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The Candy Machine: How Cocaine Took Over The World

The Candy Machine’s greatest strength may be its presentation of perspectives from former gang members and drug users, drug traffickers and retired narcotics enforcement officials in the U.S. (despite the author’s desire to “hear from those who work day to day on the cocaine trade routes that run from London and New York via Miami, Kingston and Tijuana to Colombia,” the reader mainly hears from people in the North Atlantic). Thus Rusty, a former narcotics officer for the Department of Corrections in Arizona: “When I talk about legalizing drugs, people say, “you can’t mean heroin and crack, right?” But after 30 years of the drug war, spending a trillion dollars…the bad guys still control the price, purity, and quantity of every drug. Knowing that they control the drug trade, which drug are you going to leave under their control? Regulation and legalization is not a vote for or against any drug. It’s not about solving our drug use problem. It’s solely about getting some control back.” “They” refers to drug barons, many of them large landowners as well as warlords, in Colombia, Mexico, Afghanistan, and Pakistan, but the problem with Rusty’s analysis is that U.S. government allies in such countries—the intelligence services, the judicial systems, the military and police, business and political elites—are either complicit with or directly involved in supplying U.S. and European markets with cocaine and/or heroin, generally in order to finance counter-insurgency wars. As Alfred McCoy’s The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade (2003) illustrates, this pattern was set in the 1950s with opium and heroin in places like Burma, Marseilles, and Cuba, repeated in the 1960s and 70s in Vietnam and Laos, and updated with Colombian cocaine in Central America and Central Asian heroin in the 1980s. The common thread is that the anti-communist end justified the means—active or passive collaboration with rightwing drug trafficking organizations in brutal counter-insurgency wars—in all places at all times.

The career path of “Freeway” Rick Ross, who used the U.S. inter-state highway system built when Richard Nixon was vice-president to construct his business empire in the 1980s, is illustrative. Unlike everyone else selling cocaine or crack, Rick Ross was supplied with cocaine at cut-rate prices by Danilo Blandon, a Nicaraguan employee of the CIA in the U.S. government’s war against the revolutionary Sandinista government, as documented in the late Gary Webb’s Pulitzer-prize winning Dark Alliance: The CIA, the Contras, and the Crack Explosion (2003). From prison, Ross explained to Feiling, “Me and Danilo Blandon were really tight. I knew from earlier that he was backing some war, and I knew that he was from Nicaragua, but I had no idea about the Contras. I was illiterate at that time, you know? I never read a newspaper or listened to the news. They say that Danilo was protected, and you can assume from the Feds that I was protected too, but I never knew that. I was just in it for the money, trying to get out of the ghetto.” Blandon sold cocaine to Ross at a price, of a quality, and in quantities that none of Ross’s competitors could match. As former DEA agent Celerino Castillo III, who served in El Salvador, told Feiling, “They gave all the coke to Danilo Blandon, who was a CIA asset. He in turn fronted all that stuff to Ricky Ross. Ross became the Walmart of crack, distributing to the Bloods and Crips and everybody else all over the country…. Hangars 4 and 5 at Ilopango airport in El Salvador were used as a trampoline for drugs coming in from Colombia and Costa Rica. Oliver North and a Cuban exile named Felix Rodríguez [a former CIA agent who executed Che Guevara in Bolivia] were running one of them, and the other one was owned by the CIA. Rodriguez and North used a plane called the Fat Lady, which was also owned by the CIA, to load up with arms at Ilopango and then airdrop to the Contras in the jungle. Then the fat lady got shot down by the Sandinistas. The only survivor was the pilot Gene Hasenfus, who was also working for the CIA. He was captured and said it was a covert operation being run out of the White House, and that’s when the story broke that the U.S. government was supporting the Contras.” All evidence pointed to Vice-President George H.W. Bush’s office, but of course nothing came of it besides the Kerry Committee Report of 1989, which charged the State Department with making payments to Nicaraguan Contras involved in the cocaine business.

http://www.brooklynrail.org/2009/11/express/a-different-sort-of-blowba...

By Byron_Kostner on Nov 7, 2009, 13:21 in Friendly Talkzone.

sloopskipper says on Nov 8, 2009, 06:21:

Interesting read.

Seems that some people think "everybody's outa step but me".

0 funny, 0 helpful.

Byron_Kostner says on Nov 8, 2009, 07:27:

Illegal drugs and how they got that way, racism againt the negroes.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lrd5xtyfjFw&feature=related

Actions speak louder than words, but the self-righteous crusaders want to live by their own rules.

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sloopskipper says on Nov 8, 2009, 09:37:

A chilling program. I was not aware of the racial component of the drug laws.

I often watch the Latin American History Channel, but have never seen that.

Seems that some people think "everybody's outa step but me".

0 funny, 0 helpful.

Miguel_Clavo says on Nov 8, 2009, 09:56:

Anyone seen Elvis? Oooppss...wrong thread...my bad.

RVW orderded me to remove my tagline congratulating the PBH Mods New Golden Boys. Lame.

0 funny, 0 helpful.

Brian858 says on Nov 8, 2009, 10:57:

Amazing! Everyone should read the whole article!

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MitchAlvarez says on Nov 10, 2009, 00:59:

nice article

0 funny, 0 helpful.