Crack cocaine: the CIA's secret weapon

The US has more people in prison than any other country in the world. It imprisons and executes children and the mentally ill. It executes innocent people.  As in any society based on class exploitation its justice system is biased against workers and the poor, the exploited classes. Land was power under feudalism, money is in a capitalist economy and if you have money, in the main, you stay out of jail.

But the working class has within it different groupings, men, women, different ethnic groups and religions and people of different colors.  The ruling class uses these differences to create division among the working class as a united working class is the force that they fear. In Ireland the division was along religious lines as everyone was pretty much the same color as in India.  In  Africa, British imperialism turned tribe against tribe in its struggle to exploit natural resources and Labor.

So while a justice system is biased against all workers, it is particularly brutal for specially oppressed minorities as a group. Like class oppression in general, this racism is institutionalized and cannot be driven out of the system the system has to be driven out.  As Malcolm X once said, "You can't have capitalism without racism."

The US has one of the most racist justice systems in the world.  I could quote numerous widely known statistics here about what this means for black folks in the US but the fact that almost 50% of the prison population are people of color is enough; 70% of prisoners in the United States are non-whites. Racism based on skin color has been the dominant and most successful strategy that the US capitalist class has used to divide the working class here which set back the progress of all workers but for blacks it has meant a history of the most brutal violence.

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One modern example of the racism in the justice system is sentencing for cocaine use in the US.  Until the passing of the Fair Sentencing Act in August last year, the minimum sentence for possession of at least five grams of crack cocaine was five years with the average sentence being almost 14 years.  But it took possession of 500 grams of powder cocaine, that's more than one pound of cocaine, for a defendant to receive the same five year sentence. The vast majority of powder cocaine users are white while most crack users are black.

The changes in the law still leave a huge disparity in the sentencing.  It now takes 28 grams (one ounce) of crack cocaine to bring a five year sentence and raised to 280 grams from 50 grams the amount that brings a ten year stint. But for possession of powder the figures for receiving five year and ten year sentences are 500 grams (1pound two ounces) and 5000 grams (eleven pounds) respectively.

The use of drugs and alcohol as a weapon to keep the exploited classes and oppressed people down is nothing new and as the video shows, the CIA was very much responsible for the introduction of crack cocaine in to the inner cities during the eighties.  It was not only a fundraising effort to arm the Fascists the US supported in the war in Nicaragua but also to incapacitate whole sections of the black population and render harmless the revolutionary potential of the black youth. The British used drugs in Northern Ireland as a means of derailing the rising civil rights movement in the 1960's.  The South African Apartheid regime also used alcohol as a weapon.  The Russian bourgeois opened their wine cellars to the masses during the revolution and Alcohol was not introduced to Native Americans for medicinal purposes.  These substances are a weapon in the class war.

As we used to tell our co-workers that used to come to Union meetings drunk,"You can't fight the boss when your' f%#ed up."

The CIA is the world's dope dealer par excellence as this arm of US capitalism uses such methods along with murder and torture in the defense of US capitalism's interests at home and abroad. Alfred McCoy said of the CIA's drug policy in South East Asia that it was not so much a business but an "....inevitable consequence of its cold war tactics" * McCoy also reveals how the CIA in collusion with the AFL used thugs to break strikes in France that were led by the communist Unions in opposition to the occupation of Vietnam. 

The 1980's saw a major offensive by US capitalism against the organized working class beginning with the firing of the PATCO workers in 1981 and banning them from working in their industry for life. Since the civil rights movement the percentage of black workers in the Unions had risen considerably with a higher percentage them in Unions that whites. Links between the struggle against racism and for rights on the job had been strengthened and the US capitalist class was not willing to go through another 60's style revolt arising among the black youth of the inner cities that might link up with other sections of the working class.

The rise of crack cocaine use that began in the 1980's was a conscious strategy. It's nonsense to think that US capitalism, the force that kept the aircraft of two global military forces, Germany and Japan, from the continental US cannot stop planes flying in from Central America loaded with cocaine. Along with how such a drug incapacitates someone personally removing them as a threat politically, using the justice system to incarcerate the victims CIA policy created got a lot of potentially political opponents off the streets and in to the safe confines of the jailhouse.  This policy may sound somewhat unproductive as drugs also affect the productive ability of workers at some point.  But all policy has its pluses and negatives and when you don't have jobs for thousands of youth, what better than doping them up and putting them in jail where you can keep an eye on them.

The real crime is that drug addiction is treated as a crime as opposed to a sickness.

For more information about the CIA's exploits in the drug trade in Central America Cocaine Politics is a useful resource

* The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia: Alfred W McCoy