Red Cocaine by Joseph Douglass part 36

CHAPTER TWELVE                                            153

GRIM   OUTLOOK   FOR THE 21ST CENTURY

Since Red Cocaine first went to press ten years ago, the drug problem has continued to grow. Drugs are more widely available than ever before, prices are lower, and drug potency has increased. For example, heroin is now available that is 90 percent pure. Following a temporary decline from 1988 until 1992, teenage usage has been proliferating1. This is especially disturbing because of the grave implications for society's future.

From a global perspective, America is no longer the sole 'primary' target of the deliberate drugs offensive to destabilise the West and destroy Western society and democracy. Illegal drugs are flowing into Europe at record rates and into the various republics of the former Soviet Union. With them, crime and high-level corruption, which typically accompany illegal drugs, are growing everywhere. The size of the global criminal gross take is now estimated to be in excess of $2 trillion per annum. Health problems, which are also tied to illegal drug use, are proliferating.

Meanwhile the costs associated with measures to 'combat' the drugs scourge con- tinue to escalate. The United States alone currently spends over $15 billion per annum on anti-drug operations. Apart from the spiralling expenditures and overheads, however, not much has changed. Responsive measures remain focused on:

O Interdiction;

O Attempts to gain the cooperation of drug-producing countries; O Law enforcement, and:

O Education.

These measures remain as conspicuously ineffective today as they were 25 years ago

- as is only too apparent from the ready availability of drugs, their decreased street prices, their heightened potency, and the associated increases in consumption among adolescents. Yet notwithstanding the severity of the illegal drug scourge and its consequences, there is no evident determination to address the challenge it presents in a serious manner. Moreover the official diagnosis of the crisis in the United States remains naive and inadequate.

One reason the drugs crisis receives much less serious attention (in the United States, as well as elsewhere) than it should be receiving, is that estimates of what illegal drugs cost people everywhere - not just in monetary terms but also in respect of their impact on political and social structures, and on families and individuals' lives - are woefully incomplete and grossly understated. This appears to be because the US authorities, and some other

Western Governments as well, do not relish having to face the severity of the offensive against

Western societies, and do not want to advertise the gravity of the crisis.

In America, drug use and cost estimates are based mainly upon so-called 'Household Use' statistics. These statistics are so inadequate and misleading that they may well be worse than none at all. There are two monumental problems with the 'Household Use'

statistics. First, they assume that people will voluntarily tell the truth about their use of

drugs. Secondly, they do not address the heaviest group of drug users - people who are not 'found in households' but rather are homeless or in various institutions such as jails, shelters, hospitals, and treatment facilities.

Important insights into the value of 'self-reports' were brought to light in 1991 when the Emory School of Medicine ran a covert test of drug user 'truthfulness' at a walk-in clinic in Atlanta2. Their researchers asked patients if they had used any drugs in the preceding three days. What the researchers did not tell the patients was that they intended to test their urine for cocaine drug residue. What they determined was that seventy-two percent of the men who claimed they had used no drugs during the preceding three days tested positive for cocaine use alone. If they had been tested for the use of other drugs as well - for example, marijuana, heroin, PCP, LSD, ecstacy, methamphetamines and so forth - the percentage would probably have exceeded ninety percent. Their conclusion was clear: self-reports of

drug use are unreliable. The drug-use statistics that they calculated for the segments of the population they dealt with were three times higher than one would estimate based on the

'Household Use' statistics.

In addition, there have been no good estimates of US hard-core users, and the costs associated with drug usage by this group probably exceed all those of the non-hard core users that form the backbone of the 'Household Use' statistics. For over ten years, the number of chronic users has been assumed to be around three to five million. To its credit, the US Office of National Drug Control Policy has initiated a study to try to establish how many hard-core addicts there are in the United States3. Their first attempt focused on Cook County, Illinois. There, they studied the jails, homeless shelters, and institutions and used drug-use tests -both urine and hair tests - to verify reports. While their survey still yielded an underestimate, the results were alarming. The Office of National Drug Control Policy estimated that there were 330,000 chronic users in Cook County alone. Their findings were still labelled 'preliminary' and carried the warning, 'do not extrapolate'. But, if one nevertheless extrapolates these findings, the corresponding national hard-core total would be in the 15 to 20 million range, which is three to five times higher than the conventional wisdom - and, as predicted, considerably higher than the usage rates one might be tempted to employ, based on the 'Household Use' statistics.

A realistic estimate of what the drug plague costs the United States each year, using conservative figures and Government statistics where they exist, is also eye-opening. It is three to five times higher than the $50 to $60 billion numbers quoted by President Clinton and Vice President Gore a few years ago. To place these 'competing' estimates in perspective, they show the drug plague each year costing the United States more than the entire ten-year Vietnam War, with the number of illegal drug casualties each year also exceeding the total Vietnam War data4. Moreover, annual deaths attributable to illegal drugs are actually over four times higher than the total fatalities in the worst of the Viet- nam War years.

These cost estimates do not and cannot put a dollar figure on the damage being done due to the corruption of drugs and drug money on people's lives. Brains, bodies,

spirituality, and life courses are destroyed. Families, the basic building blocks of society, are burdened to the point, sometimes, of total disruption. Almost everyone one meets in the United States these days has direct personal experience of the damage inflicted by the drugs offensive on a family member or a close relative.

The Drug Enforcement Administration's estimate of US domestic marijuana production in 1992 - and that department (the DEA) rarely, if ever, overestimates the size of the supply - multiplied by the average street value of 'good' marijuana, yields an annual cash crop value of $30 billion, twice the size of any legal farm crop. All such transactions and profits are illegal and have to be laundered. How much is laundered into stocks, bonds, and real estate? Has the endless and escalating flood of drug money sustained and bolstered the stock and commodity markets, and also the strength of the US dollar on the foreign exchange markets? How much drug money goes into political campaigns, or shows up in election contributions? How much influence and corruption does just the home- grown marijuana proportion of the drug trade in America, buy? Add imported marijuana, heroin, cocaine, LSD and methamphetamines - and the total rises sharply. Influence- peddling and election-financing are the natural associates of drug funds: so democracy is being undermined directly through interference with the democratic process and by ensuring that political candidates are beholden to evil money from the outset. This makes for corrupt government, as events in 1998 confirmed.

The implications are inescapable: growing, widespread, all-encompassing drug- money corruption, including corruption of the political, judicial, police, legal, accounting, finance, and even the business communities throughout the United States. And of course the same fate awaits the other leading Western countries which are prime targets for the drug offensive. In Europe, the European Union's structures, already notorious for nomen-klaturist corruption and inefficiency, are prime targets for the drug offensive.

Police corruption has featured on the font pages of the newspapers in most of the leading American cities: for example, New York, Philadelphia, Miami, Los Angeles, Cleveland, Detroit, Chicago, New Orleans, and in Washington, DC. Extensive corruption in Federal agencies responsible for combating the flow of drugs has also been reported -

affecting, in particular, the Drug Enforcement Administration, the US Customs Service, and

the Immigration, Justice, and Border Patrol communities. The domestic and international banking communities are heavily compromised, of course, by the drug scourge.

Everyone understands that it is usually the so-called 'small fry' who get caught. These people are the most expendable and least sophisticated. Nor does it take a rocket scientist to recognise that the same corruption that has been exposed within the law enforcement agencies also permeates the higher levels in the judicial, financial, political and political influence communities throughout the United States. It is also clearly present, as noted, in the financing of elections; but neither US political party wants to discuss this phenomenon, if it can be avoided. It must be assumed, on the basis of the evidence, that the reputations of both the main US political parties are equally at risk.

In addition to a general lack of serious attention, assisted by an often complacent media approach to the issue, the 'war on drugs' in America remains ineffective because

the illegal drug issue is still not understood historically, financially, politically, or strateg- ically. Conventional beliefs and assumptions concerning the origins of the drug plague and the reasons it has proliferated so alarmingly, contain serious gaps and mis- or disin- formation. According to the 'conventional wisdom', it is the people themselves who are at fault; that is, it is the people themselves who who bear primary responsibility for the drug

plague. If the people did not use drugs, there would be no scourge. This, by the way, has always been the standard argument used by Colombians when the issue is raised by vis- iting Americans or Europeans: in Bogota, it is the preferred analysis - for only too obvious reasons. Moreover, US officials and the media foster the image that drug-traffickers are little more than common criminals, people who live in fear of the law and who are, in effect, renegades whose only ideology is the pursuit of profit. These same purveyors of the news would also have us believe that the US Federal Government is doing its best to curb drug production and trafficking. As is demonstrated in the preceding material, nothing could be further from the truth. The army of apologists for the drugs crisis and its consequences, together with the 'liberalisers', have powerful and influential organisations behind them - and, of course, unlimited financial resources.

But the drug crisis, as we have seen, is not home grown - the result of some defi- ciency in US and other Western societies. It emerged because it was forced upon the West as an act of long-term low-level warfare by very sophisticated intelligence operations orchestrated by the Chinese and by the Soviets and their various surrogates and satellites. When Nikita Khrushchev was reported to have informed the West that 'we will bury you', he was misquoted. What Khrushchev actually said was: 'we will be present at your funeral'. And, as anyone who has lost a family member, relative or loved one knows at first-hand, there have been many funerals since the drugs offensive began.

In this respect, note again the data in Figure 5 on page 135, which show the growth in the first use by addicts of heroin recorded in the Haight-Ashbury section of San Francisco and the numbers of drug dependent deaths in New York City (Figure 4, page 133). These data reveal a significant jump in drug abuse in 1949-50, precisely when the Chinese narcotics trafficking operation began, and an exponential rise beginning in 1960-61 - which was when the Soviet narcotics trafficking operation was launched and the Chinese Communist operation was expanded.

The message is clear to anyone interested in learning what is really happening -

which is to say, to anyone prepared to discard the rose-tinted spectacles and 'politically correct' misapprehensions favoured in baffled US and other official circles these days. First, the dramatic change in the usage statistics is the result of increased supply; and secondly, the sources of the supply are foreign intelligence operations designed specifically to attack the youth of targeted countries with illegal drugs.

In the course of 1998, yet more data emerged which, once again, showed the same phenomenon with respect to cocaine. In 1992, during the 'Household Survey' in the United States, people were asked when they began using cocaine for the first time. The data from the answers received were placed on the Internet. They are plotted in Figure 7 on page 157. What stands out clearly is a significant change in usage statistics, starting in 1967, at which time the rate of first use of cocaine starts rising. Why? What happened in 1967?

The potential of cocaine as the most important drug of the future was first communi-

cated to the Czechs in 1962. Operations to construct cocaine networks had already begun and were expanded with effect from that year. Between 1962 and 1965, the relevant pro- duction techniques were modernised by the East Germans. They developed brand new processes which turned out to be far superior to the old techniques. One plant using the new German process could produce three times more cocaine than the entire then-existing production of Colombia, Peru and Bolivia. These techniques were introduced, and the production and distribution networks were put in place, during 1965-66.

As General Sejna explained the position in detail, 1967 was the year when the

Soviets' cocaine production and distribution operations, centred indeed in Colombia, Peru and Bolivia, came on stream - which was precisely when the first use of cocaine data began rising steadily: see Figure 7. The increase in drug usage was the result of a substantial increase in supply and associated marketing strategies, and the source of those supplies and strategies was the Soviet foreign intelligence operation - the code name of which was 'Pink Epidemic' (see page 33 et seq) alluding to the blending of the white (cocaine) with the red (Communism).

The chart below also provides significant insights into the means which need to be adopted in order to achieve an effective solution to the illegal drug scourge.

First, of course, there are two sides to the crisis - supply and 'demand'. Both sides have to be attacked, particularly since, uniquely in the case of drugs, demand is created by supply. Any proposed 'solution' which does not attack the availability of the drugs in ques-

tion is not a solution because it does not address the fundamental source of the crisis - the

supply. It is the supply (and this includes its marketing and support networks) which creates addicts in the first place. If the supply is not attacked, there will be a constant increase in the number of addicts as each new generation of young people for various reasons decides to 'experiment' and gets hooked.

In all honesty, the demand side, which is dominantly the demand generated by addicts, will ultimately solve itself as the addicts die out. Many users may languish and may never be cured. Proposals that make it safe for users to do drugs or that provide them with cheap drugs under the assumption that this will reduce crime are of course intended to

Figure 7: New cocaine users in the United States [in thousands], showing conclusively the correlation with the commencement of Soviet involvement in 1967, and thus with supply. Data source: Rouse, B.A., Ed, 1995, Substance Abuse and Mental Health Statistics Sourcebook. DHHS Publication No. (SMA) 95-3064, Government Printing Office. Washington DC. Chart prepared from published official data selected by the Author.

[see pdf for pictures]