Is the Opioid Crisis Pre-Planned, as America’s Contra-Cocaine Addiction and Prison Crisis Were?

The Contra-cocaine Scandal of the 1980’s was no aberration or isolated event. Indeed, the U.S. Government has known and participated in many drug-related operations and experiments for decades. There’s a lot of evidence too that government agencies, like the CIA and DEA, pushed drugs and drug addiction in poor black and minority communities to imprison the same people with mandatory-minimum sentencing laws. Given the U.S. Government has gone to bed with Nazis and a number of brutal dictators, including radical Islamic groups like al-Qaeda and ISIS, did it also pre-plan the Opioid Crisis?

Gary Webb’s investigative journalism and Mark Levin’s “Freeway: Crack in the System” consequently showed the Contra-cocaine Scandal was used to grow the financial interests of the power elites, even if it meant people getting hooked on drugs and large numbers of poor blacks being imprisoned. Through draconian jail sentences for drug offenders and the militarization of local police forces, drug addiction was moreover used to pacify potential disrupters of the status quo and disenfranchised. The so-called war on drugs also provided elites with a new source of cheap labor: mass incarceration for-profit.

Who “Really” Needs Zero Tolerance?
The same use of state power to incarcerate poor blacks and minorities in the name of drugs and profit now appears to be in use against poor whites and the homeless. To be sure, the Trump Administration’s Fiscal Year 2019 budget looks eerily similar to the Reagan Administration’s diversionary “look the other way” and “Just Say No to Drugs” tactics. Keeping in mind that the Reagan Administration funded and knew about the Contra-Cocaine Scandal, the president’s budget pays only lip service to the Opioid Crisis while favoring Big Pharma and the same failed law-and-order drug policies of the 1980s.

What’s more, the budget asks for more money for the president’s wall along the southern border with Mexico than for any kind of opioid dependency treatment. Meanwhile, the budget would gut the Office of National Drug Control Policy (the drug czar’s office), a number of treatment and health related centers, and the anti-drug advertising campaign. Given that the president campaigned on the promise to address the Opioid Crisis, this is truly alarming. It’s also disingenuous, specifically since $20 million is also scheduled to be cut from the Second Chance Act, a program aimed at helping people leave prison.

Draco’s Alive and Well-But No Longer in Greece
In the meantime, drug courts-in which people suffering from drug dependence rarely get the necessary intervention but are instead sent to prison and saddled with enormous court costs-are expected to expand so as to deal with rising drug-related arrests. Some not only see this as another prison-to-pipeline source of cheap prison labor, but they question why the DEA is getting a $400 million increase. They find it odd the Justice Department and Department of Homeland Security is receiving the lion’s share: $775 million too. Could a drugged lower class be much more manageable than sober radicals and protesters?

Could it also be that Big Pharma stands to increase its billions? Indeed, a recent investigation by the AP and the Center for Public Integrity revealed how painkiller manufacturers used hundreds of lobbyists and millions of dollars in campaign contributions to fight state and federal measures aimed at stemming the tide of prescription opioids, often enlisting help from advocacy organizations. Furthermore, they paid nonprofit groups and doctors to push opioid prescriptions. No wonder, then, that U.S. deaths linked to opioids have quadrupled since 2000 to roughly 45,000 per year.

Homeless and Destitute Lab Rats
Just as insidious is how Big Pharma is testing drug medications on the homeless and mentally ill. According to “Medium’s” Carl Elliot, homeless shelters have consequently become a target for recruiters trying to find subjects. With shelters filled with people desperate for jobs or fleeing domestic abuse, the people are moreover willing to overlook whatever side effects might occur with the trial. It also has the potential to make matters worse for those suffering depression or forms of mental illness. With 500,000 homeless and another 7 million living in destitute, is an entire subgroup being turned into lab rats?

Recall that the big picture in the Nicaragua drug scandal was to do everything necessary, no matter how immoral or unlawful, to remove a progressive Sandinista government. Ethics, consequently, didn’t enter into the big picture then and it doesn’t enter into the big picture now with the Opioid Crisis. To be sure, there might be inhumane side effects, such as highly addictive and illegal drugs entering our country back then, or addictive prescription drugs being manufactured in the U.S. and lawfully prescribed now, but to the power elite making money these were and still are the side effects of a “just war.”

Potential Troublemakers Need Not Apply
A just war for the power elites, that is, which is meant to suppress, imprison, and cull the poor and minorities. They’re more than likely used too so as to prevent massive demonstrations for economic justice and fair wages. After all, what political or economic elitist wants millions of potential troublemakers with the possibility of being radicalized fodder for a charismatic leader such as Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.?(1)

Dallas Darling is the author of Politics 501: An A-Z Reading on Conscientious Political Thought and Action, Some Nations Above God: 52 Weekly Reflections On Modern-Day Imperialism, Militarism, And Consumerism in the Context of John’s Apocalyptic Vision, and The Other Side Of Christianity: Reflections on Faith, Politics, Spirituality, History, and Peace. He is a correspondent for www.WN.com. You can read more of Dallas’ writings at www.beverlydarling.com and www.WN.com//dallasdarling.

(1) Hill, Chad. Covert Propaganda And Molding The Mass Mind. Charleston, South Carolina: Chad Hill Press, 2015., p. 174.