Flooding Cities with Crack to Fund War Crimes in C. America & Altered States of Consciousness-Casts

What's up to my bulging babirusas and polychromatic paddlefish! Welcome back to the BNP and thanks so much for joining! We have a dandy doozy of an ep for ya this week friends, a real ripsnorting pistol whipper.

We got a zany audio tidbit, believe that. Also included are two original altered states of consciousness-casts,  the first of their kind on the BNP - but certainly not the last.  Someone who isn't me gets a hoot out of recording content from a seat in their pineal gland.

The meat n potatoes of this week's ep weaves a sordid tale of rampant government corruption, cover-ups at the highest echelons of power, and rogue intelligence agencies. We hear from investigative journalist Gary Webb, who sacrificed his career (and eventually his life) in order to paint a detailed portrait of how the CIA and assorted other 3 letter agencies worked intimately alongside Colombian drug cartels, Nicaraguan right-wing para-militiamen, and inner city dope dealers in order to flood U.S. urban centers (starting in E. L.A., then fanning out from there) with cheap cocaine. This cheap blow could then be cut into crack, making a high price drug suddenly affordable in low income neighborhoods. This highly addictive and socially destructive substance blossomed forth an entirely new drug market.

The result was a public health apocalypse, with crack cocaine causing generationally devastating effects throughout urban America and filling the prisons with young black men, who because of racist sentencing legislation were put away for twice as long as their richer, white-collar counterparts selling powdered cocaine uptown.

Gary Webb's 1996 expose was entitled Dark Alliance, and it ran in the San Jose Mercury. It's now quite difficult to find online, however currently you can access it here.  Download while you can.

I end the episode by reading an article outlining Israel's role in arming and supporting brutal right wing dictatorships in Central America. The Guatemalan right wing actually referred to the genocidal slaughter in the 80's as the "Palestinianization" of the country's indigenous Mayan people.

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