TIL that Afghanistan resumed exporting Opium and derived goid from 2000/1 to 2022, which coincides with the US invasion of Afghanistan.
The US wanted them to import synthetic OxyContin, which is stronger and therefore more dangerous than Heroin (which can be produced from Poppy (Sr's name)).
Also, Opioids actually prolong pain by affecting the nervous system.
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The film "American Made" is about US government involvement in trafficking in the 1980s.
"Mandatory minimum sentences! Build more prisons! Lock up the users!"
Meanwhile they - the Republican federal government of the 1980s that recklessly deficit spent to a record degree - were involved in trafficking, were driving up the price with artificial scarcity, were dumping toxic exfoliant on campesinos in their country, where structuro-lateral adjustment by US banks that had very strongly recommended that other countries forego developing an internal economy in favor of specializing in certain exports only had failed. For example, "You (your country must only) grow wheat. Do not make washing machines for yourselves." And then the market for illicit exports that compete with the price of wheat.
Republicans have built these prisons and filled them with drug users and sellers.
Democrats have advocated for harm reduction, criminal justice reform, medicalization, and legalization.
Nixon, a Republican in the 1970s, decided that he was qualified to disagree with the interim Shaeffer report; which - like the LaGuardia report - found that cannabis should be a public health issue instead of a criminal issue. Nixon disregarded the major government-commissioned report on drugs at the time and villified drugs, druggies, anti-war idiot left on his lawn, and fucking hippies.
Should they hippocritically have access to cannabis that they have so criminalized and so victimized?
There are tens of millions of cannabis users in the US. There are thus millions of person years of wrongful incarceration.
The Right has vilified and wrongfully incarcerated unequally according to medical status, without proving intent, and with cruel and foolish disregard for the evaluations of the La Guardia commission and Shaffer report.
How can we refuse to pay for another bs junta claiming to be protecting us from severe peril while knocking out their competition, protecting their liability as sellers, and sabotaging quality control they enjoy for their essential inputs?
Somewhere there's a chart of (1) the addiction rate; and (2) and the federal and state funding schedules for criminalization of drugs.
Killing traffickers without due process presumably forces drug prices up, causes violence, and terrifies the competition.
Should the US government kill drug traffickers without due process? The former president of the Philippines should not have been killing people for drugs without due process.
If you murder (foreign traffickers, goy women and children, towlies, etc.) without positive identification or due process or presenting credentials, you cannot be the "good guy" to Americans who know the law and stick to their values.
> And, after sealing the deal, there's only one organization which could have been responsible, by sheer power, and motivation.
There is a ton of circumstantial evidence backing this theory? up too. The goal seemed to be to gain control over a Government organization that since the 30s had grown to act with basically no oversight. They were an international group with enormous power and wanted to keep that power and expand it. The Kennedy administration was trying to provide that oversight and roll it back.
The Bay of Pigs and the continued oversight along with the belief that Kennedy was somehow a Catholic communist sympathizer with connections to Russia. It's really fascinating to read those accusations in hind sight.
Then consider that after Kennedy, Nixon was very friendly towards the supranational intelligence service and after Carter, the CIA Director was even Reagan's VP, then became President himself for four years.
He lost the next election to someone with clear CIA ties from the drug running happening in Arkansas as he was governor. The story behind the movie American Made is incredible. So, Bill Clinton then became President for 8 years with many of this same group from the Defense Dept and CIA who had been in executive power for decades. Rumsfeld, Bush, Clintons, etc. Bipartisan even...
So what do you get after the Clintons? Another Bush who had control for 8 years.
Then consider how history might have been different if Kennedy was able to reign in the CIA, work with the Soviet Union to avoid escalation in Vietnam and then maybe the executive branch would not have been captured by CIA linked people for over the next few decades.
Anyway, we will all likely never know the full story but all of this seems more than plausible to me.
> because of being told by the governments and in schools, that the CIA and co only fight terrorist and evil empires.
That's not their image in the US at all and that's not how formal education about the CIA works in schools in the US. The opposite is closer to the truth.
You're maybe aware of the common American conspiracy theory that JFK was murdered by the CIA? As retribution for the Bay of Pigs, among other things.
Every other Hollywood movie in which they make an appearance has portrayed the CIA as up to no good for decades now, especially when it comes to topics like the war on drugs and terrorism. They're frequently portrayed as duplicitous and incompetent. That's because that's how the culture views them at this point. They do not have a good reputation with the American public.
See: American Made (2017), Kill the Messenger (2014), Syriana (2005), The Siege (1998), The Jason Bourne movies, among many others
Appreciate your thoughts as well! Without getting into the weeds too much on it, I would draw a contrast between a few perspectives:
a.) "The intelligence community are the good guys and mostly do the right thing, minus one or two foibles here and there." In this category you've got your Marvel movies, your James Bonds, your Tom Clancys, etc
b.) "The IC is fighting the good fight, but sometimes has to do morally questionable things to get it done." This is stuff like Zero Dark Thirty and encompasses most of what you might call "serious" cinema that depicts the CIA.
c.) "The IC is deeply morally flawed, serving the interests of an elite few at the expense of the vast majority both at home & abroad, and often undertakes actions where this must be clear to anyone involved who has a conscience." This is very rare. There are a few paranoid conspiracy films from the 70s, there's American Made, there's Kill the Messenger, there's JFK, but I'm already struggling to come up with more names.
Intelligence work is so compartmentalized that I believe it's possible for the vast majority of those who work in it to believe they are fighting a good (or at least neutral) fight without allowing for too much cognitive dissonance at all. I don't think this is true of, say, the FBI agents who buried the allegations against the Epstein & Franklin pedophile rings, or the CIA agents who ran drugs into Mena airport to supply funds to child murdering contras in Nicaragua. These are the characters which tend to be assiduously avoided in Western media.
Murder? Quite frankly, that's either akin to terrorism or it is terrorism. It destabilises entire regions of harmless civilians.
The CIA did this as well in Central and South America in the previous century. They got away with it as well, of course. The series Narcos and movies American Made and Che Part One and Che Part Two are albeit partly about these subjects. Not to mention more recently the collateral murder video.
I'm not entirely sure why? I guess if you got the military and economic high ground you get away with doing things like that?
Hacker Cinema
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There's even a Tom Cruise movie about it called American Made.
TIL that Afghanistan resumed exporting Opium and derived goid from 2000/1 to 2022, which coincides with the US invasion of Afghanistan.
The US wanted them to import synthetic OxyContin, which is stronger and therefore more dangerous than Heroin (which can be produced from Poppy (Sr's name)).
Opium production in Afghanistan: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opium_production_in_Afghanistan
--
The now $7.4B Sackler opioid pill settlement.
Also, Opioids actually prolong pain by affecting the nervous system.
--
The film "American Made" is about US government involvement in trafficking in the 1980s.
"Mandatory minimum sentences! Build more prisons! Lock up the users!"
Meanwhile they - the Republican federal government of the 1980s that recklessly deficit spent to a record degree - were involved in trafficking, were driving up the price with artificial scarcity, were dumping toxic exfoliant on campesinos in their country, where structuro-lateral adjustment by US banks that had very strongly recommended that other countries forego developing an internal economy in favor of specializing in certain exports only had failed. For example, "You (your country must only) grow wheat. Do not make washing machines for yourselves." And then the market for illicit exports that compete with the price of wheat.
Republicans have built these prisons and filled them with drug users and sellers.
Democrats have advocated for harm reduction, criminal justice reform, medicalization, and legalization.
Nixon, a Republican in the 1970s, decided that he was qualified to disagree with the interim Shaeffer report; which - like the LaGuardia report - found that cannabis should be a public health issue instead of a criminal issue. Nixon disregarded the major government-commissioned report on drugs at the time and villified drugs, druggies, anti-war idiot left on his lawn, and fucking hippies.
Should they hippocritically have access to cannabis that they have so criminalized and so victimized?
There are tens of millions of cannabis users in the US. There are thus millions of person years of wrongful incarceration.
The Right has vilified and wrongfully incarcerated unequally according to medical status, without proving intent, and with cruel and foolish disregard for the evaluations of the La Guardia commission and Shaffer report.
How can we refuse to pay for another bs junta claiming to be protecting us from severe peril while knocking out their competition, protecting their liability as sellers, and sabotaging quality control they enjoy for their essential inputs?
Somewhere there's a chart of (1) the addiction rate; and (2) and the federal and state funding schedules for criminalization of drugs.
Killing traffickers without due process presumably forces drug prices up, causes violence, and terrifies the competition.
Should the US government kill drug traffickers without due process? The former president of the Philippines should not have been killing people for drugs without due process.
If you murder (foreign traffickers, goy women and children, towlies, etc.) without positive identification or due process or presenting credentials, you cannot be the "good guy" to Americans who know the law and stick to their values.
> And, after sealing the deal, there's only one organization which could have been responsible, by sheer power, and motivation.
There is a ton of circumstantial evidence backing this theory? up too. The goal seemed to be to gain control over a Government organization that since the 30s had grown to act with basically no oversight. They were an international group with enormous power and wanted to keep that power and expand it. The Kennedy administration was trying to provide that oversight and roll it back.
The Bay of Pigs and the continued oversight along with the belief that Kennedy was somehow a Catholic communist sympathizer with connections to Russia. It's really fascinating to read those accusations in hind sight.
Then consider that after Kennedy, Nixon was very friendly towards the supranational intelligence service and after Carter, the CIA Director was even Reagan's VP, then became President himself for four years.
He lost the next election to someone with clear CIA ties from the drug running happening in Arkansas as he was governor. The story behind the movie American Made is incredible. So, Bill Clinton then became President for 8 years with many of this same group from the Defense Dept and CIA who had been in executive power for decades. Rumsfeld, Bush, Clintons, etc. Bipartisan even...
So what do you get after the Clintons? Another Bush who had control for 8 years.
Then consider how history might have been different if Kennedy was able to reign in the CIA, work with the Soviet Union to avoid escalation in Vietnam and then maybe the executive branch would not have been captured by CIA linked people for over the next few decades.
Anyway, we will all likely never know the full story but all of this seems more than plausible to me.
End rant!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Made_(film)
> because of being told by the governments and in schools, that the CIA and co only fight terrorist and evil empires.
That's not their image in the US at all and that's not how formal education about the CIA works in schools in the US. The opposite is closer to the truth.
You're maybe aware of the common American conspiracy theory that JFK was murdered by the CIA? As retribution for the Bay of Pigs, among other things.
Every other Hollywood movie in which they make an appearance has portrayed the CIA as up to no good for decades now, especially when it comes to topics like the war on drugs and terrorism. They're frequently portrayed as duplicitous and incompetent. That's because that's how the culture views them at this point. They do not have a good reputation with the American public.
See: American Made (2017), Kill the Messenger (2014), Syriana (2005), The Siege (1998), The Jason Bourne movies, among many others
Not recently, did watch this one though
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Made_(film)
So many movies would not exist if drugs were made legal.
Appreciate your thoughts as well! Without getting into the weeds too much on it, I would draw a contrast between a few perspectives:
a.) "The intelligence community are the good guys and mostly do the right thing, minus one or two foibles here and there." In this category you've got your Marvel movies, your James Bonds, your Tom Clancys, etc
b.) "The IC is fighting the good fight, but sometimes has to do morally questionable things to get it done." This is stuff like Zero Dark Thirty and encompasses most of what you might call "serious" cinema that depicts the CIA.
c.) "The IC is deeply morally flawed, serving the interests of an elite few at the expense of the vast majority both at home & abroad, and often undertakes actions where this must be clear to anyone involved who has a conscience." This is very rare. There are a few paranoid conspiracy films from the 70s, there's American Made, there's Kill the Messenger, there's JFK, but I'm already struggling to come up with more names.
Intelligence work is so compartmentalized that I believe it's possible for the vast majority of those who work in it to believe they are fighting a good (or at least neutral) fight without allowing for too much cognitive dissonance at all. I don't think this is true of, say, the FBI agents who buried the allegations against the Epstein & Franklin pedophile rings, or the CIA agents who ran drugs into Mena airport to supply funds to child murdering contras in Nicaragua. These are the characters which tend to be assiduously avoided in Western media.
Very interesting read!
This fellow reminds me of Barry Seal [0], recently dramatized in the movie "American Made."
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barry_Seal
Murder? Quite frankly, that's either akin to terrorism or it is terrorism. It destabilises entire regions of harmless civilians.
The CIA did this as well in Central and South America in the previous century. They got away with it as well, of course. The series Narcos and movies American Made and Che Part One and Che Part Two are albeit partly about these subjects. Not to mention more recently the collateral murder video.
I'm not entirely sure why? I guess if you got the military and economic high ground you get away with doing things like that?