed to the total
white populace since poor, middle class and wealthy whites are lumped into
the wealthier white majority.  The adverse effects of poverty (i.e.
crime, drug abuse, etc.) will be more pronounced for minorities as a
whole, when statistics are broken down strictly by race, failing to factor
in economic status.  So by token of their relative wealth, whites are
portrayed by the media as somehow more virtuous than minorities even
though the media never addresses the obvious question as to whether
economically disadvantaged whites are as likely as to be welfare mothers,
pregnant teens, drug dealers or absentee fathers.  While there is no doubt
that serious problems afflict minority communities, and these problems are
not to be down played for the sake of opposing government policy, the
question remains whether it is accurate or fair to emphasize race when so
many other conspicuous variables are involved.

The media persist in reporting the relatively higher public assistance and
incarceration rates of the minority populace beleaguered by poverty as
though economics has nothing to do with social problems, leaving the
audience to assume the overriding contributing factor to crime and
dependence upon public assistance is race.  When one accounts for the
acknowledged fact that a vastly greater proportion of minorities live in
poverty than whites, a lower crime rate will be attributed to the total
white populace since poor, middle class and wealthy whites are lumped into
the wealthier white majority.  The adverse effects of poverty (i.e.
crime, drug abuse, etc.) will be more pronounced for minorities as a
whole, when statistics are broken down strictly by race, failing to factor
in economic status.  So by token of their relative wealth, whites are
portrayed by the media as somehow more virtuous than minorities even
though the media never addresses the obvious question as to whether
economically disadvantaged whites are as likely as to be welfare mothers,
pregnant teens, drug dealers or absentee fathers.  While there is no doubt
that serious problems afflict minority communities, and these problems are
not to be down played for the sake of opposing government policy, the
question remains whether it is accurate or fair to emphasize race when so
many other conspicuous variables are involved.

In the sensationalism of the war on drugs, if one cannot "just say no,"
then one is lacking in moral capacity, and since the venal media declares
that all inner-city crimes have become drug-related crimes, then premature
death is the inevitable result of idleness and hedonism of the darker
races.  The perception that welfare dependence fosters idleness, drug use,
and violence in turn leads to the conclusion that welfare recipients are
taking advantage of other citizens and offering nothing in return, which
of course absolves the middle-class of obligations in the form of taxes
and concern for fellow citizens.  Those who wish they didn't feel pangs of
conscience about the socio-economic distances between the inner city and
the suburbs can be comforted by media double-think about race - believing
that the segments of society most plagued by violent crime, poor health,
shortened life span, and poor education are the most deserving of such
circumstances.  Indeed, poor whites exhibit greater high school drop-out
rates than do poor blacks.

In letting misconceptions about race justify repudiation of responsibility
for the barriers and poverty experienced by minorities, responsibility is
ultimately relegated to minority children who had no say about the world
into which they were born.  How often have we heard the sentiment
expressed "they have more children than they can afford?"  In the
rhetorical manipulation of resentment against "welfare mothers,"  their
children are bestowed a heritage as society's "excess baggage,"  despite
the fact that single women (and men) are denied access to federal welfare,
and the reason federal welfare is grudgingly disbursed is to give succor
to the children in poverty who are blameless for the circumstances into
which they were born.  But despite glaring inaccuracies in their rhetoric,
conservative politicians (most notably Ronald Reagan) exploited an
existing substrate of prejudice by using anecdotal rhetorical ploys like
"welfare mothers," a hot-button image that became a metaphor for the oft
depicted absentee fathers, pregnant teens, high drop-out rates, crime,
vagrant hedonism, etc., -phenomena that in the minds of the middle class
become indistinguishable from race.

The media is complicit in promulgating this image, neglecting to mention
the majority of welfare recipients are white, failing to examine the
incidence of the same social problems amongst white counterparts of poor
minorities, and conveniently forgetting the effects of America's historic
racial legacy that impacts minority communities to this day.  The media
reinforce the assumption middle class "news consumers" harbor that the
disproportionate burden of poverty upon minorities is an artifact of some
imagined lack of industry on the part of an ethnic minority.

Federal assistance in the form of Aid to Families with Dependent Children,
by the way, is capriciously withdrawn if the woman tries to budget costs
by cohabiting with a man who may or may not be the children's father, or
who may or may not even be the woman's lover.  In a country with a 50%
divorce rate, when presented the choice between her children's well being
and a potential male partner whose presence entails forfeiture of AFDC
(provided he can not stay one step ahead of welfare investigators), the
woman is compelled to choose against marriage and for the children if his
income is less than the monthly AFDC check.

Barely maintaining some modicum of objectivity, the mass media have
obsequiously followed the government's script of the war on drugs.  Having
saturated the public with images of African-Americans indulging in drug
use or being arrested by the police, the media still neglect to even
mention that the majority of illegal drug consumers are white or that the
majority of the illicit drug trade occurs in white communities.  If media
intent is to be judged by its actions, I am inclined to think the media
expect the "news consumer" to infer that the overriding factors
contributing to violence in the inner city are drugs and race, that the
worsening appearance of the inner city is a result of an indigenous
idleness and amoral hedonism rewarded and reinforced by what is in fact
paltry federal assistance to poor families.

But even though the children in impoverished minority neighborhoods are
future citizens and are blameless for their parent's economic situation,
it is anticipated they will ultimately repeat the cycle of welfare
dependency, which in effect justifies denying them, their parents, and
their communities desperately needed funds. This self-fulfilling prophecy
relegates America's children to a category where nothing is owed to them
in the form of education, health care, or respect, since conventional
wisdom expects them to be another generation of social parasites.

MINORITIES AND VOTING:  Martin Luther King III, the son of Rev. Martin
Luther King, Jr., has said the reason Dr. King was assassinated was that
Dr. King was asking for redistribution of wealth and power (remember that
a 1979 Congressional Committee determined that there were indeed
conspiracies to kill Martin Luther King and JFK).  It has been argued that
the real enemies of U.S.-based multinational monied interests are
minorities who have been denied equal educational access in the past, who
are in dire need of infusions of public money into their school systems,
and who, once educated, would start voting in increasing numbers in favor
of greater social programs and a redistribution of power in America.

How valuable is education in drawing a person into political or civic
life?  Politicians are well aware of the correlation between the
likelihood of voting and economic and educational background.  Politicians
know even though more than half of the total electorate, voting and
nonvoting, makes less than $30,000 per year family income, more than half
of the votes actually cast are by voters with family incomes greater than
$30,000 per year, skewing election results according to higher income and
education.  If American education were to improve across the board, one
might assume that whether or not incomes showed a corresponding
improvement, voting rates would increase most in those sectors currently
receiving inferior education.

The media provide the easy explanation for inner city violence as the
result of drugs, which reinforces the Calvinist notion that minority
neighborhoods are plagued by welfare dependent rabble who presumably lack
the motivation to better themselves and waste public assistance on instant
gratification.  This also fuels tax payer anger and resentment, justifying
repudiation of responsibility for the general plight of minorities.  In
this double-think, minorities become undeserving of desperately needed tax
dollars, education, health care, etc., and deserving of more prisons,
longer prison sentences, and shorter life span.  Under the doctrine that
the poor should be motivated by the unremitting spur of their poverty
while the wealthy should be motivated by the opportunity to acquire yet
more wealth, those who are most educated, wealthy, and politically
involved owe nothing to the segments of society who have sacrificed the
most for America's perceived wealth.  After all, if we were to better
educate minorities resulting in their voting in increasing numbers,
consider the political ramifications if they did not also realize
commensurate increases in income or opportunities (I'm certain
conservative policy analysts are well aware of the implications inherent
in a more democratic society).

American demographers predict current ethnic minorities will constitute
the majority some time next century, so it's not hard to imagine why the
right wing has sought to undermine, distance, and alienate them from the
electoral process.  Were education reform finally delivered to all
Americans under the principle that society should deliver the education
necessary for democratic rule, then candidates of both political parties
would have to vie for those precious voter market shares by focusing on
real issues, which is contrary to the nature of the media contests
necessarily funded by monied interests who want to retain the status quo.

THE WAR ON DRUGS AND POLITICIANS:

While the media can be accused of complicity in the exaggerations and
myths of the war on drugs by failing to report actual drug-use trends,
many politicians are guilty of outright malfeasance in cynically
manipulating war on drugs rhetoric.  Boston University President John
Silber in response to questions on why he didn't announce his
crime-control plans in a mostly black Boston neighborhood said "Well, I
will tell you something about that area.  There is no point in my making a
speech on crime control to a bunch of addicts." His comment was in
reference to the predominantly African American neighborhood of Roxbury,
Mass.  He later recanted his remark after a wide-spread outcry ensued.

President Bush in his September 1989 televised speech to the nation,
attempted to escalate the rhetoric of the war on drugs by holding up a bag
of cocaine purchased from a Washington, D.C. resident in Lafayette Park -
just across the street from the White House.  It was a stage prop to
signify how the scourge of drugs had pervaded society, and that the plague
of drug dealers had finally washed up upon the innocent shore of the White
House lawn.  This was exposed for the fraud it was when it leaked out that
DEA agents had to lure the drug dealer to Lafayette Park in order to have
the arrest occur across the street from the White House.  When George Bush
was caught by reporters in his little cocaine-bag trick, his response was,
"I don't understand - I mean, has somebody got some advocates here for
this drug guy?"  Bush's little cocaine-bag trick was analogous to the
larger intrigue apparently perpetrated by the CIA and the media:  the most
easily scapegoated elements of society were fair game in an attempt to
justify prolonging the military-industrial complex and expanding the scope
of America's internal security apparatus.  This media image confirms the
worst that can be imagined by the middle class about the neighborhoods
populated by racial groups whose plight would otherwise demand more state
charity - as opposed to an escalation of the war on drugs which will
further enrich the coffers of the military and police agencies.

He thought he was playing to a willing audience, very much in the same
manner Ronald Reagan demonstrated gutter-level ethics by using
cryptoracist rhetorical ploys like "welfare mothers."  In the supply-side
logic of Reaganomics, the poor should be motivated by the unremitting spur
of their poverty and the wealthy should be motivated by the opportunity to
acquire yet more wealth.  The media have conveyed, for mass consumption,
the Calvinist fallacy that drug-use and poverty are the products of
laziness and immorality and the appointments and comforts of the consumer
life-style are symbols of American virtue.

THE WAR ON DRUGS AND LAW AND ORDER:  Naturally, the cities of America,
which witnessed PROHIBITION - related violence in the 1920's and 30's,
bear the costs of similar violence today, as poverty continues to take its
toll on a growing underclass.  The conditions of chronic poverty
(remember, 20 million people in America suffer from hunger) only
aggravates the human desires for escapist self-intoxication, and
intensifies criminal greed modeled after and justified by Donald Trump,
Samuel Pierce, Ivan Boesky, Michael Milken, Oliver North, or corrupt
military contractors.  The rule of law breaks down slowly in a spiral that
starts from the top.

In states like Florida, tougher anti-drug legislation has resulted in
astonishing numbers of first-time drug offenders serving increasingly
longer mandatory sentences, thereby pressing the early release of inmates
convicted of violent crimes.  The statistics are breathtaking in that they
demonstrate how obviously misguided the current drug strategy has become.
George Bush's current Drug Czar, Bob Martinez, during his 1986 - 1990
tenure as Florida's governor managed to push through tough legislation
that entailed mandatory one-year to three-year prison terms for persons
convicted of selling drugs near college campuses, public parks, or using,
buying, or selling drugs near or in housing projects.

But while the number of inmates convicted of drug offenses for the period
1985 - 1990 jumped 580 percent for simple possession and 700 percent for
low-level drug activity (i.e. purchase / sale), the number of high-level
drug traffickers (i.e. drug kingpins) remained constant in the 5 year
period at 1,000 inmates.  According to two FSU researchers, the majority
of current arrestees have no prior criminal record.  Despite Martinez's
accomplishment of building more prisons in his 4 year tenure than were
built in the previous two decades, Florida prison populations surged with
first time drug offenders serving mandatory sentences.  The resulting
overcrowding was eased via a variety of sentence- reductions and
early-release programs, resulting in the duration of murder sentences
dropping by 40 percent, robbery sentences dropping by 42 percent, and
overall prison sentences dropping by 38 percent.  Florida, with all of its
new laws and new prisons, now has its convicts serving the lowest
percentage of their prison sentences in the country - 32.5 percent.
(Mother Jones, July/August 1991) It seems that not only is the war on
drugs biased and duplicitous, but is also stupid and lost.

But in examining the relative performance of our system, the U.S.
currently has the highest incarceration rate of any country in the world,
exceeding South Africa's and the Soviet Union's.  Indeed, there are more
American black males in prison than there are in college.  In 1990, a
Minnesota drug-enforcement law was found racially biased and
unconstitutional by the Minnesota Supreme Court, because it imposed
harsher penalties upon illicit users of crack cocaine (predominantly
African Americans) than consumers of more-expensive powdered cocaine
(mostly caucasians).  And note that crack cocaine is essentially the same
as freebasing powdered cocaine - a practice popular among caucasian
cocaine users.  A similar existing Federal law imposes harsher sentences
on crack-cocaine convictions than powdered-cocaine convictions.

Looking back at the past decade, we find that the number of Americans in
prison doubled from 500,000 to 1 million, that the majority of convicts
are imprisoned for drug offenses (not violent crimes), and while 80
percent of drug users are white, and as of 1990, the majority of prisoners
are black.  More disturbing yet:  1 in 4 black males in their twenties are
incarcerated or on parole or probation, but 1 of 5 black males between the
ages of 16 - 34 are in prison, or on parole or probation, which indicates
that the broader age range finds young black males staying out of the
criminal justice system, and that black males who came of age in the
Reagan era were those most targeted by the war on drugs.  Between 1985 and
1988, prosecutions of white juvenile drug offenders dropped 15 percent
while jumping 88 percent for their minority counterparts.  When assembled,
these statistics have prompted many to call the government's war on drugs
a "race war," never mind the long acknowledged lopsided trend of
minorities receiving harsher prison sentences than white counterparts
convicted of equal crimes.

Looking back at the past decade, we find that the number of Americans in
prison doubled from 500,000 to 1 million, that the majority of convicts
are imprisoned for drug offenses (not violent crimes), and while 80
percent of drug users are white, and as of 1990, the majority of prisoners
are black.  More disturbing yet:  1 in 4 black males in their twenties are
incarcerated or on parole or probation, but 1 of 5 black males between the
ages of 16 - 34 are in prison, or on parole or probation, which indicates
that the broader age range finds young black males staying out of the
criminal justice system, and that black males who came of age in the
Reagan era were those most targeted by the war on drugs.  Between 1985 and
1988, prosecutions of white juvenile drug offenders dropped 15 percent
while jumping 88 percent for their minority counterparts.  When assembled,
these statistics have prompted many to call the government's war on drugs
a "race war," never mind the long acknowledged lopsided trend of
minorities receiving harsher prison sentences than white counterparts
convicted of equal crimes.

With astonishing numbers of young minority males convicted of drug
offenses paroled from crowded jails, the effect is not to jail them, but
to bar them from voting and to further incumber them in finding employment
or advancing themselves economically as a result of the stigma of their
criminal records.  But while drug treatment programs are eminently more
humane and more economical (1/4th the cost of prisons), and realize vastly
lower recitivism rates (1/4th the recitivism of prisons), the emphasis is
not upon bettering the lives of citizens who run afoul of our drug laws,
but to create a criminal justice debacle that will take years to rectify.

But the racial aspects of the war on drugs are accompanied by an equally
insidious specter:  the steady erosion of our civil liberties.  Under
federal drug laws, agents can - without a formal court indictment -
confiscate your home, car, and the funds with which you would retain an
attorney so to defend yourself!  And the government is not obliged to
return that property if you are acquitted.  Your lawyer may be subpoenaed
to testify against you, so lawyer-client privilege is no longer inviolate.
The Reagan and Bush era Supreme Court has upheld police powers to detain
and interrogate travelers who bear a resemblance to "drug couriers," to
engage in surveillance, including secretly taping conversations and
sifting through garbage.  An anonymous tip is now sufficient grounds for a
search warrant, meaning the police no longer have to verify that their
source is reliable.  New anti-crime legislation entails granting the
police the power to submit as admissible evidence any property gained as a
result of entering your home without a warrant.  The new legislation also
includes extending mandatory death sentences to include drug convictions
which do not involve a homicide, and to limit federal death sentence
appeals thereby speeding executions.  The U.S.  Supreme Court has recently
ruled that a mandatory life sentence for a first-time drug offender acting
as a drug courier is not cruel and unusual punishment.  But apart from the
violence of the drug trade, the number of deaths attributed directly to
illegal drugs in 1985 was 3,562, whereas 520,000 people die each year
strictly from the health effects of our legal drugs, tobacco and alcohol.
Even when the violence of the drug trade is taken into account, the figure
surges up towards 15,000 deaths per year, which still pales in comparison
to the violence and premature deaths attributed to alcohol.  But even
though no drug is as renown for its association with violence and
premature death as alcohol, surely Americans want to retain their freedoms
to use and abuse alcohol.  Indeed, given the well- known physically
addictive nature of both cigarettes and alcohol, it is interesting to note
that marijuana is not addictive.  Strictly by virtue of marijuana's
illegal status, it serves as a vertical marketing tool for other illicit -
and addictive - drugs.  One need to look no further for a finer example of
the hypocrisy of our government's policies regarding substance abuse and
addiction, than the unseemly spectre of our government's subsidies of the
tobacco- growing industry.  The cigarette manufacturers however, expect
healthy profits, since the remaining market of addicted cigarette smokers
will easily bear cigarettes manufacturers' price hikes.

Indeed, in the face of a declining market cigarette smokers in the U.S.,
our cigarette manufacturers are seeking new markets.  So, in the course of
recent trade negotiations with Thailand, the U.S. government, apparently
looking after the interests of U.S. tobacco growers, recently threatened
to impose stiff trade penalties if the Thai government didn't ease its
prohibition of tobacco use in that southeast Asian country.

THE WAR ON DRUGS AND FREEDOM:  The current wave of drug testing via urine
specimens by corporations will not detect occasional cocaine use but will
detect occasional marijuana use - marijuana being the drug-of-choice for
what the right wing considers political heretics.  These are of course,
the same liberal heretics, according to arch-conservatives like Jesse
Helms, who want to give jobs away to blacks, who were unpatriotic spoiled
brats who protested against the Vietnam War and used drugs, who allowed an
epidemic of abortions, and who are responsible for the general decline of
morality and patriotism in the country.  And the drug testing ostensibly
required to qualify for employment may be a cover for corporations and
insurance companies to winnow out employees who are pregnant, have
diabetes, etc., while providing no guarantee that the results of the tests
will be applied equitably or fairly.

And despite the obvious drug scandal lurking behind Iran-Contra, no one in
their right mind dare openly oppose the war on drugs for risk of being
suspect as a heretic, liberal, or worse, a DRUG USER.  In this political
atmosphere reasoned debate about drugs is stifled and open dissent casts
suspicion on anyone opposed to a governmental drive to acquire enhanced
powers of repression and control.  Too embarrassed to even utter a squeak
of opposition to an obviously cynical abuse of our rights, the population
is cowed into accepting the government's fear campaign and grows to regard
the complaints of civil rights advocates as somehow either naive, liberal,
fringe, militant, or radical.

The scope of this impingement upon civil rights has extended to the
criminalization of millennia-old American Indian ritual use of
hallucinogenic peyote cactus buds in religious practice.  The ritual use
of hallucinogenic plants in the Native American Church was legal until
recently, but now that religious freedom has been abrogated by the war on
drugs.

FREEDOM AND SECURITY The devastating violence of the Prohibition era
finally prompted nullifying the Prohibition amendment; the rum-running
gangster violence far more devastating than the social associated with
legal alcohol.  The question is, what is it that is so different about
other addictive drugs?  If one were to compare the escalation of inner
city violence associated with the illicit trade of highly addictive drugs,
and the alternative of legalizing the drugs so that payment schedules
would no longer be enforced with hand guns, it seems the choice would be
for legalizing the drugs.  While there would be some increase in drug use
and addiction as a result of legalization, the destructive violence
associated with the drug trade would be eliminated.  In communities
afflicted with drug abuse and paralyzed by poverty and violence,
eliminating the violence is paramount.  If the alternative of legalization
entails a marginal increase in drug addiction and a decrease in
drug-related violence, then it seems the truely rational alternative is to
accept a few more addicts in return for fewer deaths.

But in lieu of a rational discussion about the pro's and con's of
legalization, we have been treated to a barrage of rhetoric and
demagoguery.  Rather than try to clarify the issue, rather than attempt to
answer to the desperation of communities besieged by poverty and violence,
our policitians lambast anyone who calls into question the failed policies
that have lead to this aweful situation. Repeatedly, I have observed
politicians cloud the issue with rhetoric and polemics, refusing to
discuss the benefits and trade- offs of legalization, annointing
themselves sole purveyors of canonical truth.  In the interest of the
status quo (i.e., minimal taxes for the rich and upper middle class in
fortress suburbia), our politicians have scape-goated minorities so to
justify denial of their plight or the need to spend the money required to
extract them from the mire of inadequate education and health care.  In
the portrayal of the poor as deserving of their plight and undeserving of
the assistance of society, the polity has been infected with the deadly
pale cast of theocracy, thereby leaving us the lurid spectre of an
increasingly violent society.

It seems that the greatest threats to freedom in America are the habits of
liberty, citizen responsibility and tolerance falling into disuse.  If one
turns on the T.V., the media promote the perception that T.V.'s, stereos,
CD players, VCR's, fast food, microwave entrees, cars and expressways
expand the scope of freedom that one may enjoy, while the same media has
portrayed as threats to these freedoms tax-hungry liberals and welfare-
dependent neighborhoods riddled with drug dealers.  As the average
American adult watches 30 hours per week of T.V., he is increasingly
isolated from civic life and perceives his world via a one-way
conversation with the sensationalist mass-media.  In that one's
Constitutional freedoms and social-contract obligations are replaced by
consumer pseudo-freedoms, one's status as a consumer supplants one's
status as a citizen.  Political expression of anything other than what has
been espoused by "experts" falls in the realm of the imprudent, and
aspirations or opinions that counter the "conventional wisdom" are
oddball, selfish, misguided, or misinformed.  If not regarded as "normal,"
"bipartisan,"  "acceptable," "efficient," "strong," or "tough,"  other
ideas become regarded as anomalous.  The labels "liberal," "weak,"
"anti-family," etc., pre-empt any doubts or criticism of what the ivory
tower technocrats and policy analyst priesthood has determined to be the
final shining ultimate truth.  And if confronted with evidence that casts
doubt upon the wisdom or efficacy of current policy, the status quo is
defended by either clouding the issue with some tangential matter or
avoiding an honest response or concession with a reliable thought
terminating cliche.  Our politicians conduct opinion polls, much in the
manner that marketing research is done for our clothes and our cars, to
parade that ephemeral mandate of the people missing when 50% of the
electorate didn't bother to vote (a viable well-funded organized third
party could easily take advantage of such a large proportion of non-voters
if they were convinced that voting would be in their best interest).  In
election time, emotional rhetorical "hot buttons" (i.e. drugs, flag
desecration, Willie Horton, ACLU membership, reverse discrimination) are
determined via marketing research to determine which voting blocks can be
motivated to vote and which voting blocks can be alienated and
dis-motivated into not voting.

With costly media contests necessarily
funded on both sides by monied interests, the republic comes to resemble
an oligarchy, with each party becoming increasingly interchangable,
offering safe opinions in return for the largesse of well-to-do political
donors.

The Democrats, nominal party of opposition in the past decade and
presumably friends of civil liberties, have become timid and as a result
Congress has abdicated more and more of its power to the executive branch,
a capitulation with profound ramifications.  The myriad voices that are
necessary to democratic rule are homogenized into the incomprehensible
circuitous babble of politicians who listen not to the electorate, but
rather select the voters meeting the criteria of the political marketing
surveys.

But if the mass media were to offer its "consumers" an honest examination
of what the war on drugs has so far entailed, how long would popular
support last for an unjustifiable war on our civil rights?  Under the
pretense of fighting drugs and violence, the government has acquired
enhanced police powers.  A September 1989 Washington Post opinion poll
showed more than half the respondents were willing to "give up some
freedoms" in order to fight the war on drugs - including informing on
family members, universal mandatory drug testing, military involvement,
etc.  The cynicism of the war on drugs might have passed as a lesson in
how absurd the rancor and rhetoric of democracy can get at times, but
foremost it stands as an ominous milestone.  When one accounts for the
steady erosion of our civil rights, the Iran-Contra affair, the CIA -
Contra intrigues, the widespread media complicity in promoting war on
drugs rhetoric while ignoring the CIA-Contra involvement in the drug
trade, the war on drugs has been immediately damaging to the habits of
liberty and has sought to make the most basic tenets of our Constitution
null and void.

As the U.S. Government has been deprived of the USSR as an enemy, our
leaders must conjure up new threats so that we may require their
leadership.  The war on drugs ostensibly attacked drug use and abuse, but
in the end it sought to acquire as much as possible the sum total of our
civil rights.  In selecting the most easily scapegoated elements of
society and the poorly understood illness of drug addiction, the
government rallies one group of people against another by offering
protection from a government- proclaimed epidemic that would supposedly
spread, if left unchecked, to the innocent realms beyond the inner cities.
In offering protection from a social problem better addressed by doctors
and education, the same government which promised to get big government
off our backs has succeeded in expanding its available powers of
repression and control and has scapegoated and marginalized a racial
minority.  If one were to watch the evening news in recent years, one
might have made the conclusion that the greatest threat to our internal
security was an epidemic of drug abuse and related violence, and the
villains responsible for this awful plague were Narco-militarists in
Central and South America, and the darker races in America's inner-cities.
This widely broadcast notion set the precedent for further incursions upon
privacy and civil rights in the future.

But just as the Reagan administration was found to have violated its own
declared policy of combating terrorism and terrorist attacks by dealing
arms to declared terrorists, a deeper look into the war on drugs reveals a
government partnership with drug traffickers while presumably fighting
drugs.

Massachusetts Institute of Technology Linguistics Professor Noam
Chomsky has noted:
          "If the media proceed to expose the probable
          U.S. government complicity in the
          international drug racket, that will (cause the
          administration serious problems) given the
          effort to exploit the drug problem as an
          additional device to mobilize the public and
          bring it to accept the strengthening of state
          power and the attack on civil liberties that is
          yet another platform of the `conservative'
          agenda." (Culture of Terrorism, p. 186) President Dwight


Eisenhower warned in his farewell address to the Nation on January 17,
1961: "In the councils of government, we must guard against the
acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the
military - industrial complex.  The potential for the disastrous rise of
misplaced power exists and will persist."  But monied interests who buy
the mass media have convinced many voters that taxes are being wasted on
social programs presumably rewarding poverty and encouraging minority
idleness leading to drug dependency and violence.  It's the same monied
interests benefiting from increased spending on the corrupt
military-industrial complex at the expense of social programs, childhood
nutrition, and education.

In light of the Iran-Contra intrigues and the
psychological warfare schemes of the war on drugs, it can be argued that
Eisenhower's greatest fear has come true.  We must heed the 1961 omen and
take care that we do not submit to a demagogue offering security in
exchange for freedom, for we will find ourselves in a situation where we
are neither secure nor free.  Democracy only works if all the groups
collectively welcome each other and accept each other's interests in
addition to their own.  Otherwise, the polity evolves into something other
than democratic, and the buffer against turmoil that the habit of
compromise provides is diminished.

The only viable long-term alternative for the U.S. is to treat all of its
people as though they are indeed citizens.  The dangers of a selfish
oligarchy using smoke and mirrors tactics is that the resulting mass
alienation of the public from the democratic process leaves the republic
vulnerable to the increasing incidence of demagoguery.  It must be widely
recognized that all Americans' destinies are intertwined and all are
inexorably linked and responsible for one another.  The alternative is
reaping a crop of tragedy from the iniquities that have been sown, and
that prospect could come sooner than we think.


BIBLIOGRAPHY

John Stockwell:  Lecturer on CIA operations; former CIA field
case officer


Harpers Magazine:  Editor Lewis Lapham's November 1989 rant about the
dangers and hypocrisies of the war on drugs


Associated Press, Jan. 21, 1987;

Associated Press, Oct. 3, 1988;


Esquire Magazine, Michael Levine, March 1991;

Spin Magazine, Michael Levine, May / June 1991;

Foreign Policy Magazine, Prof Ethan Nadalman, Spring and Summer 1988

Newsday, June 28, 1987;

The Pittsburgh Press, May 12, 1988;

Rolling Stone, November issue, 1988;

Rolling Stone, Between the Lines, October -November 1990;

TIME Magazine, Dec 3, 1990;

Village Voice, Oct. 11, 1988;

Z Magazine, December 1990;

Mother Jones Magazine, July / August 1991, "Just Say Whoa! to George
Bush's race-based war on drugs..."


Humanist Magazine, The Empowerment Project, June 1991


Christopher Robbins, Air America, 1979 edition - inexplicably Robbins has
deleted from his 1988 edition of Air America many references and quotes
that occurred in his original 1979 edition regarding direct CIA
involvement in drug smuggling in Laos and Southeast Asia.  Robbins became
embroiled in controversy when he spoke out against the 1990 movie Air
America, and was roundly criticized by former Air America pilot Jack
Smith, ex-CIA agent John Stockwell, and journalist Andrew Cockburn;


Alan Moore & Bill Sienkiewicz, Brought to Light, Eclipse Books;

Noam Chomsky, The Culture of Terrorism, South End Press;

Joy & Siegel Hackel, In Contempt of Congress, Inst. for Policy Studies,
1987;

Avirgan, Tony & Honey:  La Penca: Report of an Investigation;


Avirgan, Tony & Honey:  La Penca:  On Trial in Costa Rica;  William Blum:
The CIA: A Forgotten History;  Marshall, Scott and Hunter, The Iran-Contra
Connection, South End Press;  CATO Institute: The Crisis in Drug
Prohibition;  Michael Levine, Deep Cover, [publisher name?];  Henrik
Kruger, The Great Heroin Coup, South End Press;  Jonathan Kwitny, The
Crimes of Patriots, Norton & Co.;  Alfred W. McCoy, The Politics of Heroin
in Southeast Asia, Harper & Row;

Leslie Cockburn, Out of Control, Atlantic Press;

Leslie Cockburn, CBS West 57th Street Program:
  John Hull's Farm Bordering on War, June 25, 1987;
  The CIA Connection: Drugs for Guns, April 6, 1987;
  CIA Front Dealing Drugs, July 11, 1987;

Leslie & Andrew Cockburn, PBS Frontline:  Guns, Drugs & the CIA, May 17,
1988;  Helena Kennedy & Richard Bradley, The Heart of the Matter, BBC TV;
Bill Moyers, The Secret Gov't..The Constitution in Crisis, PBS Bill
Moyer's Journal, Nov. 4, 1987;  Charles Stuart, Murder on the Rio San
Juan, PBS Frontline, April 19, 1988;  Barbara Trent & Gary Meyer,
Cover-up: Behind the Iran-Contra Affair:  MPI Home Video;  The Shadow
Government... Christic Institute Home Video;
PBS Frontline on Noriega - 1990;