Censored Minds

A Short Outline of the Dope Wars

(part 2 of 4) by Gary Stimeling

 

Copyright 2004 Psychotropics Cornucopia, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

 

A Whole New Bull Game

      Like the ban on opium and cocaine, marijuana prohibition arose from bigotry, in this case against Mexicans. In 1913, the Mexican revolutionary Pancho Villa had reclaimed 1,250 square miles of Sonora that William Randolph Hearst had coercively bought for pennies an acre. Since Villa and his followers were enthusiastic users of canamo (cannabis), Hearst began a campaign to outlaw it. For the next two decades, his newspapers hammered home the message that marijuana makes Mexicans lazy and blacks sexually promiscuous, in particular making black men want to rape white women.

 

If Viagra grew on trees, it would be illegal.

 

      During the 1920s, liquor-control agent Harry J. Anslinger became a tireless public spokesman for this campaign as it grew clear that Prohibition would eventually be repealed and he might be unemployed. Seizing upon a lurid Louisiana case in which a teenager murdered his parents and afterwards claimed to have been under the influence of both alcohol and marijuana, Anslinger wrote dozens of similar tales that were pure fiction and placed them in various receptive magazines and newspapers. He also warned that Jazz Age marijuana use was leading to moral decay via mixing of the races. A nephew of millionaire Treasury Secretary and Teapot Dome fraud conniver Andrew Mellon, Anslinger was made Secretary of the Bureau of Narcotics in 1930.

      In 1931 the Siler Commission, formed to investigate marijuana use among U.S. soldiers in Panama, concluded that alcohol was the only real drug problem there, and found no reason for sanctions against cannabis. A recently invented hemp decorticator, a machine to do for hemp what the gin had done for cotton, had revived interest in hempen cloth and paper. But in 1936 representatives of I. E. duPont met with Treasury officials to draft the Marijuana Tax Act, which would outlaw all cannabis, whether grown for the drug or for industrial use, except for a few fields of hemp requiring a rarely issued federal permit. Due to Anslinger’s scare stories, the act passed the following year without public outcry. Immediately afterwards, with hemp competition killed, duPont patented nylon and a new process for wood-pulp paper processed with large amounts of sulfuric acid, the kind of paper that has caused most books and newspapers published between 1937 and 1975 to turn brown and disintegrate in a decade or two.

      Even as police were breaking down tea-pad doors and sending thousands of smokers to jail, in 1938 New York’s Mayor Fiorello La Guardia commissioned the New York Academy of Medicine to study marijuana and see if there really was any justification for banning it. Six years in the making and still one of the bedrock sociological and clinical assessments of the subject, the La Guardia report concluded that cannabis is not addictive, does not promote rape or other violence, and does no serious mental or physical harm to the individual or society. Anslinger had his agents try to seize and destroy all copies. A half dozen survived, but the drug czar did succeed in suppressing the report while cannabis prohibition was not yet firmly entrenched.^[6]

      Since World War II, American drug policy has been a hellish four-pronged pitchfork:

·       Heavy promotion of legal work-adjustment drugs, including addictive ones, if they are profitable to influential corporations—chiefly tea (the beverage), coffee, tobacco, and mood-controlling pharmaceuticals.

·       Well-publicized seizures and prison terms for low- to mid-level dealers and non-wealthy users of illegal drugs that produce addiction or dependence, chiefly heroin and cocaine.

·       Surreptitious high-level trafficking and support of traffickers in the same drugs by agencies of the government as a tool to support pro-capitalist dictators and suppress anti-capitalist rebellions.

·       Savage campaigns against suppliers and users of drugs that tend to induce euphoria, enlightenment, or sexual communion with little danger, such as cannabis, the psychedelics, and Ecstasy.

       Until the Sixties, domestic drug suppression proceeded at a fairly steady pace driven by the periodic need of local officials to get their names in the papers for “doing something” about the “scourge.” Users and suppliers, for the most part, learned to avoid the constabulary. The chief legal development was Harry Anslinger’s crowning achievement, the adoption in 1961 of the Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs, a treaty that exported the Dope War throughout the world. When John F. Kennedy shook Anslinger’s hand at the ratification ceremony, he was almost certainly high on speed injected by Doctor Feelgood (Max Jacobson). The treaty was broadened by the 1971 UN Treaty on Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances.

      A national anxiety attack resulted from the new freedoms and psychotropic exploration of the Sixties. Nixon declared drugs “Public Enemy Number One,” and draconian suppression efforts began to escalate year by year, like an addict’s stable usage pattern that suddenly turns into an “oil-burner habit.” In 1968, Operation Intercept temporarily curtailed imports of Mexican marijuana across the border, leading to a dramatic upsurge in heroin use as a substitute. A campaign against pot smoking by soldiers in Vietnam had the same effect.

 

Marijuana really does lead to insanity.

Whenever somebody smokes it, other people go crazy.

 

      The American marijuana decrim movement made brief progress during the Carter years. Denmark allowed the Christiana enclave, an independent hippie neighborhood where drugs were used without fear, to flourish for three decades in Copenhagen. Holland has done the same with cannabis cafés in Amsterdam. Movements for legalization, especially for medical marijuana, have grown tremendously without, so far, the slightest effect on federal policy. In general, Canada and several nations of Europe have far surpassed the United States as “lands of the free.” Since the election of Reagan, drug-war history has been more—much, much more—of the same, chiefly because the war is useful in repressive domestic and foreign policy. To recount even the major assaults would require a length and level of detail far beyond the scope of this essay. Instead let’s look briefly at what the Dope War is doing to us all, as a society and as human beings.

 

Just Say Woe

      The Dope War creates multinational criminal cartels, which do not go away even after relegalization. Annual margins in the two most profitable legal industries, pharmaceuticals and banking, average about 18 percent and 15 percent respectively. Though much harder to estimate, average margins for well-established smugglers of illegal drugs are probably several hundred percent. Enormous profits guaranteed by law enable them to buy entire small governments and infiltrate larger ones, eliminating competitors and reducing their own risk to near zero. On the international level, struggles against new cartels like the cocaine mafia of Medellín and Cali are more turf wars than attempts to stop the supply.

      The prohibition dynamic always increases smugglers’ profits because of what economists call an inelastic demand curve. If cops make a 20-percent dent in the traffic, demand drives prices up by 30 or 40 percent. Then, when trade routes adjust and supply returns to normal, prices fall, but not all the way back to their original level. The war makes the most addictive banned drugs the most profitable because demand for them is least elastic. Lester C. Thurow stated the case succinctly: “If our goal is to deprive criminals of large profits from selling drugs, economic theory and history teach us that legalization is the only answer” (emphasis added).

      Islamic terrorists and the corrupt so-called communist states of the former Soviet bloc have profiteered in drugs. Revolutionaries have sometimes protected drug growers in their territory and profited from the trade—rebels in Bolivia and Colombia, for example, and the anti-Soviet fighters in Afghanistan. Castro has let Cuba be used as a stopover between Colombia and the U.S., and has given permanent asylum to Nixon’s contrabander-in-chief, Robert Vesco.^[7] But the overwhelming preponderance of government complicity in the drug trade has been on the part of Third World military dictatorships allied with the United States, as a tool for repressing popular revolts.

      Right-wing Latin American generals have been profiting from the coke trade for decades, sometimes with seed money from Nazi war criminals sheltering in their domains. Perón confidant José Lopez Rega and his successors under the Argentine military junta helped other governments establish death squads from Tegucigalpa to Santiago. Initially they used gold paid to Eva Perón by Nazis entering Argentina via the “Ratlines,” the disguise and escape network for war criminals organized with the help of several officials of the Vatican. Later they used regular injections of American drug-war money. The brutal coup that installed coke-running generals in place of the elected government of Bolivia in 1980 was organized by Klaus Barbie, the Nazi “butcher of Lyons,” and bankrolled by local drug lords and the World Anti-Communist League, run by Japanese war criminal Ryoichi Sasakawa and the Reverend Sun Myung Moon.

      U.S. military aid enabled Nationalist Chinese leader Chiang Kai-shek to control 80 percent of the Golden Triangle opium trade. The U.S. has supported anti-communist governmental opium lords in Burma and Thailand at least since the 1950s. Thai police and paramilitaries murdered 10,000 restive hill tribespeople in a “drug crackdown” in early 2003. Manuel Noriega turned Panama into cocaine transshipment central while serving as a CIA asset. Congressional whitewash notwithstanding, the triangular trade in guns and coke between the U.S., the Contras, and Iran helped create the 1980s coke boom.^[8] C-123 cargoloads of drugs and weapons were traded at Homestead Air Force base in Florida—and at a private airfield in Mena, Arkansas, with the complicity of then-governor Clinton.^[9] The ongoing Plan Colombia begun by Clinton has been financing a Son-of-Vietnam anti-guerrilla war with over $2 billion in “anti-drug” military aid since 1998, much of which money ends up with coke-running paramilitaries. This type of arrangement goes back at least to World War II, when the Office of Naval Intelligence made Lucky Luciano the king of smack in return for Mafia information on Italian left-wingers between the fall of Mussolini in 1943 and the election of 1946, in which a Communist Party victory was thwarted by massive intervention of American spy agencies.^[10]

 

Remember: If you buy the Drug War, you’re supporting terrorism.

 

      Banned drugs are the perfect source of untraceable money for “black ops.” The CIA proved the method during the Vietnam War by smuggling opium from Laos and importing the heroin in body bags on Air America, its private airline. The agency used the proceeds to fund the Ravens, its secret army and air force in Laos, and Operation Phoenix, the assassination program in which 40,000 village leaders and other Vietcong sympathizers were murdered in South Vietnam.^[11] Poet Allen Ginsberg initially exposed the gambit when, in reviewing his files of news clips, he noticed that every American offensive in or near Laos was followed a few months later by a spike (pardon the unavoidably gruesome pun) in heroin OD deaths in the U.S. Spooks and tyrants throughout the world learned that prohibited drugs mean easy money off the books, along with the ability to get away with murder and call themselves saints at the same time.