Blacks Were Targeted for CIA Cocaine
It Can Be Proven
By
Michael C. Ruppert
January 28, 1999
(© 1999 From The Wilderness Publications and Michael C. Ruppert at www.copvcia.com. All Rights Reserved. Permission to reprint for educational purposes only to paid subscribers of From The Wilderness with direct sourcing as indicated in the Master Copyright. Any reprint for resale will be vigorously prosecuted.)
For a long time, many people have believed that African-Americans were targeted by the Central Intelligence Agency to receive the cocaine which decimated black communities in the 1980s. It was, until now, widely accepted that the case could not be proven because of two fallacious straw obstacles to that proof. Both lie smack dab in the misuse of the word "crack" and that is why, in my lectures, I have strenuously objected to the term "CIA crack".
First, it cannot and probably never will be established that CIA had anything to do with the first creation of crack cocaine. Chemically, that problem could have been solved as a test question for anyone with a BS in chemistry. The answer: add water and baking soda to cocaine hydrochloride powder and cook on a stove. A study of the literature (including articles I wrote 14 years ago for The U.S. Journal of Drug and Alcohol Dependence), as opposed to, for example, that pertaining to LSD, shows no CIA involvement whatever in the genesis of crack cocaine. Also, there has never been any evidence provided that CIA facilitated the transport or sale of crack itself. What is beyond doubt is that CIA was directly responsible for the importation of tons of powdered cocaine into the U.S. and the protected delivery of that cocaine into the inner cities.
Another obstacle has been the fact that CIA imported so much cocaine that, even if every black man, woman and child in the country had been using it, they could not have used all of what CIA brought in. Ricky Ross, the celebrated dealer of Gary Webb's Dark Alliance, sold approximately four tons of cocaine during his roughly five years in business. Yet one CIA ring, that of Miguel Angel Felix Gallardo and Rafael Caro-Quintero, was moving four tons a month. And that was only a fraction of the total CIA operation.
Leaving the unsupportable arguments aside, is there a supportable case that CIA directly intended for African-Americans to receive the cocaine which it knew would be turned into crack cocaine and which it knew would prove so addictive as to destroy entire communities? The answer is absolutely, yes.
And the key to proving that CIA intended for blacks to receive the drugs which virtually destroyed their communities lies in the twofold approach, of proving that they brought the drugs in and interfered with law enforcement - AND that, by virtue of CIA's relationships with the academic and medical communities, they knew exactly what the end result would be. Knowing that, we then have a mountain of proof, especially since the release of volume II of the CIA's Inspector General's Report (10/9 that the CIA specifically intended and achieved a desired result.
For anyone not familiar with the ways in which CIA studies and manipulates emerging social and political trends I cannot encourage strongly enough a reading of The Secret Team by L. Fletcher Prouty, Col., USAF (ret.).
This article is a start, a beginning on the painful work that needs to be done to build a class-action lawsuit. Such a suit, by necessity, will have to include room for all the whites, Asians and Latinos who also fell prey to cocaine addiction. But this article should convince any reader that the argument is solid - and winnable. I thank Gary Webb and Orange County Weekly reporter Nick Schou for giving me the missing pieces I had waited nineteen years to find.
SOURCES:
The Dark Alliance The Straight Dope- Between The Rock and a Hard Place by Michael C. Ruppert, The LA WEEKLY, March 8-14, 1985 (referenced as Ruppert 1).
- Rock Cocaine Hits L.A. by Michael C. Ruppert, The U.S. Journal of Drug and Alcohol Dependence, February, 1985 (referenced as Ruppert 2).
- U.S. Drug Experts Cancel S.A. Trip, by Michael C. Ruppert, The U.S. Journal of Drug and Alcohol Dependence, November, 1984 (referenced as Ruppert 3).
- Thy Will Be Done, The Conquest of the Amazon: Nelson Rockefeller and Evangelism in the Age of Oil. - Gerard Colby, Harper Collins, 1995 (Referenced as Colby).
- The Secret Team (3rd Edition), L. Fletcher Prouty (1973, 1992, 1997). This book has been erased even from the Library of Congress. To my knowledge it is available only on the Internet at http://www.ratical.org/ratville/JFK/ST (referenced as Prouty).
As a budding LAPD narcotics investigator I was selected in 1976 to attend a two-week DEA training school in Las Vegas. The diploma I received from that school, approximately 30% larger than the one I received from UCLA, hangs above my desk to this day. At that school I was given the official position of the DEA and the government, which was that cocaine was less addictive and less harmful than marijuana. I had only made one arrest for cocaine, a heroin addict who liked speed balls (heroin and cocaine mixed), and I had seen it less than a half dozen times in my life.
One of those times was right after my fiancÈe Nordica D'Orsay, a CIA agent, had broken her ankle in the summer of 1976. Before I could take her to the emergency room she had to make some urgent calls from a pay phone equipped with the then new touch-tone technology. Our home phone was monitored, she said. Having broken both ankle bones she was in severe pain. She went into her purse and produced a paper bindle filled with a white crystalline powder. She rolled a dollar bill and snorted the powder. Her people, she said, recommended it to treat pain when an agent was wounded or over-tired and needed extra strength. Once she ingested what was in the bindle we delayed for about an hour while she made the urgent phone calls from a gas station. Only then was I permitted to take her to the hospital. Her ankle had swollen to the size of a grapefruit. She came out five hours later with a cast from her toes to her crotch. Who was I to question the CIA?
That was the only time I was ever aware of her in physical possession of cocaine. But it was not the only time she ever talked about it.
In 1979 Congress held rushed hearings into the perils of cocaine and was told, time and again by expert after expert that cocaine was not a problem because it was not seriously addictive, too expensive and not easy to find. The hearings, chaired by Republican Congressman Tennyson Guyer in the House Select Committee on Narcotics Abuse and Control did not live up to Guyer's hopes of finding a devil in the drug cocaine.
"Witness after witness trooped up to the microphone to tell Congress that cocaine was not only a relatively safe drug, but so rare that it could hardly be called a nuisance, much less the menace Guyer was advertising." (Webb - p24). Ron Siegel, PhD of UCLA's Neuropsychiatric Institute (NPI) had written in an earlier monograph, "The rediscovery of cocaine in the seventies was unavoidable because its stimulating and pleasure-causing properties reinforce the American character with its initiative, its energy, its restless activity and its boundless optimism." (Webb - p19).
Siegel, one of the world's leading experts on drug abuse had, however, written a February, 1979 article for The New England Journal of Medicine which warned of a growing trend toward the smoking of cocaine (freebase, not rock) in the western United States. He traced the origins of freebasing back to 1974 in the San Francisco Bay area. He, like others, noted that smoking was a much more effective and powerful way to ingest cocaine because the surface area of the lungs absorbed the drug more rapidly, more efficiently and in larger quantities. He cautioned that smoking cocaine was also many times more addictive than snorting. Yet Siegel concluded, "All in all the long term negative effects of cocaine use were consistently overshadowed by the long term positive benefits," (Webb - pp. 31-33).
The witnesses testifying before congress included the heads of the Drug Enforcement Administration, that National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) and a host of medical and psychiatric experts. The conclusion: cocaine was not a problem.
[NOTE: My sixteen years in 12 Step recovery from alcoholism and my work with scores of recovering alcoholics and addicts belies the fact that powdered cocaine can be, in and of itself, extremely destructive and addictive.]
Only one man, Dr. Robert Byck of Yale University was insistent that trouble was coming and it was BIG trouble. Byck was a professor of psychiatry and pharmacology at Yale Medical School. He began his testimony by stating, "What I would like to talk to you about for the most part is the importance of telling the truthÖ We have given a great deal of cocaine to many individuals and find it to be a most unremarkable drug."
It Can Be Proven
By
Michael C. Ruppert
January 28, 1999
(© 1999 From The Wilderness Publications and Michael C. Ruppert at www.copvcia.com. All Rights Reserved. Permission to reprint for educational purposes only to paid subscribers of From The Wilderness with direct sourcing as indicated in the Master Copyright. Any reprint for resale will be vigorously prosecuted.)
For a long time, many people have believed that African-Americans were targeted by the Central Intelligence Agency to receive the cocaine which decimated black communities in the 1980s. It was, until now, widely accepted that the case could not be proven because of two fallacious straw obstacles to that proof. Both lie smack dab in the misuse of the word "crack" and that is why, in my lectures, I have strenuously objected to the term "CIA crack".
First, it cannot and probably never will be established that CIA had anything to do with the first creation of crack cocaine. Chemically, that problem could have been solved as a test question for anyone with a BS in chemistry. The answer: add water and baking soda to cocaine hydrochloride powder and cook on a stove. A study of the literature (including articles I wrote 14 years ago for The U.S. Journal of Drug and Alcohol Dependence), as opposed to, for example, that pertaining to LSD, shows no CIA involvement whatever in the genesis of crack cocaine. Also, there has never been any evidence provided that CIA facilitated the transport or sale of crack itself. What is beyond doubt is that CIA was directly responsible for the importation of tons of powdered cocaine into the U.S. and the protected delivery of that cocaine into the inner cities.
Another obstacle has been the fact that CIA imported so much cocaine that, even if every black man, woman and child in the country had been using it, they could not have used all of what CIA brought in. Ricky Ross, the celebrated dealer of Gary Webb's Dark Alliance, sold approximately four tons of cocaine during his roughly five years in business. Yet one CIA ring, that of Miguel Angel Felix Gallardo and Rafael Caro-Quintero, was moving four tons a month. And that was only a fraction of the total CIA operation.
Leaving the unsupportable arguments aside, is there a supportable case that CIA directly intended for African-Americans to receive the cocaine which it knew would be turned into crack cocaine and which it knew would prove so addictive as to destroy entire communities? The answer is absolutely, yes.
And the key to proving that CIA intended for blacks to receive the drugs which virtually destroyed their communities lies in the twofold approach, of proving that they brought the drugs in and interfered with law enforcement - AND that, by virtue of CIA's relationships with the academic and medical communities, they knew exactly what the end result would be. Knowing that, we then have a mountain of proof, especially since the release of volume II of the CIA's Inspector General's Report (10/9 that the CIA specifically intended and achieved a desired result.
For anyone not familiar with the ways in which CIA studies and manipulates emerging social and political trends I cannot encourage strongly enough a reading of The Secret Team by L. Fletcher Prouty, Col., USAF (ret.).
This article is a start, a beginning on the painful work that needs to be done to build a class-action lawsuit. Such a suit, by necessity, will have to include room for all the whites, Asians and Latinos who also fell prey to cocaine addiction. But this article should convince any reader that the argument is solid - and winnable. I thank Gary Webb and Orange County Weekly reporter Nick Schou for giving me the missing pieces I had waited nineteen years to find.
SOURCES:
The Dark Alliance The Straight Dope- Between The Rock and a Hard Place by Michael C. Ruppert, The LA WEEKLY, March 8-14, 1985 (referenced as Ruppert 1).
- Rock Cocaine Hits L.A. by Michael C. Ruppert, The U.S. Journal of Drug and Alcohol Dependence, February, 1985 (referenced as Ruppert 2).
- U.S. Drug Experts Cancel S.A. Trip, by Michael C. Ruppert, The U.S. Journal of Drug and Alcohol Dependence, November, 1984 (referenced as Ruppert 3).
- Thy Will Be Done, The Conquest of the Amazon: Nelson Rockefeller and Evangelism in the Age of Oil. - Gerard Colby, Harper Collins, 1995 (Referenced as Colby).
- The Secret Team (3rd Edition), L. Fletcher Prouty (1973, 1992, 1997). This book has been erased even from the Library of Congress. To my knowledge it is available only on the Internet at http://www.ratical.org/ratville/JFK/ST (referenced as Prouty).
As a budding LAPD narcotics investigator I was selected in 1976 to attend a two-week DEA training school in Las Vegas. The diploma I received from that school, approximately 30% larger than the one I received from UCLA, hangs above my desk to this day. At that school I was given the official position of the DEA and the government, which was that cocaine was less addictive and less harmful than marijuana. I had only made one arrest for cocaine, a heroin addict who liked speed balls (heroin and cocaine mixed), and I had seen it less than a half dozen times in my life.
One of those times was right after my fiancÈe Nordica D'Orsay, a CIA agent, had broken her ankle in the summer of 1976. Before I could take her to the emergency room she had to make some urgent calls from a pay phone equipped with the then new touch-tone technology. Our home phone was monitored, she said. Having broken both ankle bones she was in severe pain. She went into her purse and produced a paper bindle filled with a white crystalline powder. She rolled a dollar bill and snorted the powder. Her people, she said, recommended it to treat pain when an agent was wounded or over-tired and needed extra strength. Once she ingested what was in the bindle we delayed for about an hour while she made the urgent phone calls from a gas station. Only then was I permitted to take her to the hospital. Her ankle had swollen to the size of a grapefruit. She came out five hours later with a cast from her toes to her crotch. Who was I to question the CIA?
That was the only time I was ever aware of her in physical possession of cocaine. But it was not the only time she ever talked about it.
In 1979 Congress held rushed hearings into the perils of cocaine and was told, time and again by expert after expert that cocaine was not a problem because it was not seriously addictive, too expensive and not easy to find. The hearings, chaired by Republican Congressman Tennyson Guyer in the House Select Committee on Narcotics Abuse and Control did not live up to Guyer's hopes of finding a devil in the drug cocaine.
"Witness after witness trooped up to the microphone to tell Congress that cocaine was not only a relatively safe drug, but so rare that it could hardly be called a nuisance, much less the menace Guyer was advertising." (Webb - p24). Ron Siegel, PhD of UCLA's Neuropsychiatric Institute (NPI) had written in an earlier monograph, "The rediscovery of cocaine in the seventies was unavoidable because its stimulating and pleasure-causing properties reinforce the American character with its initiative, its energy, its restless activity and its boundless optimism." (Webb - p19).
Siegel, one of the world's leading experts on drug abuse had, however, written a February, 1979 article for The New England Journal of Medicine which warned of a growing trend toward the smoking of cocaine (freebase, not rock) in the western United States. He traced the origins of freebasing back to 1974 in the San Francisco Bay area. He, like others, noted that smoking was a much more effective and powerful way to ingest cocaine because the surface area of the lungs absorbed the drug more rapidly, more efficiently and in larger quantities. He cautioned that smoking cocaine was also many times more addictive than snorting. Yet Siegel concluded, "All in all the long term negative effects of cocaine use were consistently overshadowed by the long term positive benefits," (Webb - pp. 31-33).
The witnesses testifying before congress included the heads of the Drug Enforcement Administration, that National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) and a host of medical and psychiatric experts. The conclusion: cocaine was not a problem.
[NOTE: My sixteen years in 12 Step recovery from alcoholism and my work with scores of recovering alcoholics and addicts belies the fact that powdered cocaine can be, in and of itself, extremely destructive and addictive.]
Only one man, Dr. Robert Byck of Yale University was insistent that trouble was coming and it was BIG trouble. Byck was a professor of psychiatry and pharmacology at Yale Medical School. He began his testimony by stating, "What I would like to talk to you about for the most part is the importance of telling the truthÖ We have given a great deal of cocaine to many individuals and find it to be a most unremarkable drug."