While Nancey said no at the front door of the White House, Ronnie said yes to Crack at the back door. Send Crack to the Negroes, buys guns with money, send guns to Contras in Nicaragua.
SEATTLE (AP) — For a
generation of Americans, first lady Nancy Reagan was most closely
associated with a single phrase: "Just Say No."
Three decades after the anti-drug campaign's
heyday, its legacy is mixed. Experts say the slogan brought new
attention to drug abuse and helped focus research on how to prevent it.
But the motto was also part of a larger escalation of the drug war that
relied on fear-based rhetoric, public moralizing and skyrocketing
incarceration rates.
"Overall
the larger prevention community is thankful for large campaigns like
'Just Say No,' for the broad, population-level awareness they raise,"
said Derek Franklin, who heads the Washington Association for Substance
Abuse and Violence Prevention. "However, the sort of shaming attitude
and questionable moral divide it created was something we wouldn't do
today."
Further evidence of
changing attitudes can be found in the movement to legalize marijuana,
which is now permitted for medical use in 23 states and for recreational
use in Colorado, Washington State, Oregon, Alaska and Washington, D.C.
Reagan,
who died Sunday at 94, made "Just Say No" the hallmark of her tenure in
the White House. She said she first became aware of the drug problem
when she learned that the children of some of her friends were using
drugs. Her own daughter, Patti Davis, later wrote of experimenting with
pills and cocaine.
As Reagan once recalled, the idea emerged
during a visit with schoolchildren in 1982 in Oakland, California. "A
little girl raised her hand and said, 'Mrs. Reagan, what do you do if
somebody offers you drugs?' And I said, 'Well, you just say no.' And
there it was born."
At the time, Allan Cohen
was the executive director of the Pacific Institute for Research and
Evaluation, which had a federal contract to help states and local
communities develop drug-abuse prevention programs. Cohen's organization
had promoted and adopted the program the first lady visited in Oakland,
called Oakland Parents in Action, which taught children skills for
refusing drugs offered by their peers.
The
message instantly resonated. By 1988, there were more than 12,000 "Just
Say No" clubs around the country. Most were at least loosely based on
the ideas developed in Oakland, Cohen said.
One of them was at
Clyde Riggs Elementary in Portland, Tennessee. Helen Berry, the mother
of a student there, was volunteering to help assemble a bulletin board
one day in 1985 when a teacher showed her some "Just Say No" pamphlets.
"It was like a light bulb came on," Berry recalled. "I said, 'Wow, this is really important.'"
She
went on to lead the school's "Just Say No" club for 25 years, bringing
in emphysema patients to warn about the dangers of smoking and quizzing
pupils about how long marijuana can stay in the body.
"I just thought it was an outstanding program for kids to see
what drugs can do," Berry said. "I've had kids come up to me today who
are in their 30s and say, 'Mrs. Berry, I want you to know I never
touched a cigarette.'"
Many researchers remain skeptical of the
campaign's effectiveness, associating it with the first lady's calls to
be intolerant of drug users or with the famous television commercial
that featured an actor dropping an egg into a frying pan and saying,
"This is your brain on drugs. Any questions?"
It's apparent now that efforts to scare people into abstaining from drugs failed, they said.
"You
think of 'Just Say No,' you think of eggs in a frying pan," said Caleb
Banta-Green, a researcher at the University of Washington's Alcohol and
Drug Abuse Institute. "Just because you remember it doesn't mean it
worked. Addiction is a medical condition, but we still have a
fundamental misunderstanding of what addiction is, and 'Just Say No'
spread that misunderstanding."
Michelle Miller-Day, a professor at
Chapman University in California, said the refrain might have been a
simplistic message, but its popularity also focused the attention of
researchers on the social context of drug use and on developing programs
that would help youngsters refuse drugs or at least delay
experimentation.
She worked with a colleague from Penn State University, Michael
Hecht, to develop "Keepin' It REAL" — for Refuse, Explain, Avoid and
Leave, a research-validated curriculum that the popular anti-drug
program DARE adopted in 2009 as it was under fire about its
effectiveness.
Cohen said there's no way to quantify the impact of
"Just Say No," but it's unfair to conflate the campaign — a prevention
effort aimed at middle or elementary school children — with criticism of
the larger drug war or mass incarceration. And while the message may
have seemed simple, the Oakland-developed curriculum was actually
comprehensive, he said.
The
issues "of criminal justice overreach or overstatement of the moral
horrors of drug use were not much related to what the first lady was
doing," Cohen said. "The greatest legacy was the promotion of preventive
approaches, which at that point had almost been totally ignored."
These
days, researchers have come up with better prevention programs, said
Christopher Ringwalt, a prevention researcher at the University of North
Carolina. But schools aren't necessarily using them. An emphasis on
testing has squeezed prevention education out of many classrooms, he
said.
"It's frustrating for people like me," Ringwalt said. "Attention has turned elsewhere."
LOS ANGELES -- With the public in the U.S. and Latin America becoming
increasingly skeptical of the war on drugs, key figures in a scandal
that once rocked the Central Intelligence Agency are coming forward to
tell their stories in a new documentary and in a series of interviews
with The Huffington Post.
More than 18 years have passed since Pulitzer Prize-winning
journalist Gary Webb stunned the world with his “Dark Alliance”
newspaper series investigating the connections between the CIA, a crack
cocaine explosion in the predominantly African-American neighborhoods of
South Los Angeles, and the Nicaraguan Contra fighters -- scandalous
implications that outraged LA’s black community, severely damaged the
intelligence agency's reputation and launched a number of federal
investigations.
It did not end well for Webb, however. Major media, led by The New
York Times, Washington Post and Los Angeles Times, worked to discredit
his story. Under intense pressure, Webb's
top editor abandoned him. Webb was drummed out of journalism. One LA Times reporter recently
apologized
for his leading role in the assault on Webb, but it came too late. Webb
died in 2004 from an apparent suicide. Obituaries referred to his
investigation as "discredited."
Now, Webb’s bombshell expose is being explored anew in a documentary,
“Freeway: Crack in the System,” directed by Marc Levin, which tells the
story of “Freeway” Rick Ross, who created a crack empire in LA during
the 1980s and is a key figure in Webb’s “Dark Alliance” narrative. The
documentary is being released after the major motion picture “Kill The
Messenger,” which features Jeremy Renner in the role of Webb and hits
theaters on Friday.
Webb's investigation was published in the summer of 1996 in the San Jose
Mercury News. In it, he reported that a drug ring that sold millions of
dollars worth of cocaine in Los Angeles was funneling its profits to
the CIA’s army in Nicaragua, known as the Contras.
Webb’s original anonymous source for his series was Coral Baca, a
confidante of Nicaraguan dealer Rafael Cornejo. Baca, Ross and members
of his “Freeway boys” crew; cocaine importer and distributor Danilo
Blandon; and LA Sheriff's Deputy Robert Juarez all were interviewed for
Levin's film.
The dual release of the feature film and the documentary, along with
the willingness of long-hesitant sources to come forward, suggests that
Webb may have the last word after all.
* * * * *
Webb’s entry point into the sordid tale of corruption was through
Baca, a ghostlike figure in the Contra-cocaine narrative who has given
precious few interviews over the decades. Her name was revealed in
Webb's 1998 book on the scandal, but was removed at her request in the
paperback edition. Levin connected HuffPost with Baca and she agreed to
an interview at a cafe in San Francisco. She said that she and Webb
didn’t speak for years after he revealed her name, in betrayal of the
conditions under which they spoke. He eventually apologized, said Baca,
who is played by Paz Vega in “Kill The Messenger."
The major media that worked to undermine Webb's investigation
acknowledged that Blandon was a major drug-runner as well as a Contra
supporter, and that Ross was a leading distributor. But those reports
questioned how much drug money Blandon and his boss Norwin Meneses
turned over to the Contras, and whether the Contras were aware of the
source of the funds.
During her interview with HuffPost, Baca recounted meeting Contra
leader Adolfo Calero multiple times in the 1980s at Contra fundraisers
in the San Francisco Bay Area. He would personally pick up duffel bags
full of drug money, she said, which it was her job to count for Cornejo.
There was no question, she said, that Calero knew precisely how the
money had been earned. Meneses' nickname, after all, was El Rey De Las
Drogas -- The King of Drugs.
"If he was stupid and had a lobotomy," he might not have known it was
drug money, Baca said. "He knew exactly what it was. He didn't care. He
was there to fund the Contras, period." (Baca made a
similar charge confidentially
to the Department of Justice for its 1997 review of Webb's allegations,
as well as further allegations the investigators rejected.)
Indeed, though the mainstream media at the time worked to poke holes
in Webb's findings, believing that the Contra operation was not involved
with drug-running takes an enormous suspension of disbelief. Even
before Webb’s series was published, numerous government investigations
and news reports had linked America's support for the Nicaraguan rebels
with drug trafficking.
After The Associated Press reported on these connections in 1985, for example,
more than a decade before Webb, then-Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) launched a congressional investigation. In 1989, Kerry released
a detailed report
claiming that not only was there “considerable evidence” linking the
Contra effort to trafficking of drugs and weapons, but that the U.S.
government knew about it.
According to the report, many of the pilots ferrying weapons and
supplies south for the CIA were known to have backgrounds in drug
trafficking. Kerry's investigation cited SETCO Aviation, the company the
U.S. had contracted to handle many of the flights, as an example of CIA
complicity in the drug trade. According to a 1983 Customs Service
report, SETCO was “headed by Juan Ramon Matta Ballesteros, a class I DEA
violator.”
Two years before the Iran-Contra scandal would begin to bubble up in
the Reagan White House, pilot William Robert “Tosh” Plumlee
revealed to then-Sen. Gary Hart (D-Colo.)
that planes would routinely transport cocaine back to the U.S. after
dropping off arms for the Nicaraguan rebels. Plumlee has since spoken in
detail about the flights in
media interviews.
“In March, 1983, Plumlee contacted my Denver Senate Office and …
raised several issues including that covert U.S. intelligence agencies
were directly involved in the smuggling and distribution of drugs to
raise funds for covert military operations against the government of
Nicaragua,” a copy of
a 1991 letter from Hart to Kerry reads. (Hart told HuffPost he recalls receiving Plumlee's letter and finding his allegations worthy of follow-up.)
Plumlee flew weapons into Latin America for decades for the CIA. When
the Contra revolution took off in the 1980s, Plumlee says he continued
to transport arms south for the spy agency and bring cocaine back with
him, with
the blessing of the U.S. government.
The Calero transactions Baca says she witnessed would have been no
surprise to the Reagan White House. On April 15, 1985, around the time
Baca says she saw Calero accepting bags of cash, Oliver North, the White
House National Security Counsel official in charge of the Contra
operation, was
notified in a memo
that Calero’s deputies were involved in the drug business. Robert Owen,
North’s top staffer in Central America, warned that Jose Robelo had
“potential involvement with drug-running and the sale of goods provided
by the [U.S. government]” and that Sebastian Gonzalez was “now involved
in drug-running out of Panama.”
North’s own diary, originally uncovered by the National Security
Archive, is a rich source of evidence as well. “Honduran DC-6 which is
being used for runs out of New Orleans is probably being used for drug
runs into the U.S.,” reads an entry for Aug. 9, 1985, reflecting a
conversation North had with Owen about Mario Calero, Adolfo’s brother.
An entry from July 12, 1985 relates that “14 million to finance [an arms depot] came from drugs” and another
references
a trip to Bolivia to pick up “paste.” (Paste is slang term for a crude
cocaine derivative product comprised of coca leaves grown in the Andes
as well as processing chemicals used during the cocaine manufacturing
process.)
Celerino Castillo, a top DEA agent in El Salvador, investigated the
Contras' drug-running in the 1980s and repeatedly warned superiors,
according to
a Justice Department investigation into the matter.
Castillo “believes that North and the Contras’ resupply operation at
Ilopango were running drugs for the Contras,” Mike Foster, an FBI agent
who worked for the Iran-Contra independent counsel Lawrence Walsh,
reported in 1991 after meeting with Castillo, who later wrote the book
Powderburns about his efforts to expose the drug-running.
* * * * *
Webb's investigation sent the CIA into a panic. A recently declassified article titled
“Managing A Nightmare: CIA Public Affairs and the Drug Conspiracy Story,”
from the agency’s internal journal, “Studies In Intelligence,” shows
that the spy agency was reeling in the weeks that followed.
“The charges could hardly be worse,” the
article
opens. “A widely read newspaper series leads many Americans to believe
CIA is guilty of at least complicity, if not conspiracy, in the outbreak
of crack cocaine in America’s inner cities. In more extreme versions of
the story circulating on talk radio and the Internet, the Agency was
the instrument of a consistent strategy by the US Government to destroy
the black community and to keep black Americans from advancing.
Denunciations of CIA -- reminiscent of the 1970s -- abound.
Investigations are demanded and initiated. The Congress gets involved.”
The emergence of Webb’s story “posed a genuine public relations
crisis for the Agency,” writes the CIA Directorate of Intelligence
staffer, whose name is redacted.
In December 1997, CIA sources helped advance that narrative, telling
reporters that an internal inspector general report sparked by Webb's
investigation had exonerated the agency.
Yet the
report itself, quietly released several weeks later, was actually deeply damaging to the CIA.
“In 1984, CIA received allegations that five individuals associated
with the Democratic Revolutionary Alliance (ARDE)/Sandino Revolutionary
Front (FRS) were engaged in a drug trafficking conspiracy with a known
narcotics trafficker, Jorge Morales,” the report found. “CIA broke off
contact with ARDE in October 1984, but continued to have contact through
1986-87 with four of the individuals involved with Morales.”
It also found that in October 1982, an immigration officer reported
that, according to an informant in the Nicaraguan exile community in the
Bay Area, “there are indications of links between [a specific
U.S.-based religious organization] and two Nicaraguan
counter-revolutionary groups. These links involve an exchange in [the
United States] of narcotics for arms, which then are shipped to
Nicaragua. A meeting on this matter is scheduled to be held in Costa
Rica ‘within one month.’ Two names the informant has associated with
this matter are Bergman Arguello, a UDN member and exile living in San
Francisco, and Chicano Cardenal, resident of Nicaragua."
The inspector general is clear that in some cases “CIA knowledge of
allegations or information indicating that organizations or individuals
had been involved in drug trafficking did not deter their use by CIA.”
In other cases, “CIA did not act to verify drug trafficking allegations
or information even when it had the opportunity to do so.”
“Let me be frank about what we are finding,” the CIA’s inspector general, Frederick Hitz, said in
congressional testimony
in March 1998. “There are instances where CIA did not, in an
expeditious or consistent fashion, cut off relationships with
individuals supporting the Contra program who were alleged to have
engaged in drug trafficking activity or take action to resolve the
allegations.”
* * * * *
One of the keys to Webb's story was testimony from Danilo Blandon,
who the Department of Justice once described as one of the most
significant Nicaraguan drug importers in the 1980s.
“You were running the LA operation, is that correct?” Blandon, who
was serving as a government witness in the 1990s, was asked by Alan
Fenster, attorney representing Rick Ross, in 1996.
“Yes. But remember, we were running, just -- whatever we were running in
LA, it goes, the profit, it was going to the Contra revolution,”
Blandon said.
Levin, the documentary filmmaker, tracked down Blandon in Managua.
“Gary Webb tried to find me, Congresswoman Maxine Waters tried to
find me, Oliver Stone tried to find me. You found me,” Blandon told
Levin, according to notes from the interview the director provided to
HuffPost.
Waters, a congresswoman from Los Angeles, had followed Webb’s investigation with one of her own.
In the interview notes with filmmaker Levin, Blandon confirms his
support of the Contras and his role in drug trafficking, but downplays
his significance. "The big lie is that we started it all -- the crack
epidemic -- we were just a small part. There were the Torres [brothers],
the Colombians, and others," he says. "We were a little marble, pebble,
rock and [people are] acting like we're big boulder."
The Managua lumberyard where Levin tracked down Blandon.
Webb’s series connected the Contras' drug-running directly to the growth
of crack in the U.S., and it was this connection that faced the most
pushback from critics. While Blandon may have been operating on behalf
of the Contras early in his career, they charged, he later broke off on
his own. But an October 1986 arrest warrant for Blandon indicates that
the LA County Sheriff's Department at the time had other information.
“Blandon is in charge of a sophisticated cocaine smuggling and
distribution organization operating in southern California,” the warrant
reads, according to
Webb's orginal report.
“The monies gained through the sales of cocaine are transported to
Florida and laundered through Orlando Murillo who is a high-ranking
officer in a chain of banks in Florida. … From this bank the monies are
filtered to the Contra rebels to buy arms in the war in Nicaragua.”
Blandon's number-one client was “Freeway” Rick Ross, whose name has
since been usurped by the rapper William Leonard Roberts, better known
by his stage name “Rick Ross” (an indignity that plays a major role in
the film). The original Ross, who was arrested in 1995 and freed from
prison in 2009,
told Webb in "Dark Alliance"
that the prices and quantity Blandon was offering transformed him from a
small-time dealer into what prosecutors would later describe as the
most significant crack cocaine merchant in Los Angeles, if not the
country.
His empire -- once dubbed the
“Walmart” of crack cocaine -- expanded east from LA to major cities throughout the Midwest before he was eventually taken down during
a DEA sting his old supplier and friend Blandon helped set up.
Levin's film not only explores the corrupt foundations of the drug
war itself, but also calls into question the draconian jail sentences
the U.S. justice system meted out to a mostly minority population, while
the country's own foreign policy abetted the drug trade.
“I knew that these laws were a mistake when we were writing them,"
says Eric Sterling, who was counsel to the U.S. House Judiciary
Committee in the 1980s and a key contributor to the passage of
mandatory-minimum sentencing laws, in the documentary.
In 1980, there were roughly 40,000 drug offenders in U.S. prisons, according to
research from The Sentencing Project,
a prison sentencing reform group. By 2011, the number of drug offenders
serving prison sentences ballooned to more than 500,000 -- most of whom
are not high-level operators and are without prior criminal records.
"There is no question that there are tens of thousands of black
people in prison serving sentences that are decades excessive,” Sterling
says. “Their families have been destroyed because of laws I played a
central role in writing.”
The height of the drug war in the 1980s also saw the beginning of the
militarization of local law enforcement, the tentacles of which are
seen to this day, most recently in
Ferguson, Missouri.
In an interview with The Huffington Post, former LA County Sheriff's
Deputy Robert Juarez, who served with the department from 1976 to 1991
and was later convicted along with several other deputies in 1992 during
a federal investigation of sheriff officers stealing seized drug money,
described a drug war culture that frequently put law enforcement
officers into morally questionable situations that were difficult to
navigate.
The hunter and the hunted: A Los Angeles detective finally meets the kingpin he'd pursued.
“We all started getting weapons,” said Juarez, who served five years
in prison for skimming drug-bust money. “We were hitting houses coming
up with Uzis, AK-47s, and we’re walking in with a six-shooter and a
shotgun. So guys started saying, 'I’m going to get me a semi-automatic
and the crooks are paying for it.' So that’s how it started.”
But Juarez, who served in the LA County Sheriff’s narcotics division
for nearly a decade, explained that what started as a way for some
officers to pay for extra weapons and informants to aid in
investigations quickly devolved into greed. Since asset forfeiture laws
at the time allowed the county to keep all cash seized during a drug
bust, Juarez says tactics changed.
“It got to where we were more tax collectors than we were dope cops,”
Juarez recalled. “Everything seized was coming right back to the
county. We turned into the same kind of crooks we’d been following
around ... moving evidence around to make sure the asshole goes to jail;
backing up other deputies regardless of what it was. Everyone, to use a
drug dealer's term, everyone was taking a taste.”
* * * * *
Between 1982 and 1984, Congress restricted funding for the Contras,
and by 1985 cut it off entirely. The Reagan administration, undeterred,
conspired to sell arms to Iran in exchange for hostages, using some of
the proceeds to illegally fund the Contras. The scandal became known as
Iran-Contra.
Drug trafficking was a much less convoluted method of skirting the
congressional ban on funding the Contras, and the CIA's inspector
general found that in the early years after Congress cut off Contra
funding, the CIA had alerted Congress about the allegations of drug
trafficking. But while the ban was in effect, the CIA went largely
silent on the issue.
“CIA did not inform Congress of all allegations or information it
received indicating that Contra-related organizations or individuals
were involved in drug trafficking,” the inspector general's report
found. “During the period in which the FY 1987 statutory prohibition was
in effect, for example, no information has been found to indicate that
CIA informed Congress of eight of the ten Contra-related individuals
concerning whom CIA had received drug trafficking allegations or
information.”
This complicity of the CIA in drug trafficking is at the heart of
Webb’s explosive expose -- a point Webb makes himself in archival
interview footage that appears in Levin’s documentary.
“It’s not a situation where the government or the CIA sat down and
said, 'Okay, let’s invent crack, let’s sell it in black neighborhoods,
let’s decimate black America,’” Webb says. “It was a situation where,
'We need money for a covert operation, the quickest way to raise it is
sell cocaine, you guys go sell it somewhere, we don’t want to know
anything about it.'"
Gary Webb and Sacramento Bee writer Fahizah Alim. She interviewed Gary before his "suicide" in Sacramento.
