CIA: The Cocaine Intelligence Agency
Despite COVID-19 and the extreme coverage of the pandemic by American mainstream media, the main cause of hospital admissions in the United States of America remains excessive consumption of alcohol, usually by adults.
The younger generation, however, finds itself flooded with novel synthetic drugs, highly potent and easily available on the black market, the likelihood of overdosing on dangerous drugs persists and Americans continue living with a very serious drug problem.
The destructive aspects of the illicit drugs available in the American drug market have been exacerbated by the popularity of synthetic drugs such as Fentanyl, for example, which is similar to morphine, but is reportedly 50 to 100 times more potent.
This offers another explanation for the rise in the number of overdose deaths.
And I just realised that maybe, maybe I'll give sobriety a shot because the worst thing that could ever happen; maybe I'll be happy. The worst thing that could happen if I keep going is I'll die.
Former Addict 1
In this article, we shall delve into the various aspects of a much less reported epidemic in America, drug overdoses.
We shall consider how much the drug overdose epidemic in the US has changed, who's the most impacted, but more importantly, what could be done about it by the government, the individual states and the people.
I can tell you that in the height of my addiction, my little brother overdosed. And when I say overdosed, I mean, me and him shot heroin together. And I realised he wasn't breathing, his lips started turning blue.
Former Addict 2
A most important factor in the spiking overdose deaths is the opioid crisis which has afflicted the USA and has been tearing apart families and communities in recent years.
The crisis began with the over prescription of drugs such as OxyContin to average Americans seeking treatment for health problems like chronic headaches. The move had been promoted by Big Pharma, by companies such as Purdue Pharma.
While the company was brought down in court, the powerful Sackler family has managed to escape all accountability. The Sackler family still stands accused of helping fuel the US opioid epidemic.
How much are powerful entities such as the Sackler family to blame for the skyrocketing addiction and overdose rates in America?
I want to blame the Sackler family almost completely for this but they also had a lot of help. The Sackler family had a lot of deep ties to the FDA and local law enforcement and the Sackler family wanted to make a lot of money.
They developed this so called time release painkiller. They got the FDA to do something unprecedented. They put it on the label that it was non-addictive, and a lot of the doctors that they were, and then they used aggressive marketing techniques where the sales representatives for Purdue pharmaceuticals, the Sackler family's pharmaceutical company, were taught how to lie to people, how to lie to the doctors, and they told [the] doctors that it was not addictive and the doctors are like, “Well, I never heard of an opioid that was not addictive”, and at that time there was a crisis with painkillers, people getting addicted to painkillers.
Cindy Sheehan, Social Justice Activist
Opioid overdoses are especially tragic as they tend to affect people who are less prone to addiction; people who consulted their doctors for mostly normal and benign health issues.
It is therefore safe to say that they are victims of the medical industrial complex in the US, which has been obsessed with reaping benefits from the pharmaceutical industry with no regard for its repercussions.
It is really tragic. You know, we've seen cases in our own community, that people who get addicted to these painkillers, eventually their source dries up and when my sister, for example, was suffering from cancer she couldn't get painkillers for her cancer pain, which was real.
Cindy Sheehan, Social Justice Activist
Unfortunately, Americans are facing a very serious crisis which emanated from the complex internal politics of the healthcare Juggernaut, Perdue, where the men at the top make decisions about how to lead the sector in order to gain the most profits for themselves and their shareholders.
How could the rising number of overdoses in the United States affect the current public health crisis?
Well, you know, the opiate epidemic has a lot to do with prescription drugs. And that's the very key to drugs period. Right now, a lot of young people have been taking drugs. So it definitely will affect you know, people being able to function at work and provide for their families.
Drug addiction in this country is … almost like Heroin used to be, you know, heroin was the epidemic, [which] was very dangerous because people did anything to just get a needle.
But these days, they're doing anything to get a pill right now, even when it comes to the selling their family, if they have.
So this is very important and they hurt a lot of elders because they go to their parents and ask for so much money over and over again, just to continue to get the drug.
Steven Young, Activist and Commentator
To this day, families in America have had to pay the price for what Big Pharma has done. Overdoses also occur on the more powerful synthetic substances such as Fentanyl and methamphetamine, which are smuggled into America or made illegally inside the country.
The response to the epidemic by the administration of US President Joe Biden has been deemed inadequate.
I think that it's tragic that almost everybody in the United States, including my family, has lost, maybe not a family member, but a close person that might as well have been a family member, have died from overdoses.
Our friend, as a matter of fact, died from [a] Fentanyl overdose but the president's son you know, heroin and crack, and so it's a widespread problem.
Cindy Sheehan, Social Justice Activist
The US presidential budget request for the fiscal year 2022 calls for a $41 billion investment in national drug programme agencies.
The budget request offers a nearly $670 million increase over the previous year, which the administration claims will be spent on evidence based prevention, treatment, harm reduction and recovery support services
... the people that it has affected the most have been dealing the drugs as well as using the drug. They have more experience than the doctors that have degrees. They have more experience than the people that went to school and college and university to learn about this and study about it.
The average person has been using that drug for or 30 years, 10 years, five years or a year and how the affect was and then you can start turning it around because they can tell you from their experience[sic].
One thing you cannot take away from anyone or give anybody is experiencing and you cannot take that away from them and that's priceless and we need to start using that towards the solutions in this country.
Steven Young, Activist and Commentator
It's still not clear whether the sum proposed could effectively turn the tide of the overdose epidemic in America. However, the administration acknowledges that getting rid of the pandemic and collaboration between federal, state, and local law enforcement, as well as public health officials, is of great importance.
Generally speaking, what is your assessment of the so called War on Drugs by the US administration?
Well, as you all know, when the United States declares war on anything, it gets worse. So there was a war on cancer; cancer has grown exponentially in the United States.
There's a war on terrorism, which you know, didn't do anything to defeat terrorism, but in fact caused many people to rebel or to rise up against the United States because of the United States actions and this war on drugs is the same thing.
I believe Nancy Reagan was really influential in starting the war on drugs and since the war on drugs began it's only gotten worse.
And we can really combine the War on Terror with the war on drugs, because since the United States invaded Afghanistan, the opiate supply has been much larger.
Cindy Sheehan, Social Justice Activist
Now according to some statistics the US has seen a 50% rise in the cases of overdoses compared to the 1990s. This is in line with a sharp spike in recent street crimes, gun violence, and a widening political rift across the nation.
Just like with big oil and big tech, the US government is failing the people once again by failing, or refusing, to take on Big Pharma.
We don't have a national health care plan here in the United States. In fact, my state, California, just shot down another chance to have some kind of public health plan here and the bottom line is that the United States is captured by big Pharma.
Big Pharma pays tens of hundreds of millions of dollars to influence the media; they sponsor almost all of the legacy media here in the United States.
Cindy Sheehan, Social Justice Activist
A plethora of corrupt politicians appear to be duty bound to merely bow to the demands of the formidable industry and act like puppets in the face of their intense quest for profit.
How do such overdoses impact the victim’s communities and families?
These drugs have been out here for years. But it wasn't until it started in the white community that they started doing something about it, when you had a lot of white people dying from overdoses such as judges' children and lawyers' children and so forth.
When they started dying from overdoses and opioids and everything, all of a sudden, it became a lot of rehabs for people, for everybody; they had to make it equal now, try to make it equal, they didn't make it equal, but they stop a lot of things such as a lot of arrests and how long you stay in jail and start giving them rehab.
Well, we we've been asking for that for a long, long time.
Steven Young, Activist and Commentator
Roughly 17,000 Americans died of an overdose in the year 2000 which rose to over 100,000 in 2021. The situation appears to be spiraling out of control as demonstrated by the National Centre for Health Statistics report which was released in the last week of 2021.
That shocking increase remains the largest year over year rate increase on record. And it's not difficult to assume the hidden epidemic has impacted certain portions of society harder, poor people, as well as communities of color.
What should authorities do to address overdoses and the issue of addiction in America?
A lot of people come by their addictions because they got injured. Right? They got injured at work, they got injured in a car accident, and they got injured however people get injured.
And so they're prescribed these very addictive painkillers, which everybody was lied to, saying that they weren't addictive. And then what your body does is it creates pain so you can get the painkiller, right, and your body gets used to the to the dosage, so you have to take more and more and more and more.
Cindy Sheehan, Social Justice Activist
Overdoses and other drug related complications keep inundating the more vulnerable members of society with no immediate remedy in sight. The consumption of drugs is targeted towards young children, who are the most prized possessions of America. As more and more young kids die due to overdose, new adolescent arrivals are brought into the fold by the legal and illegal drug industry.
According to the 2020 National Survey on Drug Use and Health, 14.5% of Americans, that's roughly 40,300,000 people, had a substance abuse disorder in 2020. And the figure is expected to grow rather than shrink.
There are some serious things that we have solutions to but working with the people who have the solutions, the solutions usually with the grassroots people, the Foundation, the ones unheard of, the ones who are not at the tables making these decisions. But like these young people [who] hit the street with Black Lives Matter, They have solutions to a lot of things, but are they being listening to?
I've been out here for what 30 or 40 years you know as a young man,you have to listen to the solutions to be unable to plan a city and create a home ownership and get rid of the poverty so we can have peace throughout the land. So as long as we have solutions there should not be these problems in America.
Steven Young, Activist and Commentator
With hard drugs sold on the streets and traffickers reportedly increasing the amount pouring into the country, it should not come as a big shock that the overdoses have increased following a rise in the amount of hard drugs smuggled into the country. This trend simply signifies an increase in demand, which translates into a spike in overdose related deaths.
The Opioid crisis is one of the number one health issues in the United States; there are over 100,000 overdoses every year now. There's over a billion dollars being spent on addressing addiction.
Cindy Sheehan, Social Justice Activist
The hidden epidemic is indeed a grave national security and public health challenge for the United States and its officials. More people die from drug overdoses than in car crashes, incidents involving firearms, suicide or homicide.
The FDA, the Sackler family, law enforcement who refused to prosecute the Sackler family or to even investigate the addiction, they're all involved in the crisis. There were some people who really wanted this looked into and they were stonewalled by by the FDA ... and it's just very interesting here in the United States.
Cindy Sheehan, Social Justice Activist
The US must rush to disrupt the flow of the illegal drugs into the country from overseas and crackdown on middlemen as well as drug cartels who maintain the supply chain for the illicit substances.
America always had a war on a lot of things, mostly a war against black people. It did a war on drugs, a war on (video) games, ... but they do a war on everything but poverty.
So if you don't speak out (against) the poverty in this country, how you going to cure the violence and have peace? And that's one issue that America spends and wastes a lot of millions and millions of dollars, giving it to the same people, mainly to millionaires.
In this country, it is called corporate welfare when they get tax breaks for coming into poor neighborhoods and making a profit.
Steven Young, Activist and Commentator
Not all overdose cases are fatal, yet the incident could still cause suffering for the addicts themselves, as well as their families and friends for quite a long time. The lasting impact of such an experience adds to the burden of societal issues emanating from addiction in general.
We must stop using people to experiment with these types of drugs as well. COVID-19 is shut down the entire world because nobody knew. The pure no one knew where it came from. How can that be without again, you can go to the middle, but you can't figure out what happens right here on this earth.
Steven Young, Activist and Commentator
How the CIA put drugs into the black community
The US brought cocaine into the black community as part of a larger genocidal war on black people as well as to fully destroy the Black Power movement.
The United States of America's illegal imperialist regime is actually the biggest drug trafficker in the world, and even the CIA itself is known as the Cocaine Intelligence Agency.
At the CIA they literally funnel drugs into the country to destroy revolutionary movements, as well as to destroy black communities.
The United States had declared an all out war on the Black Panther Party.
The government was willing to do anything and everything to destroy the party and labeled the party as the biggest threat to national security.
The US government used the illegal FBI COINTELPRO programme to assassinate, to launch character assassinations, to torture black revolutionaries for seeking to put power into the hands of the people, where it truly belongs.
The Central Intelligence Agency also had a major role in destroying the Black Panther Party. The United States, with the Cold War going strong, declared war on socialism, whether domestic or international, and began launching coups and proxy wars to protect the corporate interests of imperialist America.
The CIA, also known as the corporate intelligence agency, did everything, everything in its power to destroy socialism. The CIA already had a war on the Black Panther Party, and in 1979, the people of Nicaragua had a successful revolution against the US backed Somoza dictatorship. The CIA lost the war on the Sandinistas who were a left wing socialist revolutionary organization which just came into power.
The US Central Intelligence Agency, figured they can use one stone for the same target. The US needed to fund the right wing Contras to fight against the left wing Sandinistas.
But to fund the CIA proxy war they needed money.
The Contras began funneling drugs to the CIA then the CIA began selling drugs to dealers within different black communities, not only to disseminate violence and terrorism against the people of Nicaragua, but it ultimately led to the defeat of the Sandinista government.
But in the black community crack cocaine became an epidemic.
Now if we put the culture war and the destruction of the Black Panther Party into the proper historical context, we can begin to see the connection. In 1979 as the Contra war started, cocaine began being smuggled into the USA by the CIA. And then what do we do three years later, three years later, in 1982, the Black Panther Party was dissolved.
The CIA put the final touches on the tactical defeat of the Black Panther Party, by using chemical {narcotic} warfare against the black community and its effects can still be felt today.
The CIA itself admitted this, claiming that they "overlooked the Contra drug sales in the US". They also admitted to working with Contras, who were the ones dealing drugs.
A DEA field agent, Hector Morales, said, "I believe that elements working for the CIA were involved in bringing drugs into the country".
Another DEA agent claimed that in the 1980s the Ilopango International Airport in El Salvador was used by the country to smuggle drugs into the US. He said that his "attempts to investigate the Contra drug smuggling were stymied by the DEA management, the US Embassy in El Salvador and the CIA.
These revelations have led to Hollywood making TV shows and movies about it, allowing media corporations to make money and get rich from shows like 'Snowfall' that have dramatized what has happened. Crack has devastated the black community and led to tens of thousands of deaths.
The homicide rate in the black community increased, the fetal death rate increased, and there was an increase in low birth weight babies.
And this also led to the war on drugs, even though the US is the one that put the drugs into the community in the first place. In this war on drugs, it was possible to create the conditions for mass incarceration, in which Black people are the most effected and then they're subjected to slavery, from mass incarceration to the 13th Amendment, allowing corporations to get rich.
There are more black men under correctional control at present than when they were enslaved.
The effects of crack cocaine on the black community had been nothing short of genocidal. The inhumanity of the United States regime is a threat to humanity itself.
Abbas Muntaqim, Power to the People
Now in many cases, addiction eventually destroys marriages, friendships and careers.
Unfortunately, out of over 20 million Americans with at least one addiction in the United States, only 10% are actually treated, while the other 90% stays on a perilous path, which could potentially end with an overdose.
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