Tag: Drug Trade

The CIA’s Drug Trade

It seems the CIA just canno0t keep its fingers out of the drug trade….now they are involved in the opium production…..

The US is deploying aggressive—and very public—methods these days in its war on international drugs. It’s a sharp contrast to a secret tactic used years ago in Afghanistan that the Washington Post is revealing for the first time. It seems the CIA secretly dropped modified seeds on poppy fields between 2004 and 2015, with the goal of making the resulting heroin less potent. The covert operation, run by the CIA’s Crime and Narcotics Center, was so secretive that many senior officials in the Pentagon and State Department were unaware it existed.

And did it work? The best answer seems to be, kind of. “There was a sense that it worked, but maybe over time, it worked less well,” one former US official familiar with the program tells the newspaper. It was also expensive to run, a big factor in why it ended—”the juice wasn’t worth the squeeze,” is how the official puts it. Still, he calls it “an example of creative, out-of-the-box thinking by the agency. … It was dealing with a problem in a non-kinetic, nonmilitary way.”

Throughout the broader US-led counter-narcotics campaign, American agencies disagreed on the best strategy, with proposals ranging from aerial herbicide spraying to buying up the Afghan crop for pharmaceutical use. The CIA’s secret seed operation took place amid these debates, but official assessments ultimately concluded that no US or allied effort led to lasting reductions in Afghan poppy cultivation or opium production. Read the full story, which notes that the seeds were not believed to have been modified genetically. Instead, they were selectively bred to be less heroin-friendly.

Is this one of their famous ‘cover stories’?

The agency’s history tells a different story…..they have not always been part of the War on Drugs…..they actually were involved in the distribution to help pay for their covert operations.

I am not convinced that they are not part of the opium trade.

How about you?  Does this give one confidence that the CIA is acting in a way that will help the war on drugs?

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Drug Cartel Strikes Back

By now most of America knows the pitfalls of fentanyl…..and there are some that have concerns that this drug is coming across the border with the influx of migrants on our Southern border.

There has even been some calls from the more radical quarters that has called for a US invasion of Mexico to stem the flow of this deadly drug.

Now at least one cartel is taking matters to hand….the Sinaloa Cartel….

When banners went up announcing that the Sinaloa drug cartel had given up the sale and production of fentanyl, authorities were understandably wary. But members of the cartel, the leading exporter of fentanyl to the US, say cartel leaders are serious—deadly serious. A “midlevel Sinaloa cartel operative” who ran a fentanyl lab before closing up shop to comply with the cartel’s stated ban tells the Wall Street Journal that he knows of five people who were killed for defying the ban. Human rights activist Miguel Angel Murillo of the Sinaloa Civic Front adds that most of the dozen people who’ve disappeared or been kidnapped in the past 10 days are thought to be “linked to the ban on fentanyl.”

You have been warned,” concluded the banners announcing the fentanyl ban, signed by the sons of imprisoned drug lord Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman. They appeared following a series of blows to the cartel. In January, one of El Chapo’s sons, Ovidio Guzman, was captured by Mexican security forces in a deadly gun battle. Then in April, the US indicted all four Guzman brothers and dozens of their associates, with the Drug Enforcement Administration claiming to have infiltrated the highest level of the cartel. A Mexican security consultant tells the Journal that cartel leaders now fear getting arrested and extradited to the US, as Ovidio Guzman was last month, per Reuters. They may believe that moving away from fentanyl will get authorities off their backs.

The midlevel operative says the cartel intends to let the rival Jalisco New Generation Cartel, another leading fentanyl producer, take the fall for the drug while it focuses its attention elsewhere. “Although the core business of the Sinaloa cartel traditionally centers on illegal narcotics, say US officials, the criminal group has diversified into other illicit activities such as widespread extortion,” the Journal reports. The operative also discussed trafficking in guns from the US. Still, US authorities remain doubtful that Sinaloa’s fentanyl production will be stopped, given that so many people make a living from the opioid. They liken the cartel’s claims to a public relations ploy, adding they’ve seen no sign of any real change.

Fascinating turn of events.

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“lego ergo scribo”

CIA And Drugs

I do not know if Americans know of the CIA involvement in the drug trade….if they truly cared then why is this still going on.

This post was inspired by an article I read about the CIA involvement in the drug trade in Afghanistan (you remember than country right?)……..

This is a far cry from the 1970s, when poppy production was minimal, and largely for domestic consumption. But this changed in 1979 when the CIA launched Operation Cyclone, the widespread funding of Afghan Mujahideen militias in an attempt to bleed dry the then-recent Soviet invasion. Over the next decade, the CIA worked closely with its Pakistani counterpart, the ISI, to funnel $2 billion worth of arms and assistance to these groups, including the now infamous Osama Bin Laden and other warlords known for such atrocities as throwing acid in the faces of unveiled women.

“From statements by U.S. Ambassador [to Iran] Richard Helms, there was little heroin production in Central Asia by the mid 1970s,” Professor Alfred McCoy, author of “The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade,” told MintPress. But with the start of the CIA secret war, opium production along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border surged and refineries soon dotted the landscape. Trucks loaded with U.S. taxpayer-funded weapons would travel from Pakistan into its neighbor to the west, returning filled to the brim with opium for the new refineries, their deadly product ending up on streets worldwide. With the influx of Afghan opium in the 1980s — Jeffrey St. Clair, co-author of “Whiteout: The CIA, Drugs and the Press,” alleges — heroin addiction more than doubled in the United States.

https://libya360.wordpress.com/2021/06/25/geopolitics-profit-and-poppies-how-the-cia-turned-afghanistan-into-a-failed-narco-state/

After reading this article….my first response is….DUH!

Of course the CIA is involved in drug trafficking….and has been since the 1970s……

Seriously!

But here is a look at the trade and CIA participation….

In August 1996, the San Jose Mercury News initiated an extended series of articles linking the CIA’s “contra” army to the crack cocaine epidemic in Los Angeles. Based on a year-long investigation, reporter Gary Webb wrote that during the 1980s the CIA helped finance its covert war against Nicaragua’s leftist government through sales of cut-rate cocaine to South Central L.A. drug dealer, Ricky Ross. The series unleashed a storm of protest, spearheaded by black radio stations and the congressional Black Caucus, with demands for official inquiries. The Mercury News‘ Web page, with supporting documents and updates, received hundreds of thousands of “hits” a day.

While much of the CIA-contra-drug story had been revealed years ago in the press and in congressional hearings, the Mercury News series added a crucial missing link: It followed the cocaine trail to Ross and black L.A. gangs who became street-level distributors of crack, a cheap and powerful form of cocaine. The CIA’s drug network, wrote Webb, “opened the first pipeline between Colombia’s cocaine cartels and the black neighborhoods of Los Angeles, a city now known as the ‘crack’ capital of the world.” Black gangs used their profits to buy automatic weapons, sometimes from one of the CIA-linked drug dealers.

https://ips-dc.org/the_cia_contras_gangs_and_crack/

Should not the government cease this involvement…..and what happened to this expensive War on Drugs?

When will the people realize just how dick deep the CIA is in the drug trade?

Here is an unique idea…..stop bitching about drugs and get off your ass and put a stop to the US involvement…..

Just a thought

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