From the Wayback Machine… George Webb’s “No More Informants” blogsite

The US Government has gradually gotten into more and more of the drug business, vertically integrating over time much like the oil business did.

I never believe much in conspiracy theories. I require too much proof. But one true guide in analyzing current events is looking at history. Historical patterns and official documents can give you a true insight into how power works. So I will explain my working hypothesis here about how the Federal government has become involved in the drug trade so extensively. I know that sounds outlandish, but this phenomenon has gradually occurred over time to the state run business we have today.

I outline four main phases of the government drug trade:

1) Cuba as Drug Island – CIA goes into the shipping business

2) Central America – a replacement for Cuba, CIA now in the production business

3) Vietnam – industrial scale production, the creation of the DEA and the distribution business

4) Middle East Wars – world market for oil, weapons and drugs, CIA, ATF, DEA, and Secret Service, and the move into managing consumption

Anyone who has seen the Godfather series knows that “narcotics” as they were called then changed the drug business. Cocaine, heroin, and later meth are more valuable by weight than gold. These substances are approximately 10,000 TIMES MORE VALUABLE than alcohol by weight. Before these substances were refined by German scientists in World War II, gangsters like Al Capone paid politicians and police their cut of the bootleg action. A federal agency known as the Bureau of Prohibition got its cut as well. This agency, created specifically for Prohibition, took bribes as well until a famous G-man named Eliot Ness came along. This agency, born in bribery, is now known as the ATF.

But the astronomical value of drugs changed everything after World War II. The key principle of power for all of history has been CONTROL PRECIOUS COMMODITIES. The CIA, created after World War II, would postulate that drugs were a new precious commodity, just like gold and oil. National security could be put at risk if another nation began profiting from drugs and using the proceeds to destabilize friendly governments to the United States. Corporations like Rand Corporation starting producing whitepapers recommending that the United States control the supply of drugs around the world, but especially in the Western Hemisphere.

Cuba became the CIA’s drug island with the production of cocaine and marijuana. The US government went into the SHIPPING BUSINESS working through mobster front organization run by Meyer Lansky. But distribution of the cocaine and marijuana was still largely a mob run operation. Accountants like Lansky made sure the CIA got its cut, and regional crime families divided up the profits of US distribution.

With the fall of Batista in Cuba, Castro closed the casinos and for the most part shut down the drug trade. The CIA had to look for alternatives like Guatemala, Venezuela, Mexico, and Columbia, toppling governments where they needed to. Later, the Iran Contra Affair in Nicaragua and Honduras would make the drugs for guns business a VERY PUBLIC affair. Gary Webb, a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist, would lay out the role of the CIA shipping crack cocaine to Los Angeles gangs, starting the crack cocaine epidemic of the 1980s.

Haiti and the Dominican Republic were also developed by the CIA as sources. During this phase, the CIA had moved into the PRODUCTION BUSINESS, showing small farmers how to grow and produce crack cocaine.

Vietnam was really a return to the 1950s for the CIA. Vietnam was the Cuba the CIA was never able to fully monetize. Opium from Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam, and to a lesser degree Laos was shipped in staggering amounts. And yes, drugs were flown in from these countries from their collection point in Saigon to Fort Bragg, North Carolina in the bodies cavities of dead US soldiers at one point. Google the very small fry, Ike Atkinson. More importantly, the DEA was specifically created as an offshoot of the CIA in the last days of the Nixon Administration to more tightly control the DISTRIBUTION of drugs in the United States. Many of the Mafia crime families involved in distribution were breaking up and being consolidated into crime organizations like the Chicago Outfit. Alan Dorfman acted as the mob accountant for the DEA in this instance, much like Meyer Lansky before him.

Finally, we have the Gulf Wars which really took the example of Iran Contra and built that model out on a global scale. In addition to oil and guns, every CIA action after Iran Contra would have a drug component from drugs from Afghanistan/Pakistan to drugs from Turkey. The DEA began wiretapping in 1996 to control their informants, we have never looked back. The NSA started providing the ATF, DEA, US Secret Service, CIA, and FBI information about their informants in the 2000s, and the decision was made to begin tracking every man, woman, and child in the US in 2007/2008 with drug crime journalists and dissidents getting special attention.

The US Government drug supply chain was now complete from the CIA pilots, DEA dealers and informants, ATF enforcers, and Secret Service money trackers all the way down to the US consumer as a potential target of asset seizure and a future source of informants. The US Government had now fully integrated the CONSUMPTION part of the business.

The odd man out of this whole business seems to be the FBI, being told to look the other way because this or that crime was a “matter of national security”. I foresee an inevitable fight between the FBI versus the CIA/DEA/ATF/Secret Service cabal – a sort of James Comey versus Dick Cheney Fight Of The Century.

The original CIA logic that Russia could use drug revenues to destabilize friendly countries was probably not wrong, but that logic has gone hideously out of control with the US Government now owning the biggest drug business in the world. And our country is being destroyed by the consequences of that logic.

Posted by George Webb Sweigert

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