Source:
http://www.sianews.com/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=3247
Veteran
Right-libertarian writer murdered by San Diego Police
by
Todd Brendan Fahey
September
26, 2007
On
a clear, blue February morning 2006, Michael E. Kreca, a longtime writer
for Right-libertarian sites EtherZone.com and LewRockwell.com--and who had been
previously financial reporter for Knight-Ridder, Business Week and the Financial Times of London--was shot dead at point-blank range by San
Diego police officers, on a very public street near his San Diego area
apartment.
San
Diego police were "cleared" of culpability by a District
Attorney. Mr. Kreca was said to have pulled a gun from his waistband
after officers asked if he were carrying a weapon. There were no
witnesses, other than the officers themselves.
Scant
reportage was given to the event. (Two representative articles here:
http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/metro/20060213-9999-1m13kreca.html; http://www.the-boondocks.org/forum/index.php?t=msg&goto=19242, the original having "disappeared".)
The
day after the shooting, a team of police officers arrived at the late Kreca's residence
and carried out and carted away boxes of "evidence," including his
computers. We wonder what San Diego P.D. was looking for; what it found,
and how anything in his house was relevant to a supposed "justifiable
homicide/self defense" situation on a public thoroughfare, where the
alleged "almost assailant" has already been offed by the very
police to whom he purportedly posed an "imminent threat"?
It
is curious that no one at EtherZone.com or LewRockwell.com issued a response.
This was a highly-capable writer, who had been researching, among other things,
the CIA's MK-ULTRA experiments (see below). Kreca was also a veteran of
the U.S. Navy, exact classification unknown--although some who knew him state
that he had worked on submarine craft as a skilled electrician. Kreca was
born in Serbia and emigrated to the United States, date unknown.
If
you knew Michael E. Kreca in any capacity, SiaNews.com would be grateful
for any information: on-record or off-; with credit given to sources or
anonymously. Please state your wishes when replying to editor@sianews.com (Use an anonymous proxy account and throw-away
e-mail account if concerned with privacy.)
Now,
keep reading:
How
the US Government Created the "Drug Problem" in the USA
by
Michael E. Kreca
"The
bottom line on this whole business has not yet been written." - Dr. Sidney Gottlieb; CIA Technical Services Staff
director for the MK-ULTRA program
Eighteenth-century
German philosopher Georg Friedrich Hegel long ago developed, among other
things, what he called the principle of "thesis, antithesis,
synthesis" to explain the process of deliberately enacted social disorder
and change as a road to power. To achieve a desired result, one deliberately
creates a situation ("thesis,") devises a "solution," to
solve the "problems" created by that situation
("antithesis,") with the final result being the ultimate goal of more
power and control ("synthesis.") It is unsurprising Karl Marx and his
disciples like Lenin and Trotsky, as well as the US government in its so-called
War On Drugs, made this process a keystone of their drive for total control of
all individual actions that, in their views, were not, in Mussolini's terms,
"inside the state" and thus controllable by the same.
In
September 1942, OSS director and Army Maj. Gen. William "Wild Bill"
Donovan began his search for an effective "truth serum" to be used on
POWs and captured spies. Beginning with a budget of $5,000 and the blessing of
President Franklin Roosevelt, he enlisted the aid of a few prominent physicians
and psychiatrists like George Estabrooks and Harry Murray as well as former
Prohibition agent and notorious Federal Bureau of Narcotics (FBN) director
Harry Anslinger.
The
OSS/FBN team first tested a potent marijuana extract, tetrahydrocannabinol
acetate (THCA), a colorless, odorless substance, lacing cigarettes or food
items with it, and administering them to volunteer US Army and OSS personnel,
all who eventually acquired the nickname "Donovan's Dreamers."
Testing was also conducted under the guise of treatment for shell shock.
Donovan's
team found that THCA, which they termed "TD," for "truth
drug," induced "a great loquacity and hilarity," and even, in
cases where the subject didn's feel physically threatened, some useable
"reefer madness." Peyote, morphine and scopolamine were judged too
powerful to be used in effective interrogation. In light of all this, Donovan
concluded, "The drug defies all but the most expert and search analysis,
and for all practical purposes can be considered beyond analysis." The OSS
did not, however, end the program. By that time, faced with the terrifying ship
losses the USA was suffering from German U-boats, Donovan pressed on, hoping to
find some effective chemical means to help interrogate captured U-boat sailors.
In
May 1943, George Hunter White, an Army captain, OSS officer and former FBN
agent, gave standard cigarettes laced with THCA to an unwitting August
"Augie Dallas" Del Grazio, an influential New York City gangster. Del
Grazio, who had by then had done prison stretches for assault and murder, had
been one of the Mafia's most notorious enforcers and narcotics smugglers. He
operated an opium alkaloid factory in Turkey and was a key participant in the
long-running Istanbul/Marsellies/NYC heroin pipeline commonly known as the
"French Connection." Influenced by the THC, Del Grazio (who was also
helping to smuggle spies and Mafiosi into German-occupied Italy) revealed
volumes of vital information about underworld operations, including the names
of several high ranking city and state officials who took bribes from the Mob.
Donovan was encouraged by the results of White's tests when he wrote,
"Cigarette experiments indicated that we had a mechanism offering promise
in relaxing prisoners to be interrogated."
Unsurprisingly,
the extensive wartime German experiments with various hallucinogenic drugs at
the Dachau concentration camp, directed by one Dr. Hubertus Strughold, later
honored as "the father of aviation medicine," aroused great interest
in the USA especially after an October 1945 Navy technical mission to Dachau
reported in detail on Strughold's work. So great, in fact, that when the OSS and
its successor, the CIA, imported 800 German scientists of various specialties
under the auspices of the infamous "Project Paperclip" during
1945-55, it made sure to include Dr. Strughold.
Dr.
Strughold's barbaric "medical experiments," for which his subordinates
were tried and convicted as war criminals at Nuremburg, were nothing more than
a series of bizarre and unspeakably brutal tortures. Even so, he learned a lot
about human behavior and mescaline, a natural alkaloid present in the peyote
cactus. Mescaline, long central to many Native American religious rituals and
first chemically isolated in 1896, is a phenethylamine whose ergoline skeleton
is also contained in lysergic acid (a tryptamine.)
Sandoz
Labs chemist Dr. Albert Hofmann also discovered a lysergic acid derivative
called ergonovine, a medication used to retard excessive postpartum uterine
bleeding. Based on his work with ergonovine, Dr. Hofmann first derived
d-lysergic acid diethylamide tartrate-25 (LSD, a refined alkaloidal liquid
byproduct of a rye fungus, ergot) in a series of experiments in Zurich in 1938.
He used the naturally occurring lysergic acid radical, the common item in all
ergot alkaloids, as the major component of the substance. Further experiments
in this vein yielded psilocybin, derived from the Mexican Psilocybe cubensis
mushroom, hydergine, essential today in the improvement of cerebral circulation
in geriatric patients, and dihydroergotamine, an important ingredient in blood
pressure medication.
The
well-read and broadly educated Dr. Hofmann knew ergot had a long natural and
cultural history as both medicine and poison. Ancient Greek midwives used to
give an ergot-based, gruel-like drink, called kykeon, to their patients about
to give birth. Kykeon was also consumed during the autumn Eleusinia, the
ancient Greek agricultural festival celebrated in honor of the goddess of
agriculture, Demeter. Across the Atlantic, sacramental Maya morning glories,
beautifully depicted at the ancient Mayan temple-palace complex at Teotihuac,
Mexico, dating to about 1450, also contain ergot-based alkaloids.
However,
the mindset the CIA had in its drug research work was far different from that
of Dr. Hofmann's. To our Cold War spymasters, ex-Nazis like Dr. Strughold were
definitely evil, but they were definitely useful as well. This pervasive amoral
pragmatism led, of course, to the extensive and notorious MK-ULTRA experiments
in which, for nearly 25 years, thousands of everyday Americans, both military
and civilian, were heavily dosed with numerous very potent artificial
psychoactive drugs, often without their knowledge or consent.
This
phenomenon of the obsessive "interests of national security"
expediency combined with our celebrity-obsessed pop culture that gleefully
raises and shamelessly promotes snake oil hustlers as well as the
pharmaceutical industry's pricey "pill for every ill" philosophy, was
a form of incompetence and arrogance far more hazardous than any synthetic
alkaloid ever developed and came as no surprise to those like Dr. Hofmann. LSD,
invaluable in psychiatric treatment--actor Cary Grant was cured of alcoholism
by carefully administered doses of the drug under close medical supervision--is
thousands of times more potent than the traditional herbal mixtures. In fact,
it is thousands of times more potent than the milder of the entheogenic
alkaloids. It is effective at doses of as little as a ten-millionth of a gram,
which makes it 5,000 times more potent than mescaline. It should not be taken
without training or supervision.
The
Navy tested mescaline as part of its 1947-53 Project CHATTER. MK-ULTRA was
first organized in 1949 by Richard Helms under the direction of Allen Dulles as
Project BLUEBIRD. Two years later, it was renamed ARTICHOKE (after one of
Dulles's favorite foods) then termed MK-ULTRA in 1953, finally becoming
MK-SEARCH in 1965 until the program's "official termination" eight
years later. MK-ULTRA was directly responsible for the wide underground
availability of LSD, phencyclidine (PCP--also called "angel dust"),
dimethyltryptamine (DMT), 2,5-dimethoxy-4-methylamphetamine (STP) and other
powerful synthetic psychoactive drugs in the 1960s. In the early 1950s, the CIA
and the Army had contacted Sandoz requesting several kilograms of LSD for use
in the test program. Dr. Hofmann and Sandoz refused this request, so Director
Dulles persuaded the Indianapolis-based pharmaceutical luminary Eli Lilly
(later the pioneers of and chief cheerleaders for the widely prescribed
antidepressant Prozac) to synthesize the drug contrary to existing
international patent accords--making the US government and Lilly the first
illegal domestic manufacturers and distributors of LSD.
These
were distributed via the agency's sometime allies in organized crime and
through the FBI's counterintelligence programs (COINTELPROs) directed against
various activist groups of the period. The actual definition of the term
MK-ULTRA remains unclear but a former Army Special Forces captain, John
McCarthy, who ran the CIA's Saigon-based Operation Cherry which targeted the
Cambodian ruler Prince Sihanouk for assassination, claimed that MK-ULTRA stood
for "Manufacturing Killers Utilizing Lethal Tradecraft Requiring
Assassination."
On
April 10, 1953, in a speech at Princeton University, CIA director Allen Dulles
(further feeding the already widespread but misguided fear about the high
effectiveness of the alleged Chinese "brainwashing" of US POWs in the
Korean conflict) warned that the human mind was a "malleable tool,"
and that the "brain perversion techniques" of the Reds were "so
subtle and so abhorrent" that "the brain becomes a phonograph playing
a disc put on its spindle by an outside genius over which it has no
control."
Propaganda,
in its simplest form, is condemning one's opponent publicly for doing what one
is already doing privately. Dulles, of course, was that very "outside
genius." Three days after warning assembled Princetonians of the
disturbing ramifications of these techniques, he had directed MK-ULTRA
researchers to perfect them. Dr. Sidney Gottlieb, the CIA's expert on lethal
poisons, (who reputedly was the inspiration for director Stanley Kubrick's
bizarre "Dr. Strangelove" character played by Peter Sellers in the
1964 film of the same title) headed up the operation as director of the Chemical
Division of the Technical Services Staff and, via a front organization called
"The Society For Human Ecology," distributed $25 million in drug
research grants to Harvard, Stanford, UC Berkeley and other institutions.
Meanwhile,
George Hunter White, of THCA-laced "Lucky Strikes" fame, had returned
to the FBN (now the DEA) at war's end and continued to research behavior
modifying drugs. In 1955, when MK-ULTRA was running full throttle, he was a
high ranking FBN administrator who helped the Agency develop and implement a
similar operation called Midnight Climax. In this infamous scheme,
"safehouses" staffed with prostitutes were established in San
Francisco. The hookers lured men from local taverns back to these safehouses
after their drinks had been previously spiked with LSD. White's team secretly
filmed the subsequent events in each house. The purpose of these so-called
"national security brothels" was to enable the CIA to experiment with
the use of sex and mind altering drugs to extract information from test
subjects, and it was planned, from spies, POWs, defectors and saboteurs.
Midnight
Climax was terminated after eight years when CIA Inspector General John Earman
charged that "the concepts involved in manipulating human behavior are
found by many people within and outside the Agency to be distasteful and
unethical." He stated that "the rights and interest of U.S. citizens
were placed in jeopardy." Earman further noted LSD "had been tested
on individuals at all social levels, high and low, native American and
foreign." Richard Helms, MK-ULTRA's bureaucratic godfather, summarily
rebuffed Earman's charges, claiming that "positive operational capacity to
use drugs is diminishing owing to a lack of realistic testing. Tests,"
Helms continued, "were necessary to keep up with the Soviets."
However, Helms reversed himself a year later when testifying before the Warren
Commission investigating the JFK assassination, claiming that "Soviet
research has consistently lagged five years behind Western research."
Upon
retirement from civil service in 1966, White wrote a startling farewell letter
to Dr. Gottlieb. He reminisced about his Midnight Climax work. His comments
were frightening:
"I
was a very minor missionary, actually a heretic, but I toiled wholeheartedly in
the vineyards because it was fun, fun, fun. Where else could a red-blooded
American boy lie, kill, cheat, steal, rape and pillage with the sanction and
blessing of the all-highest?"
Where
else indeed, but as a member of what would later become the hypocritical War on
(Some) Drugs?
By
the end of the 1950s the CIA was funding just about every qualified LSD
researcher and psychologist it could find, through such contractors as the
Society for the Study of Human Ecology, the Josiah Macy, Jr. Foundation, and
the Geschichter Fund for Medical Research. Author John Marks, in his 1975 book,
The Search for the Manchurian Candidate, identified the CIA's LSD research
pioneers as:
Dr.
Robert Hyde at Boston Psychopathic Hospital
Dr.
Harold Abramson at Mt. Sinai Hospital and Columbia University in New York City
Dr.
Carl Pfeiffer at the University of Illinois Medical School, Champaign-Urbana
Dr.
Harris Isbell of the NIMH-sponsored Addiction Research Center in Lexington, Ky.
Dr.
Louis Jolyon West at the University of Oklahoma, Stillwater
Dr.
Harold Hodge at the University of Rochester (N.Y.)
However,
there were prominent critics of the US government's activities, the earliest
among them being Aldous Huxley, the famed author of the chillingly prescient
1932 novel Brave New World (which described a totalitarian society whose
population was completely controlled by forcible administration of a
government-mandated "happiness drug" called "soma.") While
taking mescaline supplied by famed English surgeon Dr. Humphrey Osmond (who
discovered the close similarities between the molecular structures of
adrenaline and mescaline), Huxley completed another novel entitled The Doors of
Perception in 1954. In that book, the novelist described his intensely personal
vision of the world around him:
"I
continued to look at the flowers, and in their living light I seemed to detect
the qualitative equivalent of breathing--but of a breathing without returns to
a starting point, with no recurrent ebbs but only a repeated flow from beauty
to heightened beauty, from deeper to ever deeper meaning. Words like
"trace"and "transfiguration" came to my mind--Those idiots
(MK-ULTRAns) want to be Pavlovians; Pavlov never saw an animal in its natural
state, only under duress. The "scientific" LSD boys do the same with
their subjects. No wonder they report psychotics."
Obviously,
this isn't a typical CIA spook writing, and, given Huxley's incredible mind,
creative vision and compassion, we "are not talking about a moron or a
mental case either. Which means that giving someone mescaline while they"
are being tortured or lobotomized or electrocuted at Dachau will only tell you
a lot about torture, lobotomies and electrocution, not about mescaline.
As
author Marks noted:
It
would become supreme irony that the CIA's enormous search for weapons among
drugs--fueled by the hope that spies could control life with genius and
machines--would wind up helping to create the wandering, uncontrollable minds
of the counterculture."
Admiral's
son and musician Jim Morrison led The Doors, [of Perception] a quartet of
Liverpudlians sang of "Lucy In the Sky With Diamonds," while the
Rolling Stones dropped transparent hints about "Mother's Little
Helper." To take a lesson from Orwell, what is more important about the
1960s, indeed, about any period in history, is not so much what really happened
as how that period is remembered publicly decades later.
The
public memories of that particular era were carefully manipulated in great part
by the deliberate creation and promotion (via television and the recording
industry) of the phony and in reality quite small "drug/rock/hippie
subculture." The first underground LSD labs were actually set up by the
FBI in 1963 in both New York City and San Francisco. Many began to incorrectly
confuse the ancient medical art of herbalism with the shenanigans of amateur
basement "flower-power" and "biker" chemists.
Overenthusiastic pitchmen like social psychologist Dr. Timothy Leary and Beat
poet Allen Ginsberg sadly failed to sufficiently stress that key difference,
although the technically competent Leary clearly understood the artificially
high potency of LSD.
Leary
(and his longtime associate, psychologist Richard Alpert) matured
professionally in a CIA-funded research world. In 1948, Leary, then a UC
Berkeley graduate student, attended the yearly convention of the left-wing
American Veterans' Council in Milwaukee. There he met CIA officer Cord Meyer.
Meyer's professional specialty was infiltrating and discrediting various
organizations deemed "un-American" or "disloyal." Meyer
persuaded Leary to help him. Leary acknowledged Meyer's influence, crediting
him with "helping me understand my political-cultural role more
clearly."
During
1954-59 Leary was the director of clinical research and psychology at the
Kaiser Foundation Hospital in Oakland, Calif. The personality test that made
him famous, "The Leary," was actually used by the CIA to test
prospective employees. A grad school classmate of Leary's, CIA contractor Frank
Barron, worked with the Berkeley Institute for Personality Assessment and
Research, which was funded and staffed by CIA psychologists. In 1960 Barron,
with government funding, founded the Harvard Psychedelic Drug Research Center.
Leary followed Barron to Harvard, becoming a lecturer in psychology where he
remained for three years. Leary's Harvard associates included former chief OSS
psychologist Harry Murray, who had monitored the early OSS "truth
serum" experiments, and numerous other knowing CIA contractors. One of Dr.
Murray's many test subjects was a Harvard undergraduate math major named
Theodore Kaczynski.
In
the spring of 1963, Leary and Alpert left Harvard and founded the International
Foundation for Internal Freedom (IFIF)--later renamed the Castalia
Foundation--on a 2,500-acre estate in the small upstate New York community of
Millbrook. There, the pair of psychologists continued their hallucinogenic drug
research and soon became the chief investigative target of an ambitious
Dutchess County district attorney named G. Gordon Liddy. Multimillionaire
William Mellon Hitchcock generously bankrolled the founding and operation of
IFIF/Castalia and later financed a huge black-market LSD manufacturing
operation.
Even
so, Leary carefully stressed proper mindset, setting and dosages in a book he
coauthored with Alpert and Ralph Metzner, The Psychedelic Experience. It was
based on an ancient Tibetan shamanic manual, The Book of the Dead. The latter
work referred to an herbal tea similar in content to but far less powerful than
LSD, and insisted on mental discipline as an inherent part of the process. The
Incans of Andean South America, for instance, were an invaluable source of
medical knowledge, and used whole herbs like ayahuasca and the coca leaf, not
their artificially refined alkaloids, and spiritual technique was also taught
as an key part of the process.
However,
much like the crusading "drys" before and during Prohibition, the
MK-ULTRA inquisitors with their police state mentality in concert with
misinformed and emotionally distressed LSD users, had found their "devil
drug," (the term used by the Harrison Tax Act advocates in the 1910s and
Marijuana Tax Act backers in the 1930s) replete with tragic tales of already
emotionally distressed and lonely young people quite unprepared for such an
artificially powerful entheogen. It was also well within CIA policy to randomly
distribute LSD laced with the lethal poison strychnine so as to create
"horror stories" useful as propaganda. Dr. Hofmann himself chemically
confirmed the presence of pure strychnine in several random street samples of
LSD.
Consistent
with its policy of deliberately confusing the beneficial ancient herbs with
extremely dangerous synthetic alkaloid derivatives, the CIA surreptitiously
distributed of these synthetic compounds, termed "psychedelics," to
the public. One of them was STP, originally developed as an incapacitating
agent for the Army in 1964 at Dow Chemical. Dow even made the STP formula
public information three years later. This potent synthetic put many
unsuspecting people on a three-day trip, and sent many, hysterical with
anxiety, to the emergency room. That, of course, was the purpose of its
distribution.
During
1955-75, the Army tested LSD (termed EA-1729) and PCP on several of its
enlisted men at what was then the headquarters of its Chemical Corps, Edgewood
Arsenal in Maryland, something described in detail by Bill Kurtis in a
televised 1995 A&E Investigative Reports segment titled "Bad Trip to
Edgewood." The CIA also tested PCP (in conjunction with electroshock
"therapy" and sleep deprivation) at Allain Memorial Institute in
Montreal under the direction of the notorious Canadian psychiatrist Dr. Ewen
Cameron. The Chemical Corps (whose commander in the 1950s, Lt. General William
Creasy, advocated a new military strategy of LSD-based "nonkill
warfare") then stockpiled PCP for use as a "nonlethal incapacitant."
Excess doses of PCP, reported the CIA, could "lead to convulsions and
death." Soon, PCP was flooding the streets.
Edgewood
also received an average of 400 product "rejects" a month from major
US pharmaceutical firms. These "rejects" were actually drugs found to
be commercially useless because of their demonstrated hazards and numerous
undesirable side effects. In 1958, Edgewood obtained its first sample of a
"reject" called phenylbenzeneacetic acid (BZ) developed by
pharmaceutical giant Hoffmann-LaRoche, later known by its street nickname as
"brown acid."
BZ
(some 10,000 times as powerful as LSD) inhibits the production of hormones
which aid the brain's transfer of messages and instructions across nerve
endings (synapses), thereby severely disrupting normal human perceptual,
behavioral and sensory patterns. Its effects generally last about three days,
although symptoms-migraine headaches, giddiness, disorientation, auditory and
visual hallucinations, and erratic if not maniacal behavior--could persist for
as long as six weeks. "During the period of acute effects," noted an
Army physician, "the person is completely out of touch with his
environment." The Army also developed artillery shells and rockets with
warheads able to deliver large dosages of BZ to selected targets.
In
the summer of 1964, Beat novelist Ken Kesey (the author of One Flew Over The
Cuckoo's Nest and who had been an MK-ULTRA test subject at Stanford along with
Allen Ginsberg and Grateful Dead musician Bob Hunter) launched a yearlong
cross-country trip in a Day-Glo painted school bus filled with friends called
"Merry Pranksters." The Merry Pranksters distributed thousands of
doses of LSD along the way (a phenomenon colorfully described in author Tom
Wolfe's 1969 novel, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test) supplied by one Ronald
Hadley Stark. Stark (who died in 1984) was a CIA operative fluent in five
languages with access to unlimited public funds and numerous high-level
contacts in business and government throughout the world.
For
instance, when the underground manufacture and distribution of LSD was suddenly
derailed in 1969 due to the scarcity of its key ingredient, ergotamine
tartrate, and increasing federal law enforcement pressure, Stark, via the
Laguna Beach, Calif.-based Brotherhood of Eternal Love, a small group of local
surfers led by chemist Nicholas Sand, got it quickly back on track. For five
years, Stark, aided by the Castle Bank of the Bahamas (which pioneered the art
of money laundering for the Mob) and his contacts in a French pharmaceutical
firm, facilitated the mass production and distribution (via the Brotherhood and
other groups) an even more powerful strain of LSD nicknamed "orange
sunshine." This firm also manufactured BZ. Stark (who operated LSD labs in
Brussels and Paris as well) claimed he was going to supply orange sunshine as
an offensive weapon to CIA-backed Tibetan rebels fighting the Chinese
occupation.
Stark
also was a close friend of the Los Angeles founders of a small breakaway
Scientology sect called "The Process Church of the Final Judgement,"
English expatriates Robert DeGrimston Moore and Mary Ann McClean.
Regular
attendees of the Process Church included members of the Beach Boys, the Rolling
Stones and other prominent pop performers as well as an ex-convict and wannabe
rock musician named Charles Manson. Manson and his followers became heavy users
of orange sunshine--the trademark "bad acid" of the day--which they
were all on when, on Manson's orders, they carried out the brutal August 1969
Tate-LaBianca murders. When Stark (who is believed to have distributed an
estimated 50 million doses of LSD during his Agency career) was arrested for
drug trafficking in Bologna in 1975, Italian magistrate Giorgio Floridia
ordered his release on the grounds that he had been a CIA agent since 1960.
Judge Floridia documented and justified this using a list of Stark's numerous
intelligence contacts.
These
were and are all classic government COINTELPRO-style tricks--this is how
natural herbs and their mild, pharmaceutical-grade derivatives were quickly and
easily made lethal and consequently demonized. How was this done? First,
foolish claims were made that there was no difference between safe whole herbs
and their potentially deadly ultra-refined alkaloids, next, the best of the
traditional herbs and the milder of the pharmaceutical-grade alkaloid
derivatives were made unavailable, and finally, the streets were flooded with
potentially deadly synthetics. Deliberate perversions of science like angel dust
continue to be a great propaganda tool for our diehard drug warriors, and the
worn catchall excuse of "the interest of national security" is used
to justify appalling covert drug capers ranging from CIA-sponsored heroin
production and trafficking in Southeast Asia in the 1960s to the
Bush/Clinton/Mena/Nicaragua cocaine-for-arms smuggling schemes in the 1980s.
These
Constitution-shredding police state methods were adapted from the Nazis and the
Soviets by and large and were applied by the CIA, NSA, DEA, BATF, IRS and FBI
against us. Scores of groups, ranging from the American Indian Movement and
Black Panthers to militias and religious organizations like the Branch
Davidians in Waco, Texas (in which the government first falsely charged as
illegal methamphetamine dealers in order to get a Posse Comitatus Act waiver to
use military force against them) were either disrupted by agents
provocateur-style riots, bombings and armed standoffs, smeared in the
mainstream news media through the "Reichstag Fire" approach, or, in
the case of the Davidians, physically exterminated. The War on Some Drugs is
merely a horrible extension and intensification of these tried-and-true
Hegelian methods, a "war" in which we all lose.
Short
Bibliography
Bowart,
Walter; Operation Mind Control, Dell Publishing, 1978.
Delgado,
Jose, Physical Control of the Mind, Harper, NYC, 1969.
Huxley,
Aldous, The Doors of Perception, Harper, NYC, 1954.
Lee,
Martin; Shalin, Bruce, Acid Dreams, 1986.
Marchetti,
Victor, The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence, New York, 1974.
Marks,
John, The Search for the Manchurian Candidate, New York, 1975.
Masters,
Robert & Houston, Jean, The Varieties of Psychedelic Experience: The
Classic Guide to the Effects of LSD on the Human Psyche, 2000.
McCoy,
Alfred, The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade,
Lawrence Hill, 1972, rev. 1991.
Meerloo,
Joost, The Rape of the Mind, Crowell, NYC, 1956.
Skinner,
B.F., Beyond Freedom and Dignity," Knopf, NYC, 1971
Smith,
Harris R. OSS: The Secret History of America's First Central Intelligence
Agency, Berkeley, 1972.
Stevens,
Jay, Storming Heaven: LSD and the American Dream, 1998.
April
19, 2001
Michael
E. Kreca lives in San Diego and has been a financial reporter for
Knight-Ridder, Business Week and the Financial Times of London.
Copyright 2001
LewRockwell.com