I seem to remember stories of heroin and crack distributors getting a go-ahead from DEA to infiltrate and sell poison in the inner cities of L.A., Frisco, San Diego, Seattle,.
Yep! Just checked the story out. Gary Webb was a Pulitzer winning investigative reporter who broke that story in in the 1980's and published a book about it, "The Dark Alliance" and was basically ostracized by the journalist community with the help of the Feds. Driven into obscurity by an oddly conspiratorial-seeming set of circumstances, he killed himself in 2004, just as his book went to press.
Interesting how what goes around (during Reagan's "City on the Hill" reign) comes around half a century later. The reason the DEA turned the other way as heroin and coke, especially coke, entered the cities of America, was that Reagan's favored "Contras", right wing insurgents in Nicaragua, needed the profits from their drug dealing (and life ruining) in the States to continue fighting the "communist menace." Ollie North was a major supporter of this "turn the other way" strategy. He bragged about it but, to my knowledge, never attended any of the many American funerals caused by his untiring efforts in support of Fascism in Central America.
Interesting times. Ollie said, publicly, that he kept a lot of his drug-pushing bullshit from Reagan's ear in order to provide the Sainted Conservative "plausible deniability." Ollie had a famous affair with Fawn Hill -- a 10, definitely, who once got arrested for eating a banana on the subway platform in D.C. -- an affair consummated 40 years later when the couple married --and always wore civilian clothes while working at the WH. I recall, though, that when summoned to Congress to testify, he got his Marine uniform out of moth-balls so he could, I guess, impress the people watching. Ollie was a graduate of Annapolis and served as a marine officer in Vietnam. No one questions the man's courage or leadership ability. But he trashed his combat rep in order to help drugs enter the inner cities of America.
(Also, while at Annapolis, he beat Jim Webb in a boxing tourney, a fact which Webb said was made possible by North's getting outside coaching from a professional boxing master -- a fact that, had the Nacy pursued it, would have disqualified him from the tournament and given Webb the title.)
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