Comment by lmg643 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by lmg643 | Hacker News Reader

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I've seen a lot of this data - very troubling.

With some familiarity of Gary Webb's work on crack cocaine, it does make me wonder whether the CIA is also allowing exports of opium to fund additional covert ops in Afghanistan.

The NYT had reported back in 2001 - just prior to 9/11 - that the Taliban ban on opium production was a big success:

http://www.nytimes.com/2001/05/20/world/taliban-s-ban-on-pop...

Think about it - our now sworn enemy, the Taliban, was the only effective government to shut down drug production inside its borders. Sure, among other things, but it does make you think. Karzai's family members are major opium traffickers.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/28/world/asia/28intel.html

And, apparently in partnership with the CIA. So perhaps I'm not so crazy after all.

Heroin has won new converts among American youth who used to take oxycontin - effectively a gateway opiod. Oxy was reformulated to reduce its ability to produce a high, and heroin is now cheap and everywhere.

Just another wonderful side effect of our misguided overseas adventures.

OxyContin wasn't changed to reduce high, it was just made harder to crush, to make it harder to IV. It's still just oxycodone. This was purely in response to pressure in the US from misguided or malicious people.

The change to OC to make it hard to crush only applies in the US (which doesn't seem to stop "abuse" of OC, just makes it far dangerous/expensive). Similarly a liver toxin, acetaminophen (Tylenol) is added to many opiates, purely to damage users that take "too much". Doctors often prescribe as little opiate with as much poison as possible, and slowly move patients over to more pure forms once they've proven themselves (by suffering needlessly).

Heroin is just cheaper and easier to get than OxyContin. This seems mostly caused by the massive increase in difficulty for doctors to prescribe medicine and do their jobs. Addiction to opioids is seen as bad, patients get labelled drug-seekers, and doctors that do help patients end up getting severe penalties.

As you point out, in reality, clamping down on pharmaceutical opiates simply leads to people buying products with low quality control or consistency, and that directly contributes to death. (Though note that opiates by themselves aren't that dangerous, and around 2/3rd of overdoses (according to one Australian study) are due to mixing opiates with other drugs.)

If you search Wikipedia for "rendition aircraft" you will find a plane that crashed in Mexico in 2007 while carrying multiple tons of cocaine. Do a Google search on the tail number of the aircraft and you'll find a couple sites who did extensive investigation of the aircraft's previous owners (an empty business office) and interesting flight history (Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.)

[1] Here is another one about a plane in australia they just busted.

The article is a bit all over the place - but it has some really interesting information about how the CIA gets its rendition aircraft.

[1] http://www.madcowprod.com/2014/09/12/mystery-aircraft-busted...

I'm not so sure about that one, FARC is a marxist group that had ties to Chavez. I can't see the CIA helping them.

It seems more likely that anyone looking at the flight / maintenance logs noticed discrepancies. No legitimate buyer would take it.

Why not? The CIA is a highly compartmentalized organization staffed by people with extremely pragmatic (albeit often relentlessly anti-Bayesian) attitude. As such, they will--and historically have--ally themselves with pretty much anyone if it seems like a plausible way to further their immediate, narrowly-defined mission.

As such, supplying arms to Iran was no big deal for them in the 80's, and helping FARC today is likewise no big deal. You have to understand that the typical CIA operative (or at least the ones who get caught doing something egregiously illegal) has absolutely no moral compass. They are purely interested in the narrowest possible operational goals, and this unfortunate reality is extremely well-documented.

The CIA has a history of funding black ops through drug running, regardless of which side they are supposed to be helping.

As an intelligence agency, I imagine that it would be highly desirable for the CIA to have contacts close to FARC.

There are many compartments within the Central Intelligence Agency, and within the Intelligence Community (IC) [1]. This contributes to the difficulty of applying oversight to the IC.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sensitive_Compartmented_Informa...

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