Did the CIA spark the inner cities crack epidemic ?

by xlhat

This post claims that the CIA funded the Contras by hiring drug traffickers which ultimately led to the crack epidemic that plagued the inner cities.

Is this true ? Did the CIA really flood American cities with drugs or turned a blind eye to it ?

beeswaxx

there is no definitive proof (and, likely, will never be) that the CIA was was directly involved in the distribution of drugs in the US. There is enough evidence, one could argue, to suggest that in their quest to fight communism, they had a net "positive" effect growing the drug epidemic in the US. See here, here and here where this was discussed previously on this sub.

rmosquito

/u/beeswaxx pointed to the fairly well-hashed out questions about the role of the CIA and such, but I'd like to address the question from a slightly different angle.

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The Gary Webb story is interesting to media historians because it came out at a pretty pivotal time. It was published in the San Jose Mercury News but was also published online -- and that's where it started taking off. Today if something is reported by one media outlet, other media outlets are going to report on the reporting. But the Webb series wasn't picked up by the east coast media establishment until months later.

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Because of this silence, the story blew up in conspiracy circles (and particularly in the African American communities most impacted by the crack epidemic), where the silence of the mainstream media was seen as an indicator of complacency. When other outlets did start reporting on it, they brought to question the veracity of Webb's reporting, both for the current "Dark Alliance" story, dredging up lawsuits over his past reporting, and basically tearing his piece to bits over tens of thousands of words in defense of their own silence on the matter. But because of their extended silence on the matter, this was easily interpreted as the media attempting to cover up for the government... which has let this "Remember Gary Webb" meme stay alive for so long... and paved the way for the Hollywood biopic.

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Again, LOTS of good longer-view articles on this. See particularly:

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  • Paterno, S. 2005. The sad saga of Gary Webb. American Journalism Review 27(3).
  • Hall, J.A. 2006. Aligning Darkness with Conspiracy Theory. Howard Journal of Communications 17(3).
  • Bratich, J.Z. 2004. Trust No One (On the internet): The CIA-Crack-Contra Conspiracy Theory and Professional Journalism. Televeision and New Media 5(2).

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For some articles around the time of the event that dealt more with the mainstream responses, see:

  • Kornbluth, P. 1997. Columbia Journalism Review 35(5). Crack, the Contras and the CIA.
  • Miller, A.H. 1997. How the CIA fell victim to myth posing as journalism. International Journal of Intelligence and Counterintelligence 10(3).
  • Shepard, A.C. 1997. The Web that Gary Spun. American Journalism Review 19(1).

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HTH!