Drugs: Threat to World and Factor of US Policy
by Jeremy McCoy
Oil, weapons and drugs are among the products with the largest turnover in the world. According to the International Energy Agency, the world demand for oil is between 94 million barrels per day with the United States being the largest oil consumer in the world, 11,500,000 barrels of oil per day. Likewise, according to the International Institute of Studies for Peace in Stockholm, the United States is the leading producer and exporter of weapons worldwide, controlling 31% of the international market.
Regarding drugs, according to the United Nations report, 255 million people – slightly over 5 per cent of those aged 15 to 64 years worldwide – consume drugs. 182 million people consume only marijuana, 48.9 million people use heroin, 17 million users consume cocaine and the rest of people consume amphetamines, ecstasy and other types of drugs. According to the UN Drug Report, an unacceptable number of drug users worldwide continue to lose their lives prematurely, with an estimated 190,000 drug-related deaths in 2017.
Today the United States is the first marijuana producer in the world. As for heroin, Afghanistan (invaded by the United States since 2001) is the world’s leading producer of this drug. Cocaine continues to flow mainly from Colombia (where the United States has been operating since 2000 with the “Plan Colombia”). This country ranks first in the world for its illegal production that increased over the past years.
By the way, the case of Afghanistan is very interesting. According to the United Nations, the country, before the US intervention, had almost eradicated the production of heroin. However, since 2002 its production increased significantly, considering that only in 2014 there were estimated 6,500 tons of opium. It is even more amazing to know that 90% of the heroin consumed in Canada comes from Afghanistan. The heroin market of Europe is supplied by this invaded country as well.
The same thing happens to the production of cocaine in Colombia. The United States has implemented an alleged plan to shovel the cultivation of this illegal product since 2000 and has deployed 7 military bases in this country. However, contrary to these measures drug production keeps on increasing and Colombia continues to supply cocaine to the American and European markets. According to the UN, Colombia has increased the production of this drug by 52% in 2015; it is about 442 metric tons per year.
How does the United States relate to the drug trafficking business?
The United States used the drug business to finance the subversive activities of the Central Intelligence Agency against other states. The CIA and the DEA – expelled in Venezuela and Bolivia – have acted hand in hand to support the world drug trade, thus turning the United States into an Empire of Drug Trafficking.
The CIA began using the drug trade to generate income since the 1950s, financing operations in Thailand and other Asian countries with a great amount of drugs. The climax of these American activities became evident in the 1980s when the United States used the funds obtained from heroin taken from Afghanistan to Western Europe for financing the organization led by Osama Bin Laden.
The same case occurred in Central America, when the United States with the mediation of the CIA, funded the Nicaraguan contras on the money taken from the sale of cocaine they received from Colombia, Peru and Bolivia and imported into their territory. Reports published by the US Congress and declassified documents confirm how the CIA and the DEA worked with drug traffickers and provided material assistance, including using their bank accounts in Bank of Credit and Commerce International to launder the drug money with which they financed their secret activities in the world.
Due to the international scandal the US position to “fight against drug trafficking” was under question and all the officials involved in these cases were prosecuted, however none of them was punished in fact and were reinstated by George Bush Jr.
Does the United States use this scheme today?
The monetary income from the sale of narcotics continues to be used by the United States to finance clandestine operations, but it has also served to finance its own crises. In 2009, Antonio Maria Costa, head of the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, stated that drugs money worth billions of dollars kept the financial system afloat at the height of the global crisis. Later, in 2012, the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations released the report on U.S. vulnerabilities to money laundering, drugs, and terrorist financing stating that every year almost 300 billion dollars of criminal origin are washed by the banks throughout the world and half of those funds pass through the American banks.
Such allegations of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee were confirmed in 2012 when the New York Federal Court made public the participation of HSBC, JP Morgan, Wells Fargo and Banks of America in the laundering of money from drug trafficking. In 2008, it was confirmed HSBC that this bank had laundered 1,100 million dollars of the Sinaloa cartel for the United States. The Court imposed fines but none of its directors or staff was imprisoned. This indicates that we are facing a society of accomplices, where the state finishes legalizing drug money through the fines. There are more US banks that are identified to be involved in the laundering of drug dollars, such as City Group, Bank of New York, and Bank of Boston, however, everything indicates that they have the protection of the US authorities.
There are countless confirmed scandals around DEA in Latin America. This US entity maintains close relations with drug cartels in Colombia despite being presented as the one that fights them. In March 2015, the US Department of Justice published the report confirming the deformed behavior of these officials participating in sex parties organized by drug traffickers using the facilities of the DEA and receiving gifts from criminals.
The US intelligence flagrantly uses drug trafficking to keep its activities hidden under the international law, as well as to raise money for special operations. The policy chosen in the 1980s is currently maintained, and both the CIA and the DEA continue to protect their drug trafficking corridors.
What continues to attract attention is that the UN Office against Drugs and Crime, despite having decisive information to blame US officials of being drug criminals, maintains an inert attitude towards this illegal activity that takes thousands of lives every year and causes so much harm to the society. In other words, interests of the White House and Wall Street prevail over those of humanity.
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The major causes of death in most first world countries are heart attacks, strokes and cancer.
One simple change can reduce the risk factor of all three by at least 50%.
Veganism.
Top 3 Dangers of a Vegan Diet
Of all the health crazes in past and recent years, the vegan diet is potentially the most dangerous one for our health. While not one exact form of eating works perfectly for everyone, the very real (top 3) health risks and danger posed by a vegan diet are important to understand.
More at http://www.grassfedgirl.com/top-3-dangers-of-a-vegan-diet/
Brought to you by the meat industry, perhaps.
Nope, not at all, far from it. Perhaps you ought to read that web-page top to bottom.
I’m afraid I’ve read such screeds innumerable times. The vast weight of real evidence, not corrupted by industry money, is the less meat the better. Grass-fed better than grain-fed, white meat less harmful than red, and complex carbohydrates making up the bulk of the diet. And then there is the moral aspect of animal confinement, then slaughter. Do you know that here in Austfailure, the live sheep industry sends thousands of sheep to the Middle East, in the summer, and the poor creatures are so tightly packed that lambs and the weaker individuals are trampled to death, drowning in faeces, yet the evil Federal regime refuses to interfere with ‘business’?
Well, that is not the case where I live. Switzerland has the strictest laws in the world with regard to the treatment of livestock. Cattle is grass-fed most of the year, hay-fed in the winter, and always access to the outside. Pigs are for the most part reared outside or in decent and spacious stalls. Sheep and goats are reared outside. Factory farming is strictly prohibited. The use of hormones is completely prohibited, and antibiotics must exclusively be used for treating bacterial illnesses. Calves must be fed (suckled) by their mothers and have to be kept with their mothers, so their meat is never white. The transportation of livestock is also strictly regulated with regard to the conditions of the animals in vehicles. They have to have access to water and are not packed like sardines in a tin. They have to be taken to the closest slaughterhouse and stunned properly before being killed. Of course, there are the occasional cases of abuse which are severely punished.
The website whose link I posted gives two links for people to find where the closest organically-reared animal meat is available. Did you not see that?
Intensive pig farming in Switzerland:
https://www.alamy.com/stock-photo-a-large-group-of-pigs-in-a-field-at-a-high-intensity-organic-pig-farm-23911820.html
@Mulga. From the herbivores mouth [Vegan Society]: “Very low B12 intakes can cause anemia and nervous system damage. The only reliable vegan sources of B12 are foods fortified with B12 (including some plant milks, some soy products and some breakfast cereals) and B12 supplements. Vitamin B12, whether in supplements or fortified foods, [even in] animal products, comes from micro-organisms.”
So one can be a healthy vegan yet have a clear conscience because micro-organisms rank a billion years below vegetables on the Ladder of Evolution.
Read the real stuff:
http://www.adaptt.org/
https://www.drmcdougall.com/health/education/health-science/featured-articles/articles/diet-only-hope-for-arthritis/
If you really want to threaten the world, you grab the food: all of it.
Vandana Shiva versus seed patenting:
https://www.globalresearch.ca/the-bayer-monsanto-merger-empowering-a-life-destroying-cartel/5641082
@Rilme. That’s right: “Food First” (the name of a book). Around 6M people die of malnutrition each year — sometimes in countries which are exporting food. The Mammonites who run the world merely to make money are mad as well as bad. See post below about powerful US criminals destroying food crops in the USA’s fake “War on Drugs”.
And don’t forget the water. All of it.
One issue not considered by Jeremy McCoy’s detailed article is that the US may be intentionally encouraging the drug trade to trap targeted populations in drug addiction and the social, economic and other issues that arise from widespread drug addiction in communities. Resources have to be diverted from other more productive activities to treat immediate medical and long-term health issues, to particular forms of policing (especially heavy-handed and violent policing) and solving crimes committed by drug addicts, and programs to supply methadone and similar fungibles that act as much to control drug addicts as to maintain their addictions. The crack wars in southeast Los Angeles in the 1980s, in which the CIA fed crack into poor communities there, could be seen in this light.
Jen – a very good and important analysis on your part. I always felt that the CIA’s narcotics trafficking was often as much about social control on the domestic front as it was making money for covert operations for overseas operations. I think this is particularly true of the Iran/Contra affair. In Iran-Contra the drugs coming into the U.S. paid for the weapons to the Contras going out; Those drug coming in, as you pointed out, devastated poor communities in the U.S. and fueled the creation of the prison industrial complex, more militarized policing and also disenfranchising 100’s of thousands of largely urban African Americans from voting due to felony records. The political decision to make penalties for crack cocaine mush harsher than for the power was policy directly aimed at poor communities of color as a social control function.
In a very real sense when a poor person in the U.S. bought crack cocaine from the CIA’s Iran/Contra operation they were unwittingly paying money toward the repression of their poor brothers and sisters in Nicaragua. In the world of the psychopaths at the CIA this must have been seen as a rather perfect “win-win” symmetry of this operation. Poor primarily Black communities in the U.S. by narcotizing their pain with cheap CIA crack cocaine ended up paying for the repression of the poor communities of color in yet another CIA targeted country – hardly a coincidence one would think.
In the end I have no doubt that the CIA, and American oligarchy it represents, much preferred the Bloods and Crips gangs shooting each other over drug turf (while selling CIA supplied drugs) than to have to deal with generation of young Black activists who were drug free, as MalcolmX demanded of his followers, knowing this was necessary in order to have any chance at fighting the racist repressive system of the U.S.
Whenever I see the traffic on US highway exchanges and in general in US cities either on TV or on a video, I am astounded by the density of it – and I am aware of the fact that this requires enormous amounts of fuel because not everyone by far has a hybrid or an elecric car. So my thoughts are that this simply cannot continue much longer. I even have these thoughts when I see the comparatively (to the US) much lighter traffic here in the streets of Geneva, Switzerland. I’ve been having these thoughts and feelings for years now, yet still it goes on and on and on.
The electricity which powers electric cars has come from somewhere. It’s one of Elon Musk’s popular myths that his cars pollute less. In fact they may even pollute more if the electricity used to charge them has come from coal-fired power stations.
Even so, Americans need to try walking or cycling sometimes. Then they wouldn’t be so obese.
And using public transport, too.
It’s true. But the energy efficiency of a metro train or trolleybus per passenger is enormously better than a selfish idiot at the wheel of one of Musk’s deathtrap cars. 🙂 Today I’m going to work by bike as usual :-)) Moscow’s weather may be impassable for bikes for 4-5 months of the year – but in summer they are a great option :-))
Part of the problem though is that in the US – and also in Australia – new suburbs and cities are not built to favour walking, cycling or other forms of transport apart from driving cars. In too many communities, people have a stark choice from getting from Point A to Point B: either risk their lives (or jail time) walking in areas where there are no pavements and they must in effect share the road with traffic, or use cars. Should they choose Plan A and end up being hit, they end up carrying the blame. In one case, a woman who tried walking across the road with her son when they were both hit by a car, she was the one charged with homicide when the child died.
https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2013/01/america-walking-disaster/4409/
And imagine being a pensioner in one of those ghettos? If your eyesight falters, or you can’t drive your car any longer – what then? To say nothing of kids under driving age, who are made prisoners in their own homes :-((
Oh, and I forgot to mention that electric cars don’t pollute the air on the streets of cities, which is a good thing.
Let’s just pollute the air around coal-fired power stations instead? People who live near power stations aren’t bankers or lawyers.
In my neck of the woods there are no coal-fired plants for many hundreds of miles. Only hydro-electric, wind, solar and – unfortunately – nuclear plants.
It’s great to hear :-)) Except about the nuclear plants, of course.
Yes, but the electricity need NOT come from coal power stations. There is plenty of sun and wind to meet all our needs.
Yet in reality coal is cheapest, so it’s the favourite fuel, sadly.
Coal is NO LONGER the cheapest, even if you ignore the ‘externality’ of causing human Near Term Extinction.
Coal will always be cheapest, while we allow Chinese producers to dump it on energy markets for fourpence. There’s the reality of it, sadly.
The Trump Administration’s Coal Bailout (NYT)
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/07/opinion/trump-coal-bailout.html
Wish it were not so. of course.
It’s the same in Austfailure, where coal-worship is the de facto religion of the Right, in politics, in the Murdoch fakestream media cancer and in Rightwing, fossil-fuel funded propaganda tanks.
Sadly I’m not surprised. One look at Julie Bishop’s face says everything.
The mummified hag is at it today, hissing the Ukronazi lies regarding MH17. The final drive to wreck the FIFA World Cup has begun.
Good heavens. what a coincidence that the MH17 report (which they admit isn’t complete) has been published immediately prior to the St P Economic Forum, and the kick-off of the World Cup, eh? Whoever would have imagined it?
what evidence is there for there being enough renewable energy to meet our needs?
Admin: there isn’t (see below). We cannot continue the dead paradigm of perpetual growth. Even if we replace the energy we are using, we have to keep doubling the energy input to get the capital valorisational output to stave off debt collapse. All so a handful of billionaires become multi-trillionaires? The planet cannot sustain the iniquity. Even the conservative IEA is predicting “oil shocks” in the next few years. The networked globalised economy is systemically fragile (see Jack Rasmus’ book of the same name to detail the legion of ways we are financially vulnerable. BTW: China is the engine of crisis, not solution). I do not know the solution (although I could adumbrate what a society would have to look like to survive) but we are facing a crisis of perception if we do not wise up. Humanity is facing an existential crisis: the obscenely rich are plundering what is left to get obscenely richer, while the masses are content with weddings and World Cups! (If you really want to get your head around the civilization crisis: I recommend Hall and Klitgaard: “Energy, and the Wealth of Nations”). BTW: we are peculiarly vulnerable in the UK, being a tertiary service economy without food or energy sovereignty.
Of course you are correct-capitalist neoplasia MUST end. But if a truly sustainable economy, say a circular economy or steady state or some other type, is ever created, it can EASILY be powered by renewables. Very easily.
Absolutely agree: but it requires the entire reordering of society to post-production, reversing neoliberal globalism, reducing food and product miles, modifying private property rights and all the other things I bang on about. But above all it requires a new philosophy of mind and respectful appreciation of the environment and each other, not least, to create the will to change. All the time we endorse the statist mentality, we are apt to be subordinates. If the “reality based community” ,which is nowhere near a cohesive community, is to provide the seedbed for alternative visions, now would be a good time. Forty years ago would have been better!
I remember hearing Edward Goldsmith, Zac’s uncle, of the Ecologist, talking on our ABC radio, in 1988, before its Howardisation and takeover by the Murdoch cancer. He told the host that forty more years of ecological damage like that which had occurred since WW2 would see humanity in terminal plight. Of course, with the rise of China, the situation is probably even worse than he imagined. ‘Intelligence’ looks more and more like a fatal mutation.
Recycled Vierotchka’s post from Don’t Visit the M.E. Nobody else seemed to like it there but this thread might stimulate a more appreciative response:
“I don’t have a fridge, I don’t have a cooker (I eat raw veggies, fruit and meat [steak tatare]), and I don’t have a car. I either walk or use public transport. My only luxuries are – as you stated – my laptop, my internet connection (optic fibre) and my little TV. I consume very little electricity, and the electricity I do consume is hydroelectric power (J’habite à Genève).”
I must add that the fruit, vegetables and meat are consumed are all from local organic farm. I also eat some dairy – raw milk and cheeses made from raw milk, not as local as the rest but still fairly local since from Switzerland, and they are delivered to the local shops by rail (electric).
Numerous studies have shown that capturing only a tiny proportion of the solar energy that bathes the world would cover all our energy needs. Moreover wind power alone could satisfy the USA requirements, and thus any other state with good wind resources, on-shore and off. It is only a matter of investment, made more easy by the fact that solar thermal and PV, and wind are all now cheaper than fossil fuels, with costs still falling. And, of course, not using renewables will cause an ecological catastrophe of unimaginable depth and extent.
Geothermal is an excellent source of 24/365 power. Iceland leads the way. Japan, also full of volcanoes, prefers to burn money on the four fuels: methane, coal, oil, and uranium.
Geoff disagrees with you Mulga.
Geoff disagrees:
https://newmatilda.com/2018/05/23/flooded-valleys-burning-forests-global-face-renewable-energy-part-ii/
Fair, read as far as the garbage, long refuted, about wind turbines killing birds and bats, a Rightwing, fossil fuel industry denialist trope, LONG refuted over and over, and thereby knew this was crap. More garbage followed, and it turns out Russell is a nuclear shill, which, given the costs and decades long delays with nukes (let alone the hideous risks)is de facto a pro-fossil fuels position. The New Matilda has gone to the shit-house, as they say.
Electric cars are a start. They have the potential for their energy source to be renewable. A fossil fuel burning SUV will, however, always be a fossil fuel burning SUV.
Oh, it’s going to end, very soon. Whether in an ecological Holocaust, or a thermo-nuclear one is the only question.
We are in the early stages of an energy crisis. The cubic mile of oil visualization gives some idea of scale and magnitude. We have 40 years at current consumption to replace the equivalent energy: the Wikipedia entry gives some examples of how this might be achieved. Such as 52 nuclear plants per year for 50 years: or 91,250,000 solar PVs. Only capitalism dictates that the rate of consumption must accelerate exponentially: or the debt hangover from the GFC will catch up with us. So the replacement ratio of energy (in BOE) must also accelerate exponentially. It should be apparent that this is not achievable: but if it were, the world economy would still have to double, then quadruple, on a roughly thirty year cycle. To do this, the primary energy consumption, renewable and non-renewable resource consumption, and waste and pollution all have to increase (though technological advance would mean that it would not necessarily quadruple – it still ain’t happening).
The reserve replacement ratio for oil is the worst it has been for 40 years. The general synopsis is we are not looking for oil as the CapEx funds are being consumed in debt repayments. A hydrogen economy is a net energy sink, and EVs add to the resource burden. Then there is the environment. You get the picture: only the most inveterate hopium could posit that we can maintain our industrialised, financialised materialistic consumption for much longer.
The point is: does anyone know of a major world leader or state that is even contemplating the death of capitalism? Or the consequences or alternatives? In reality, capitalism is already dead: the only thing keeping the fictitious economy going is financial engineering. No one is contemplating what comes next, let alone designing a transition. The entire ruling class is deluded, basing their reality on hallucinated exponential GDP growth. I predict the collapse of this simulation hypothesis in the next ten to fifteen years: plus the collapse of capitalism’s false consciousness wants, needs, and desires …something for which no one is prepared. It is something we could have easily accomodated with forethought, and still could ameliorate with afterthought. Only, it will never come from the top down. It is a slim hope that the people will demand change in the bourgeois heartlands (there will be no change allowed on the periphery, where we export our violence). But this can not occur so long as the “turkeys vote for Christmas” of perpetual materialistic growth. Materialism is over. Spiritualism or barbarism comes next.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cubic_mile_of_oil
To survive capitalism MUST go, the kleptocrats stolen wealth MUST be redistributed back to the humanity from which it was stolen, and the human population humanely reduced to two billion, at most. To power such a radically down-sized global economy, renewables are easily enough, along with greater efficiency and lowered consumption. Anything else is a literal dead end.
Agreed: the antithesis of “primitive accumulation” or “accumulation by dispossession” is “evolutionary repossession”, as I call it. We need the land as well, put back into commons, the opposite of the “enclosure” acts – “evolutionary disclosure” or accessibility acts. I’m not sure the world is ready for such radical polity, but it will be.
The parasites made much of ‘restitution’ when it meant stolen goods being returned to hereditary parasites in eastern Europe. What we need is restitution to humanity of the diverse paradise we inherited 10,000 years ago, and have been destroying ever since. But the enemies of Life on Earth, the dead souls of the psychopathic Right, will fight it every inch of the way. Future prospects are grim.
It’s not a left or right thing, the bourgeois consumers of materialism and culture, or what passes for culture, are instrumental. It’s not so much a top down imposition as a cross cultural and class cultural collusion. A sufficient quorum of consumers must maintain the “consensual collective constituency” in order to validate subordination. Why do they think they invest so much energy in manufactured consent? To keep us consuming: information, culture, and materialism. They want us to be state dependant for our every need: physical and material and psychological and immaterial. I happen to think we could do an awful lot better than that, if we break our state dependency and heirarchical subordination. To do that, we need to take our power back and claim the rights and sovereignty of our own perception, conception, and acculturation …not theirs: which is on the brink of implosion anyway.
Well, by ‘Right’ I simply mean the life-hating psychopaths. They are a group entirely congruent with ‘Rightwing’ political parties, the business parasites and their fakestream media and other brainwashers. ‘Left’ political parties, in any meaningful sense, no longer exist anywhere in the West. They did in a polite, social democratic, form, exist with the Depression and WW2 generation, when decent, humane, non-psychopathic individuals came to power briefly, in various places in the West.
This, naturally, produced a ferocious, hate-crazed, reaction from the Right. In Latin America under the tutelage of Thanatopia, it produced rivers of blood, death-squad terror, torture and general horror-Western Moral Values at their finest. Here in Austfailure, it produced our one decent Federal Government, that of Whitlam, whose mild social reformism, infrastructure building and foreign affairs rationality produced a psychopathic reaction of unhinged hatred (you can still get older ‘conservatives’ to foam at the mouth at the mere mention of ‘Whitlam’) US intervention to engineer a constitutional coup through their ‘asset’, Kerr, and an unending forty year descent into social viciousness and foreign servitude to the USA and Israel that will bring a nasty reckoning, very soon.
Where was I? Yes-Rightwing,( however you define it) dominance is totally antithetical to continued human existence. It’s as simple as that.
Vierotchka, Interesting that you use the word “density”; I’m astounded by the vast space allocated to moving a rather small number of people around. There was a time when the centre of Houston, TX was mainly empty space. Imagine walking from one building to another across the street:
More about space:
http://humantransit.org/2012/09/the-photo-that-explains-almost-everything.html
More about traffic “accidents”:
http://www.aviewfromthecyclepath.com/2011/01/stop-child-murder.html
Well, they did have to put their cars somewhere while they were working…! My husband is from Huston, by the way.
Enormous amounts of fuel, yes, because we’re moving cars that weigh x tons in order to transport people who weigh x kg. Every day, at the same time, on the same roads. There couldn’t be a more wasteful system!
America is not the world it just thinks it is the Irony being that they created most of them the roundabout goes round and round
Well, now we have it.
The Drug Prohibition is not about laws (Misuse of Drugs Act, UN Single Convention and all that).
It’s a business!
A monopoly business: CIA Inc.
And clearly as ruthless in protecting its monopoly against competitors (those who would legalize drugs) as the Mexicans, Colombians, Mafiosi, Triads, etc., etc.
Thanks for the stats, they put my own concerns into perspective. As many people have HIV as use cocaine (50 Million); yet HIV mortality is 5 times higher than for all drug deaths (1M vs 200k per annum). Hydrocarbon deaths (AZC oil and gas wars) are likewise higher (estimated at around 500,000 p.a for the past 20 years); and the money wasted is much higher. Other hydrocarbon related deaths (traffic accidents) are higher still: 1.3Mpa. My own drug, alcohol, accounts for even more (2.5 Mpa) yet is not pursued by the Law on Drugs. A truly memorable number of people die from malnutrition and starvation: 6 Mpa. These figures help me to understand my lack of interest in the subject despite a preponderance of colourful drug news and exciting drug movies. Sorry if this sounds smug.
Finally! An area in foreign policy where the U.S. is leading! Tubularsock says, “You have got to take the VICTORIES when you see them”!
If it hasn’t occurred to you why it is called The Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA), well NOW YOU KNOW! Somebody has to run the operations. The CIA is the enforcer agency. Sweet.
DEA=Drug Employment Agency.
CIA=Cocaine Importers Agency.
A really excellent post. Thanks. A couple of observations. I’ve made two trips to Colombia as a human rights activist, one in the late 1990’s the other in 2001. What was fascinating is the difference between U.S. involvement in Colombia and EU projects at that time. The EU was supporting the growing of cacao for chocolate exports, while the U.S. was spraying herbicides everywhere ostensibly to suppress coca production for cocaine, but in the process destroying these cacao plantations that actually offered an alternative to coca growing. So U.S. policy was totally counterproductive even if taken at face value, but of course the spraying always took place where rebel activity was greatest, defoliating those regions and leaving the poor with no option BUT coca production for survival.
Another observation is that the extreme violence of the U.S. supported death squads in Colombia stood out, even compared to El Salvador where I’d traveled in the early 1990’s. In El Salvador the death squads routinely engaged in torture and dismemberment as a terror tactic, while in Colombia they took such terror tactics to new heights. In Colombia they often engaged in cutting up living human beings in front of their village and family using chain saws. Of course these tactics never made U.S. MSM reporting as Colombia is a U.S. ally and Plan Colombia was off and running. So there is a bizarre symmetry when we look at say our U.S. supported jihadist buddies used for regime change in the Middle East, and their decapitation of living human beings (the Saudi’s also of course), and the extreme brutality of the Colombian death squads, which I can’t but help believe sent many former and current members into the drug cartels as “enforcers” using the same techniques of terror. The U.S. has trained and supported the most horrific torture and brutality in its pacification efforts not only in the Middle East, but also throughout Latin America. Most American’s remain blissfully unaware of this of course.
Finally, it is a rather significant fact, though unspoken in MSM, that the U.S. presidency is a CIA vetted affair (Trump’s problems with the deep state showing HRC was the only candidate thus vetted in the last election). In the 1990’s we had Bill Clinton as the Arkansas governor squashing state police investigations into the Iran Contra drugs for guns operation at the Mena airfield, all while the sitting vice president George Bush was running that operation through underlings like Oliver North. It is quite obvious that then small time governor Clinton proved his bona fides to the deep state through these actions in protecting the Iran/Contra drug trafficking operation. This creates the delicious irony of tying a sitting vice president and soon to be future president in “Bush,” to another future president in “Clinton”- BOTH linked to “the very same CIA drug running operation.” You can’t make this stuff up. Again, mentioning such recent history to most Americans will result in a blank stare and the inane question of whether one is a “conspiracy theorist.”
Wachovia bank can be added to the list of launderers, one suspects London property also serves as a rinsing mechanism, as only drug money and professional pimping, human trafficking and sex slavery remotely justify valuations.
Remember that most of UK buildings and institutions can be traced back to the Slave Trade, opium trafficking in general and the East India Company in particular. EIC was legally allowed to prosecute wars, the template for Wars For Drugs. University of London was paid for by EIC, hence is a drug trade child. Bristol and Liverpool built their civic insfrastructure on slave trade money. The Hong Kong hub was key for many British drug traffickers, including major corporations who now sponsor scholarships at the University of Oxford.
Britain is now the cocaine snorting capital of Europe, the City of London has long been the money laundering capital of Europe and dozens of UK politicians are multimillionaires courtesy of commissions paid smoothing through arms sales to Saudi Arabia. Even if Mark Thatcher had to ride on the coat tails of mummy in Downing Street…
Let us not delude ourselves that the Russian mafia, Chinese triads and the like don’t have dreams of becoming the new drug lords.
But we do have incontrovertible evidence that the Uk and US overlords have grown obscenely wealthy trading in drug addiction, premature death and widespread human misery……
Unionist terror gangs in Ireland adopted a similar policy to US sponsored death squads such as ISIS and Los Pepes i.e they made a point of mutilating innocent members of the public whilst they were killing them. These tactics are recommended policy of Brigadier General Frank Kitson who was tasked with drawing up British army policy in the seventies. His activities in Aden,Kenya etc gave him the knowledge in how to confront insurgents etc. It must be said the British State has went to great lengths to cover up their sponsoring of them of course. Keeping up appearances and all that.
Colombia with its death-squad Boss, Uribe was a US favourite, whereas Venezuela, where the Chavez Government reduced poverty and lifted the poor up, was subjected to vicious sanctioning and abuse, vilification that continues to today in an extraordinarily scurrilous and plain Evil hate spew by some creature (the mug shot is like any member of any Latin American junta that you’ve ever seen) in the Fraudian, now really, really, open in its existence as just another Imperial shit-rag.
@IGTrauma: “U.S. was spraying herbicides everywhere ostensibly to suppress coca production for cocaine, but in the process destroying these cacao plantations”.
Reminds me of a WW2 observation, “When the Yanks fired everyone ducked — friend and foe alike”.
The third leading cause of death in US is medical treatment. To talk of ‘drugs’ without pharma (a derivative of the Oil cartels) is to miss the point.