Okay, so is it true that during Bush Sr.'s administration, it came out that the CIA was handing out crack in inner city neighborhoods suruptitiously? Any information confirming or denying this would be great, as I am very curious to see what pies the CIA has its fingers in. This is not a veiled political question or debate, please please PLEASE don’t turn it into one. I just want the Straight Dope on the dope.
It came out in ~1996 (north bush reagan cia cocaine “San Jose Mercury News” ). They didn’t give it away, they sold it.
There was a steady supply of crack readily available in DC, but not because of the CIA.
The mayor of the city, Marion Barry, had a bad drug habit. It stands to reason that when the mayor needed his fix, enforcement was, well, somewhat lax.
There was an incident in which President Bush (the elder) showed on TV a bag of cocaine that had been purchased across the street from the White House in Lafayette Square Park.
Quoting the Washington Post (January 1998):
“[Newsweek investigative reporter Michael Isikoff] disclosed that federal agents had lured a suspected drug dealer to Lafayette Square so President Bush, in a televised speech, could hold up a bag of cocaine seized near the White House”
So the Straight Dope is that DC was blessed with a doped-up mayor and a slightly dopey presidential visual aid gone awry.
Thankfully, Mayor Barry is out of office and the flood tide of cocaine is abating. Although heroin seems to be making a comeback 
Just as the US incursion into Afghanistan revved up, the the middle managers of the Afghan heroin industry cut their losses by dumping all their supply onto the world market. Afghanistan supplied roughly 90% of the world’s heroin, so when the supply went up, the price went down. The CIA has long seen the black-market drug industry as a way of generating money and local alliances. Opium and pot in SE Asia, opium in Burma, pot and coca in South America; the list goes on. When Congress doesn’t want to fund the CIA, they find a way. Afghanistan’s only real source of money was opium before the US invasion. If the US does not act quickly to offer a subsitute crop, the Afghans will simply continue to supply the world with heroin. They have to make a living somehow.
Cite please? And I don’t mean a link to a Google search, the top hits of which appear to involve Lyndon LaRouch, a la Squink.
That statement is misleading. LaRouche appears only as the fifth most popular link. The “top hits” include the national security archives at George Washington University, PBS, and the non-profit consortium news site. If you look far enough down the list you can probably find out how Englebert Humperdinck felt about the CIA’s coke deals. Who cares ? The presence of crap in a search result doesn’t invalidate the good stuff that’s also there.
Gary Webb wrote a 4 part series for the San Jose Mercury News entitled “Dark Alliance” in 1996. In it, he alleged that certain contras from Nicaragra financed their activities through cocaine sales, and that the CIA helped with the transportation.
One link from The Nation: http://www.assumption.edu/WebVAX/Nation/Parry21Oct96.html
The editors of the SJ Merc later published a somewhat odd apology for the story. The reporter stood by his work (and later wrote a book).
And an interesting book it is. Well researched and documented. And Webb is no conspiracy kook, he was in fact a well-respected reporter before this story made – and broke – him. The name of the book is Dark Alliance: The CIA, the Contras, and the Crack Cocaine Explosion. I would highly recommend reading it before forming an opinion on this.
And for the record, he doesn’t really posit that the CIA “created” crack or sold it directly on the streets, merely that they secured the supply lines for various contra-connected dealers.
And btw IIRC, Webb did not assert that the CIA was responsible for a large share of the cocaine trade.