Commentary
"The Drug Years" from Sundance – a short count
By Jerry Mazza
Online Journal Associate Editor


Jun 23, 2006, 00:29

The Sundance Channel is a place I turn to for respite. From network TV, bogus cable news, action movies, sitcoms and the like. Its documentaries are groundbreaking portrayals of some corner of life you never dreamed was there. Its independent movies are quirky, offbeat, the kind you see in a small movie theater or find in the outrider video shop. But the four-part series, no less, The Drug Years is amazingly dense, and perhaps purposefully ignorant.

As it plods it on, channeling every stoner and substance, famous, infamous and anonymous face from the beats to the Beatles to generation X for Ecstasy, including a number of talking heads, it misses somehow one simple point: that the CIA was and is the world’s largest drug dealer. And that it is by no accident, dating back at least to Vietnam, that mongo amounts of dope found their way to America’s streets and into America’s youth and adults via Air America (not the radio show), delivered on time, every time.

For me, the drug days of the '60s were over in 1997. That’s when I said bye-bye, after 30 years, after the grass itself had changed. Unnecessarily harsh laws from GHW Bush had made growing grass in America illegal. But his CIA cronies were more than encouraged to keep importing and peddling coke, smack and dope wholesale in America.

They received the drugs from Central American cartels and other international sources in return for arms, assassinations, dirty tricks, favors, propping up despotic governments, popping reformers, you name it. Yet endless numbers of American fields were burned and many Americans went to jail, but not Bush’s pals.

Nevertheless, others began growing grass here in small, clandestine spaces, basements, apartments, garages and the like. Growers hybridized and cloned the grass strains to be stronger and stronger, so less would get you higher and the weight prices would soar dramatically as well.

The grass you smoked in the early '90s, which sold for upwards of $350 an ounce, had a far higher content of THC (tetrahydrocannabinol, the plant’s primary psychoactive), ranging from 8.9 percent to a startling 29.8 percent. The grass you smoked in the '60s that went for $100 a pound had a THC content below 2 percent.

The grass had morphed like the times from the old fun-inspiring weed to dangerous whacky tobacky, often laced with potent chemical additives, as reported in Frontline’s "Busted, America’s War on Marijuana." I’m sure the price of grass has soared since the late '90s with our ongoing inflation.

And if it wasn’t the indoor-grown grass per se, one could be smoking cloned hybrid strains grown in Central America or Mexico imported via the Agency. The Agency got its huge boost in Southeast Asia in the '60s and '70s peddling heroin. The great poet (and drug-maven) Allan Ginsberg warned us about it in his poetry, letters essays and interviews. Arthur Sulzberger, Jr., of the New York Times thought he was crazy. Decades later he apologized to him, saying Allan was spot on.

What’s more in the '80s, cocaine was pouring in from Central America, smack from Afghanistan. In the '90s, there was coke from Colombia. In fact, it was part and parcel of the 1980s Iran Contra affair, in which US guns were exchanged for drugs, using the cash from drug sales to finance additional dark ops, including the Contras, even perhaps a shadow government. If you click on Iran Contra above, Wikipedia will tell you additionally, “Senator John Kerry's 1988 U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations report on Contra-drug links concluded that "senior U.S. policy makers were not immune to the idea that drug money was a perfect solution to the Contras' funding problems." [2] Kerry was suspicious of North's connection with Manuel Noriega, Panama's drug-baron. According to the National Security Archive, Oliver North had been in contact with Noriega who had previously worked for the CIA from 1950 to 1986, and had even met him personally.” There were even more shocking revelations.

“In August of 1996, the San Jose Mercury News published Gary Webb's "Dark Alliance", a 20,000 word, three-part investigative series which alleged that Nicaraguan drug traffickers had sold and distributed cocaine in the United States during the 1980s, and that drug profits were used to fund the CIA-supported Nicaraguan Contras. Webb never asserted that the CIA directly aided drug dealers to raise money for the Contras, but he did imply that the CIA was aware of the transactions and may have given them sanction. His work, at first heralded, was later disputed and disowned by the Mercury News, effectively ending his career as a mainstream media journalist. Newspapers such as the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times also endorsed the retraction and denounced Webb's reports.”

However Wikipedia’s section on Gary Webb clearly states that fortunately “Webb's research was later vindicated by the CIA Inspector-General.” This vindication came in the form in two reports dated 1997 and 1998. [12] [13] Also, a team of four Washington Post reporters who were assigned to discredit Webb's work were unable to identify any significant errors. [14] In short, Webb goes down in history a hell of a reporter.

He moved on to do some excellent work as a Consultant for the California Assembly Speaker’s Office of Member Services. As a member of the Joint Legislative Audit Committee, “Webb investigated charges that the Oracle Corporation received a no-bid contract award of $95 million in 2001 from former California Governor Gray Davis.” Yet he was laid off in 2003 with the balance of the former speaker’s staff, part of a house cleaning by the new Assembly speaker. He was hired by the Sacramento News and Review.

Yet tragically “on December 10, 2004, Gary Webb was found dead from gunshot wounds to the head. While acknowledging that the two fatal shots that had entered through the back of his head was unusual, Coroner Robert Lyons determined that it was suicide. It subsequently became known that Webb had been suffering from clinical depression for many years.” Depression or not, it would pretty nigh impossible to shoot yourself with two shots to the back of the head. This sounds more like the good old American axiom of “no good deed goes unpunished.”

Today the smack is back via poppies from Afghanistan, oozing into the world market as into some junkie’s arm or some nice clean-cut kid’s nose. In short, no covert Agency op worked or works without drug smuggling, hand in hand with fascists, Nazis, drug dealers, arms dealers, mass murderers, perverts, terrorists, sadists and the Mafia. That is the dark side of the high moon face smiling.

Not only wasn’t the Agency mentioned in The Drug Years, but there was no speculation as to who these guys really were and are. Common garden-variety criminals? Royalists who believed like GHW Bush that America belonged to them and them alone and all they could grab in the name of defending it? Survivalists practicing a violent form of political Darwinism? Fritzed idealists turned cynics after the shocks of the war? Opportunists content to live in legal anarchy, in a covert state of political schizophrenia? Government fascists working with their corporate analogs? Or even the body of the anti-Christ, to borrow a metaphor from the American fundamentalists?

Or are they all of the above? The violent, a raging force of reaction, a tsunami of greed created by a volcano of wars, a crumbling of underwater earth, a mosaic of hell’s creatures turned loose on earth in search of the inheritance of the meek? The point is the roots of the flowering poppy and marijuana plants go deep into the fields of hell. If I sound like Billy Sunday, I’m not. Just an observer of our history.

The Drug Years documentary briefly mentions MK-Ultra but doesn’t detail it. According to Wikipedia, Project MKULTRA (also known as MK-ULTRA) was the code name for a CIA mind-control research program that began in the 1950s and continued until the late 1960s. There is much published evidence that the project involved not only the use of drugs to manipulate persons, but also the use of electronic signals to alter brain functioning.”

Most of all, the CIA utilized the program’s potential to weaponize drugs. In a series of experiments, the drugs included LSD, mescaline, psilocybin, scopolamine, marijuana, and sodium pentothal, perhaps some of your Favorite Things. From 1953 on, the MKULTRA director was given 6 percent of the CIA operating budget to pursue these ends without oversight or accounting. The rest is a stoned history. Unfortunately, those experiments spilled over big time out of the labs into the American mainstream culture. I don’t think it was an accident, given the politics of the times.

Also, the migration of Methamphetamines from World Word II Germany and Japan (where they gave courage to the enemy, an occasional shot to der Fuehrer himself), the subsequent trip to America, and then their entry in the 1950s to deal with a variety of diseases, from narcolepsy to depression to obesity, led to the drugs’ further migration in the 1960s into clandestine manufacture, leading to sky-rocketing recreational usage by 1980. This too was no accident, although we can look to a convenient lack of adequate government oversight here.

Unfortunately, The Drug Years leaves us with the sun-drenched surface of nostalgia and what we already knew. That a variety of people, from the disenchanted beats and be-boppers to oppressed minorities, to increasingly upper class and affluent Americans had increasingly discovered the pleasure and disaster of getting tres stoned. And we’re still at it any which way we can. Yet, even with that slim revelation, given our little Agency helpers and post-trauma lawmakers, the ball is in our court to avoid this love affair with being high.

In fact while The Drug Years quotes Timothy Leary intoning, “Turn on, tune in, and drop out,” America might have been better served, as my friend, researcher and radio host, Frank Tolopko says, by “Tune in, tone up and fight back.” Of course we all tried our best. But we weren’t well served by the super-abundance of drugs. Too many would-be warriors and dear friends were lost to overdoses, fried brains, and slipping down the good times’ rabbit hole.

This one man’s opinion, garnered from three decades’ experience, is that straight and sober are not so bad at all. And they give one not only the clarity but the strength to see life as it is, with all its beauty and warts. Trying to look beyond the Doors of Perception brings its own kind of deception, which is closer to Hollywood than Nirvana. And consciousness that’s not juiced is a citadel that offers you protection from the mirage, with a genuine look into true-blue life to its distant horizons.

Of course, The Drug Years gives us the sad example of Marion Barrie, mayor of Washington, DC, busted for crack cocaine in a hotel room. But then he finds the light and wins his way back into power. Even if that was lip service, there may be a point here. Given the shattering impact of the New World Order, every one of us, not to mention our kids, are going to need all the marbles we have to roll through this mess. This would be a good time to put The Drug Years and its thin romance behind us. Life’s tough enough straight up. The sandman don’t need no help.