The History Channel Is Finally Telling the Stunning Secret Story of the War on Drugs – The Intercept

The good news for Grassley, and for everyoneelse, is that starting Sunday night and running through Wednesday the History Channel is showing a new four-part series called Americas War on Drugs. Not only is itan important contribution to recent American history, its also the first time U.S. television has ever told the core truth about one of the most important issues of the past fifty years.

That core truth is: The war on drugs has always been a pointless sham. For decades the federal government has engaged in a shifting series of alliances of convenience with some of the worlds largest drug cartels. So while the U.S. incarceration rate has quintupled since President Richard Nixon first declared the war on drugs in 1971, top narcotics dealers have simultaneously enjoyed protection at the highest levels of power in America.

On the one hand, this shouldnt be surprising. The voluminous documentation of this fact in dozens of books has long been available to anyone with curiosity and a library card.

Yet somehow, despite the fact the U.S. has no formal system of censorship, this monumental scandal has never before been presented in a comprehensive way in the medium where most Americans get their information: TV.

Thats why Americas War on Drugs is a genuine milestone. Weve recently seen how ideas that once seemed absolutely preposterous and taboo for instance, that the Catholic Church was consciously safeguarding priests who sexually abused children, or that Bill Cosby may not have been the best choice for Americas Dad can after years of silence finally break through into popular consciousness and exact real consequences. The series could be a watershed in doing the same for the reality behind of one the most cynical and cruel policies in U.S. history.

A still frame of former crack kingpin Rick Ross in the HISTORY documentary Americas War on Drugs.

Photo: Courtesy of HISTORY

The series, executive produced by Julian P. Hobbs, Elli Hakami and Anthony Lapp, is a standard TV documentary; theres the amalgam of interviews, file footage and dramatic recreations. Whats not standard is the story told on camera by former Drug Enforcement Agency operatives as well as journalists and drug dealers themselves. (One of the reportersis Ryan Grim, The Intercepts Washington bureau chiefand author of This Is Your Country on Drugs: The Secret History of Getting High in America.)

Theres no mealy-mouthed truckling about what happened. The first episode opens with the voice of Lindsay Moran, a one-time clandestine CIA officer, declaring,The agency was elbow deep with drug traffickers.

Then Richard Stratton, a marijuana smuggler turned writer and televisionproducer, explains, Most Americans would be utterly shocked if they knew the depth of involvement that the Central Intelligence Agency has had in the international drug trade.

Next New York Universityprofessor Christian Parenti tells viewers, The CIA is from its very beginning collaborating with mafiosas who are involved in the drug trade because these mafiosas will serve the larger agenda of fighting communism.

For the next eight hours, the series sprints through historythats largely thegreatest hits of the U.S. governments partnership with heroin, hallucinogen and cocaine dealers. That these greatest hits can fill up most of four two-hour episodes demonstrates how extraordinarily deep and ugly the story is.

First we learn about the CIA working with Florida mob boss Santo Trafficante, Jr. in the early 1960s. The CIA wanted Fidel Castro dead and, in return for Trafficantes help in various assassination plots, was willing to turn a blind eye to the extensive drug trafficking by Trafficante and his allied Cuban exiles.

Then theres the extremely odd tale of how the CIA imported significantamounts of LSD from its Swiss manufacturer in hopes that it could used for successful mind control. Instead, by dosing thousands of young volunteers including Ken Kesey, Whitey Bulger, and Grateful Dead lyricist Robert Hunter, the Agency accidentally helped popularize acidand generate the 1960s counter-culture of psychedelia.

During the Vietnam War, the U.S. allied with anti-communist forces in Laos that leveraged our support to become some of the largest suppliers of opium on earth. Air America, a CIA front, flew supplies for the guerrillas into Laos and then flew drugs out, all with the knowledge and protection of U.S. operatives.

The same dynamic developed in the 1980s as the Reagan administration tried to overthrow the Sandinista government in Nicaragua. The planes that secretly brought arms to the contras turned around and brought cocaine back to America, again shielded from U.S. law enforcement by the CIA.

Most recently, theres our 16-year-long war in Afghanistan. While less has been uncovered about the CIAs machinations here, its hard not to notice that we installed Hamid Karzai as president while his brother apparently was on the CIA payroll and, simultaneously, one of the countrys biggest opium dealers. Afghanistan now supplies about 90 percent of the worlds heroin.

To its credit, the series makes clear that this is not part of a secret government plotto turn Americans into drug addicts. But, as Moran puts it, When the CIA is focused on a mission, on a particular end, theyre not going to sit down and pontificate about What are the long-term, global consequences of our actions going to be? Winning their secret wars will always be their top priority, and if that requires cooperation with drug cartels which are flooding the U.S. with their product, so be it. A lot of these patterns that have their origins in the 1960s become cyclical, Moran adds. Those relationships develop again and again throughout the war on drugs.

What makes this history so grotesque is the governments mind-breaking levels of hypocrisy. Its like Donald Trump declaring a War on Real Estate Developers that fills prisons withpeople who occasionally rent out their spare bedroom on AirBnb.

That brings us back to Charles Grassley. Grassley is now chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, a longtime committed drug warrior and during the 1980s a supporter of the contras.

Yet even Grassley is showing signs that he realizes there may have been some flaws in the war on drugs since the beginning. He recently has co-sponsored a bill that reduce minimum sentences for drug offenses.

So now that the History Channel has granted Grassley his wish and is broadcasting this extraordinarily important history, its our job to make sure he and everyone likes him sits down and watches it. That this series exists at all shows that were at a tipping point with this brazen, catastrophic lie. We have to push hard enough to knock it over.

Top photo: A still frame from the HISTORY documentary Americas War on Drugs.

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The History Channel Is Finally Telling the Stunning Secret Story of the War on Drugs - The Intercept