The American Cartel
Scarface, Traffic, Ozark, and Breaking Bad. Some of my favorite examples of TV and film to showcase the intricate deception required in the distribution of illicit goods. And while all were fictitious works of art, every one incorporated a very real component: the distribution of drugs in the United States.
What if I told you that there is a real-life cartel, based in Washington DC, that makes these fictional drug dealers look like small-time crooks?
You might find that hard to believe. But in the next few minutes, I’ll cite enough evidence to shatter any doubt. The following information is from what I consider to be credible sources, and is easily found online. But you’d never have heard about it in the mainstream news.
We’ll start off with a congressional record submitted by The Federation of American Scientists, a nonpartisan policy research and advocacy organization. This article can be found on their website, fas.org, and is titled “A Tangled Web: A History of CIA Complicity in Drug International Trafficking”. This record lists numerous criminal activities assisted by, if not directly conducted by, the CIA, going back as far as the 1940’s.
The first entry references how the CIA protected, recruited, and funded members of the Italian Mafia, specifically the Corsican Gang, during World War II under the veil of “combating communism”.
Charles Lucky Luciano, an italian mobster and leader of the Corsican Gang, was originally sentenced to decades in prison back in the 1930’s, but had his sentence commuted in 1942 and was deported to Italy. Using his alliances and connections in both the US and Italy, Luciano spearheaded the smuggling of heroin from southeast Asia, through Turkey to France, and thren into the US and Canada. The Corsican’s, with considerable assistance by the CIA, became the world’s leaders in heroin distribution until the early 1970’s. This scheme was the inspiration to perhaps the greatest crime film of all time, known as the French Connection.
The next major controversy of note here was the impact of opioids on US troops during the Vietnam War. The CIA went to significant lengths to befriend dealers in Laos, Burma, and Thailand, as well as cozying up to corrupt political and military leaders in southeast Asia.
In May of 1970, our US military had unfettered access to heroin at prices cheaper than it cost to produce, which suggests that distributors had a more sinister goal than immediate profit. During that time, the CIA consistently authorized special clearance for opium shipments to leave the country of Vietnam.
Heroin, being cheaper than and just as available as marijuana and alcohol, devastated the US troops, with over 30,000 troops — 20% of all US soldiers — becoming addicts.
The last topic I’ll pull from this article was based in Latin America. In 1976, a Panamanian intelligence official by the name of Manuel Antonio Noriega was paid $110,000 for “services” by the CIA director, George H.W. Bush. This was despite the fact that Noriega was a known drug dealer and money launderer since at least 1971.
Noriega continued to receive payments from the CIA through multiple administrations, including $200,000 in 1986 alone. Despite being aware of his criminal activity for twenty years, the US only indicted Norriega on drug charges in 1988 once deciding he was no longer useful.
Clearly, the CIA has had their fingers in distribution hubs all over the world for some time. With so much worldwide trade, you’d think it would be hard to run the operation under the radar. That’s why in 1946, The CIA established Air America, one of their greatest shell company successes.
It not only functioned as a money laundering operation, but also assisted in the smuggling of drugs out of the Golden Triangle. This allegation was supported by former Air America pilots, others who were involved in the war, as well as other government documents not shown.
Michael Levine, who was celebrated by 60 Minutes as America’s Top Undercover Agent for 25 years, released a book in 1993 titled Big White Lie: The CIA and the Cocaine/Crack Epidemic.
He explains in his book how the CIA had consistently protected dealers and murderers from prosecution, how they assisted and sometimes even paid foreign drug leaders, and how they are directly responsible for the cocaine/crack epidemic experienced in the United States.
And finally, perhaps one of the most exhaustive investigations into this topic was Tim Weiner’s “Legacy of Ashes”, which won him a Pulitzer Prize. Weiner pulled from more than 50,000 CIA archive documents to illustrate how the agency built alliances with drug traffickers around the world since 1947, first under the guise of “anti-communism”, and later using “the war on terror”.
These examples, unfortunately, are only the very tip of the iceberg.
Make no mistake, if all this is true, and there’s plenty more evidence in corroboration, it would indicate that the “war on drugs” (more like war FOR drugs) was a psyop used to distract the American people from the truth. And with the US being the most drug-addicted country in the world, why would they stop? This question opens a real can of worms if you’re a curious person like me.
So the next time you hear about an overseas conflict, it might be worthy of the question: “Do drugs have anything to do with this?”
Stay curious, y’all.
