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Every objective source of data shows heroin prices going down, heroin purity and overdoses/deaths going up, beginning around 2001-02. This, of course, is totally coincidental. https://twitter.com/SeanMcCarthyCom/status/1311005032511401987
Lt. Cmdr. Charles Haffenden, Louis Lyon, Sami el Khoury, the Taranto family of Istanbul, the Ezra brothers of Beijing: these names, and others, are about as significant as Stalin, FDR, and Mao as far as 20th Century history is concerned, yet no one knows them...
How many people recall that one significant reason for the McCarthy's purge of the State Dept was that a lot of civil service officers - John Service, etc. - were not so much supportive of Communism but were voicing concern over the KMT's drug trafficking?
How many people have heard about the former US Attorney Leonard Husar, working in China as diplomat and businessman, providing weapons to a Chinese warlord in exchange for opium....with FULL knowledge of both the State AND War Depts. https://www.nytimes.com/1927/05/08/archives/husar-is-convicted-in-shanghai-court-examerican-district-attorney.html
How many have heard about the French Army's "Operation X," conceived to makeup for Mendes France's reduced military budgets as a result of Dien Bien Pho calamity, which involved buying & selling - w/ collaboration of Corsican mafia - of opium from the Hmong in N Vietnam.
How many people know about the enormous, and enormously lucrative, opium trafficking exploits of Hekmatyar, of Hizb-i-Islami fame - one of Reagan and Zia ul Haq's most prized "mujahedeen"?
How many people are stupid enough - I'm sure plenty of Americans are - to believe that Gary Webb, who blew open the CIA and Contra role in the Crack Epidemic, actually shot himself 2wice in the head with a shotgun?
How many seriously think that Freeway Ricky Ross, a man who by all accounts could not read, write, or count, was independently running a billion dollar Crack Cocaine Empire in the 80s? Why is his Crack dealing, CIA afilliated handler, Blandon, still alive and free today?
How many people understand the significance of this photo which places Barry Seal, Frank Rodriguez, and the rest of the Operation 40 team (it has also been speculated the guy with his face covered is Frank Sturgis...) in a room together as early as 1963?
How many have read this evidentiary ruling from the U.S. v. Noriega case, in which Manuel Noriega attempted to show he was a CIA asset and got his wealth FROM the CIA....and that evidence was excluded for the flimsiest of reasons, by a judge who was no doubt Epsteined prior
This thread is TBC
One of the lesser known angles to the development of the international narcotics traffic - which i've indicated above, with the name Sami el-Khoury - is the deep Lebanese involvement.
With the Luciano Project - i.e. the deal worked out between Luciano, Lansky, Haffenden (mentioned above) and NY Governor Thomas Dewey - Luciano was pardoned, released from prison, and deported to Italy after WW2, in exchange for Mafia assistance in securing NY docks from Nazi
sabotage, and also their assistance in the invasion of Sicily. With this, the pieces were in place for the French Connection (which Alfred McCoy's has done so much to bring to light to English readers with "The Politics of Heroin").
What happened was this: in 1919, after Arnold Rothstein rigged the World Series, he decided to lay low for a while - until, in 1922 when the Jones-Miller Act greatly circumscribed the legality of narcotics possession, even for medicinal purposes.
Then, Rothstein saw an opportunity: he became a major international drug trafficker....until 1928, when someone shot his nuts off, and left him to bleed to death. This prompted a massive investigation into his dealings, and it turned out he was in deep with the Democratic Party
and the NYC labor unions. Republicans used this to orchestrate a coup, and in fact this was what accounted for the rise of Laguardia, a Republican, to mayor of NYC
The main point, however: after the Rothstein investigation, the federal govt created the Federal Narcotics Bureau, headed by Anslinger (partly because the prior org in charge of this stuff was so corrupt that the son of its head was doing Rothstein's taxes!!!)
One thing leads to another, and on Christmas Eve of 1932, USA successfully puts pressure on Ataturk to shut down the opium fields in Turkey, and to crack down on smuggling with IRan. This, plus the "capital tax" 10 years later during WW2, which financially decimated first
Christians, and then (after a suspicion Blood libel style event) Jews, destroyed the non-turkish underworld in Istanbul. Many of the armenians, arabs, jews, went abroad.
Interesting sidenote: the head of the opium dealing Taranto family (which played a role in bankrolling Atatutk's war of independence, was petitioning Turkish govt for reparations for losing their drug business will into the 50s).
Nonetheless: after WW2, right when the drug dealers were down-and-out, the arrival of Luciano in Italy, and burgeoning Communism in Marsailles and other port cities important for the Marshall Plan, creates a nasty situation. America, it turned out, still needed the mob.
Thread to be continued: I will add more this evening. This is a long, complicated story which deserves a thorough treatment.
