Cocaine Nation

by Thomas Feiling

  2

  Building a Hard Drug Economy

  I know thy works, and where thou dwellest, even where Satan’s seat is…To him that overcometh will I give to eat of the hidden manna, and will give him a white stone, and in the stone a new name written, which no man knoweth, saving he that receiveth it.

  Revelation 2: 13, 17

  Cocaine, in crack form, was to become the principal target of the war on drugs in the 1980s, but as we have seen, the war had been declared with quite distinct enemies in mind. Demand for cocaine only revived when narcotics law enforcement agencies began cracking down on the black market in amphetamines in the 1960s.1 Cocaine made its return appearance in the American public eye in 1969, in a scene in the film Easy Rider in which Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda can be seen stuffing large bags of cocaine into the gas tanks of their motorcycles. Like Sherlock Holmes and his habit of injecting himself with cocaine, this was not a fiction intended to reflect reality. The film’s writers had felt that bags of marijuana would not be sufficiently dramatic, and heroin was too dangerous; cocaine was chosen because it was unfamiliar, exotic and fun. For small groups of cocaine users in Europe, Latin America and the United States, that was the way it stayed for the first half of the 1970s.

  In the second half of the decade, people became more familiar with cocaine. It was an adman’s dream, brought into the marketplace as a luxury product available only to the affluent. In 1977, a cover story in Newsweek magazine likened cocaine to Dom Pérignon champagne, a sign of the sophisticated good taste of the upper echelons of society. Initially, that meant the executive class of Hollywood and the music business, whose operators were typically young, highly paid and obliged to work for long hours in pampered but high-pressure environments. But cocaine soon became every ambitious young American’s favourite accessory. Like Dom Pérignon, cocaine was a mass market product with bona fide upper-class cachet. Time magazine called it ‘the drug of choice for perhaps millions of solid, conventional, and often upwardly mobile citizens’. Unlike a lot of other drugs, cocaine was regarded as a fitting accompaniment to both work and leisure. It had none of the counter-cultural connotations or mind-bending potential of LSD or cannabis and it was too expensive to be more than an occasional treat for all but a small constituency of wealthy acolytes. Poor people couldn’t afford it, and cocaine addicts were non-existent in 1975. It was the drug for people who didn’t like drugs.

  American politicians didn’t seem to have a problem with cocaine either. In 1975, the White House, under the presidency of Gerald Ford, issued a White Paper which, without challenging the Single Convention of 1961, insisted that ‘cocaine is not physically addictive, and does not usually result in serious social consequences, such as crime, hospital emergency room admissions or death’. In 1977 Jimmy Carter ran for election on a manifesto which included the decriminalization of marijuana. He duly won the election and though his plans to decriminalize marijuana were soon scuppered, his drugs policy adviser, Peter Bourne, described cocaine as ‘benign’.

  By 1979, illegal imports of cocaine had become Florida’s biggest source of income, said to be worth $10 billion a year at wholesale prices. This was the heyday not just for cocaine traffickers, but for the drug users of the United States more generally. There were 25,000 ‘head-shops’ across the nation, selling drug paraphernalia worth $3 billion a year. One in ten eighteen-year-olds was getting stoned on marijuana every day. Two thirds of eighteen- to twenty-five-year-olds admitted having tried some kind of illegal drug, and the number of Americans who had tried cocaine hit 22 million.2 As illegal recreational drugs became big business, large-scale criminal cartels stepped up their operations, processing and exporting cocaine to the United States in such volumes that wholesale prices began to fall, which further stimulated demand for their product. Drug warriors have since come to regard the Democrats’ initially lax response to rising cocaine use as having eased the way for the Colombian cartels to get a foothold in the United States.

  The problem, initially at least, was not the drug, but the drugs trade. The huge profits to be made selling cocaine had stoked fierce competition between Colombian and Cuban traffickers, few of whom could have been described as easy riders. By 1979, there was a drug-related murder a day in Miami.

  The trade was lucrative, but cocaine was illegal, so the profits made were always vulnerable to confiscation, depending on the political mood. At the end of the 1970s, the United States was still a bitterly divided nation, one half of which saw drugs as emblems for all that had gone wrong in their country in the 1960s. Parents who had avoided the clutches of the drug culture watched their children inherit not their own attitudes to drugs, but those of the drug culture. The violence of Latino immigrants, the perceived permissiveness of cocaine users, and the threat to the innocence of American children galvanized conservatives into a firm rebuttal of liberal America. In 1980, Ronald Reagan was elected President, and in the autumn the Republicans also took control of the Senate for the first time since 1952. In 1981, then Vice-President George Bush Sr launched a special task force to take on the traffickers, firing the first salvo in an invigorated war on drugs. In the decade that followed, the political agenda was defined by ‘culture wars’ between liberals and conservatives. The latter emphasized moral renewal and respect for the law. But as it pertained to the growing market for illegal drugs, Ronald Reagan’s crusading zeal was to have many unforeseen consequences. Drug use is cultural and drug markets are driven by economics, so it was unclear how a moral crusade might affect either, however strong the temptation to launch one.

  Whatever the resolutions of ambitious politicians, day-to-day government runs on a course which is only sometimes in tandem with official policy. The response to events early in the Reagan Presidency showed the official stance on drugs to be less than robust. The Contras were a group of Nicaraguans who had launched a guerrilla war against the left-wing Sandinista government that had taken over the Central American country in 1979. The Reagan administration saw the Contras as its allies in the global fight against communist subversion: the President even went as far as to describe them as the latter-day equivalents of the founding fathers. The United States Congress was less gung-ho in its support for the Contras, however, and passed amendments which prohibited the use of government funds ‘for the purpose of overthrowing the government of Nicaragua’. This meant that the Contras were strapped for cash to buy weapons.

  The Iran-Contra scandal is a well-known blot on Ronald Reagan’s copybook. Colonel Oliver North was found to have sold weapons to the Iranian government, supposedly an enemy of the White House, in order to raise money for the Contras. A lesser known chapter in the story, and one that throws the integrity of the Republicans’ war on drugs into real doubt, is that the CIA also approved and supported the Contras’ trafficking of cocaine into the United States. Key state operatives later testified that the Contras would take delivery of planeloads of military apparel that had been sent to El Salvador by Nicaraguans living in the United States. For the return flight north they would load the empty planes with cocaine. ‘It was coming up through Los Angeles,’ Russ, a former secret service operative from San Jose, California, told me. ‘There were boatloads of it coming up through San Francisco. A lot of it was going into Mena, Arkansas. The money that they were making was then filtered back to support the Contras in their fight in Nicaragua.’ Former Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) agent Celerino Castillo III, who was the special agent in charge of El Salvador at the time, takes up the story. ‘They gave all the coke to Norwin Meneses and Danilo Blandon, who was a CIA asset. He in turn fronted all that stuff to Ricky Ross. Ross became the Walmart of crack, distributing to the Bloods and the Crips and everybody else all over the country. They fucked up all of California with the crack epidemic.’ Thanks to his Nicaraguan connection, Ricky Ross became America’s first and most successful crack cocaine seller. He was coming to the end of a twenty-year sentence at the Federal Correctional Institute in Texarkana, Texas,
when I spoke to him. ‘Me and Danilo Blandon were really tight. I knew from earlier that he was backing some war, and I knew that he was from Nicaragua, but I had no idea about the Contras. I was illiterate at that time, you know? I never read a newspaper or listened to the news. They say that Danilo was protected, and you can assume from the Feds that I was being protected too, but I never knew that. I was just in it for the money, trying to get out of the ghetto.’

  ‘Hangars 4 and 5 at Ilopango airport in San Salvador were used as a trampoline for drugs coming in from Colombia and Costa Rica,’ explained Celerino. ‘Oliver North and a Cuban exile named Felix Rodriguez were running one of them, and the other one was owned by the CIA.’ Rodriguez was on the CIA pay-roll and had been present at the killing of Che Guevara in Bolivia in 1967. ‘Rodriguez and North used a plane called the Fat Lady, which was also owned by the CIA, to load up with arms at Ilopango and then airdrop to the Contras in the jungle. Then the Fat Lady got shot down by the Sandinistas. The only survivor was the pilot Gene Hasenfus, who was also working for the CIA. He was captured and said that it was a covert operation being run by the White House, and that’s when the story broke that the US government was supporting the Contras.’

  Under the shelter provided by the umbrella of national security doctrines, the CIA hurriedly intervened to protect its allies from the Drug Enforcement Administration. In June 1986, Congress submitted to pressure from the Reagan administration, and approved a $100 million aid package to the Contras. As soon as the flow of legal aid resumed, the Contras and the CIA severed their connections to the cocaine business. The Contras’ small fleet of aeroplanes at Ilopango was flown to a remote airstrip and destroyed. Senator John Kerry chaired a congressional committee that looked into the affair. ‘There is no question in my mind,’ his report concluded, ‘that people connected with the CIA were involved in drug trafficking while in support of the Contras.’3 ‘The shit hit the fan, and everybody ran for cover trying to deny it. Even Reagan tried to deny it,’ Celerino told me. ‘Then I started getting calls from the DEA saying, “Don’t close the Contra files.” I asked why, and they said that once the file was closed, congressional investigators would have access to it. So when Senator John Kerry had his hearings, I wasn’t called because he hadn’t seen my report.’ Castillo told the authors of White Out: The CIA, Drugs and the Press that ‘they never contacted me. The special prosecutor for the Iran-Contra case was Lawrence Walsh, but he came to an agreement with the government that the only thing he was going to investigate was Oliver North’s sale of the missiles to Iran.’4

  Despite this unequivocal indictment of government collusion with cocaine smugglers, the cocaine-Contra scandal remained on the margins of the debate as the White House went to war on drugs from 1985. Reporter Lawrence Zuckerman recalls returning from Central America laden with stories of cocaine-running by the Contras, only to be told by his editor that ‘if this story was about the Sandinistas and drugs you’d have no trouble getting it in the magazine, but Time is institutionally behind the Contras’.5 Between 1982 and 1985, concurrent with the CIA’s protection of the Contras’ cocaine shipments into the United States, wholesale cocaine prices in Miami, Los Angeles and Baltimore dropped by half.6 To what extent the Contras’ cocaine shipments were responsible for this drop in price is a matter for speculation. What is beyond doubt is that it put cocaine within the reach of many more Americans, and paved the way for the crack epidemic that swept through the inner cities of the United States in the 1980s.

  The cocaine-Contra scandal might have undermined the United States’ determination to scupper the cocaine trade, but it also brings to mind earlier cases in which the US government has allowed drug traffickers to sell drugs in the United States, usually in pursuit of the same anti-communist goals that animated their strategy in Nicaragua. The Italian-American Mafioso Lucky Luciano was the first beneficiary of collusion between the US government’s spies and its gangsters, as the government turned to the Italian Mafia for help in invading Sicily in 1943. United States intelligence agencies not only arranged for Luciano, then the world’s pre-eminent heroin dealer, to be released from prison; they also allowed him to rebuild his drug-smuggling business, watched as heroin flowed into New York and Washington DC, and then lied about what they had done. The CIA later facilitated opium and heroin trafficking to the United States by their allies in Southeast Asia during the Vietnam War. They turned a blind eye to heroin trafficking by Mujahidin rebels in Afghanistan, because trafficking paid for Afghan resistance to the Soviet Union’s occupation of the country in the 1980s. Prior to the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982, Israel’s only allies in the country were the Christian Phalangists. Knowing this, the CIA deliberately scuppered the DEA investigations of the Phalangists’ smuggling of heroin into New York City so as to allow them to raise funds for their assault on the PLO in Beirut. Each of these drug-trafficking operations had a direct and significant impact on heroin and cocaine markets in the United States. Nevertheless, they were all protected by the CIA, and by extension, the US government.

  This collusion is shocking, yet widely overlooked. So too are the deep roots that drug-fuelled crime has sunk in American soil. The most systematic estimate of the number of Americans selling drugs, either full-time or part-time, is 1.8 million.7 How have drug markets become such big employers in so many cities of the United States? Since the turn of the twentieth century, the country’s most criminalized, and hence most profitable, enterprises have been those that have fed Americans’ desire to get rich, get drunk and get laid: illicit gambling and the numbers game, bootlegging and prostitution. Yet until the 1980s, the drugs business was shunned by many figures in organized crime, with the exception of a small but lucrative heroin-smuggling business in New York City. In the 1960s, drug-selling had been handled by discreet, family-run operations, but in the early 1970s, tougher law enforcement tactics weeded out these small-time ventures, most of which had neither the funds to buy off policemen, nor the gall to kill them. As penalties grew harsher, the risks incurred by dealers became higher. Prices were raised and profits went up, which attracted the attention of the Mafia. Organized crime moved into the drugs business because it was the only entity able to absorb the rising human and financial costs of dealing in illegal drugs in New York City.8

  Several developments in the 1980s made the drugs business more attractive to newcomers and encouraged them to join criminal organizations. First were the enormous changes in industry and employment in the United States. De-industrialization, a rusting process which had been gnawing its way through the inner cities since the 1960s, was gathering speed. Between 1967 and 1987, Chicago lost 60 per cent, New York City 58 per cent and Philadelphia 64 per cent of their manufacturing jobs.9 Employers left the cities for the suburbs, other parts of the United States, or overseas; others just disappeared. As inner-city steel mills, factories and car plants closed down, the neighbourhoods that had been built to house their workers were reduced to pools of low-wage or unemployed labour, what have been described as ‘warehouses for the poor’. In New York City neighbourhoods such as Bedford-Stuyvesant and the South Bronx, more than half their young people were jobless in the late 1980s. A study of gang finances in one gang’s neighbourhood in 1990 found that the unemployment rate in the gang’s neighbourhood was over 35 per cent, a rate six times higher than the national average.10 Most of the children lived in poverty, and 60 per cent of them were growing up on welfare. The community had wasted away, both literally and figuratively: in 1990, it had only half the population it had had in 1950, and just one in five of its children lived with both their parents. Atrophy left city halls with a much smaller tax base from which to raise the money needed to pay for the welfare services that their people now depended on. Republican party politicians didn’t want to pump money into urban communities, partly because the inner cities had always voted Democrat, and partly because Republicans proved unable to solve social problems they had played a large part in creating. Instead, Presiden
t Ronald Reagan responded to de-industrialization by dramatically cutting back the very programmes that had alleviated some of the resultant poverty, as well as those that were training people to make the transition to any new jobs that were available.

  Baltimore is the last resting place of Edgar Allan Poe, America’s finest gothic fabulist. It also provides the setting for The Wire, an equally haunting depiction of American vice. In 1950, the biggest employer in Baltimore was Bethlehem Steel. Jobs for the unskilled were easy to come by, and thriving communities grew up around the steel plants. Today, the biggest employer in Baltimore is Johns Hopkins Hospital, a leader in health services, education and technology. The rise of Johns Hopkins has brought employment opportunities for some, but it has never been able to absorb the numbers thrown out of work by the decline of heavy industry in the city. It is grimly ironic that a hospital should become a major city’s principal employer, and that the treatment of the sick has become such a huge employer in the United States as a whole. Ironic, too, that so many Americans should be taking drugs of one kind, while their government fights a war on drugs of another kind. But the greatest irony of Johns Hopkins is that one of the hospital’s founders, Dr William Stewart Halsted—to this day considered the single most innovative and influential surgeon the United States has ever produced—was a clandestine drug addict for forty years. Halsted depended on a daily fix of 180 mg of morphine, a habit he inadvertently acquired while trying to overcome an addiction to cocaine. He was able to maintain his addiction to heroin while building one of the best hospitals in the US, firstly because he had better access to quality morphine than anyone else in Baltimore, and secondly because he also had a real stake in conventional society, a vocational calling which helped to keep his drug habit within some bounds. By 1989, one hundred years after Halsted helped found Johns Hopkins Hospital, one in eight adults in Baltimore had a serious drug abuse problem, a rate unmatched by any other city in the United States. Unlike Halsted, most of them had neither a stake nor a vocation to temper their compulsive drug use.11