What is a more effective means of genocide than fostering suicide? What America committed comes in second to Hitler’s infamous Final Solution, but not by much. Granted, Black men, women and children haven’t been rounded up in cattle cars and shipped to concentration camps, but it was so slick, that there’s no prominent image at which the world can point a damning finger.
U.S. hands are perceptibly clean, while there is a popular perception that the crack plague is the Black community’s own problem. In fact, some people reason that crack cocaine is the Black community’s fault since no one placed a gun to anyone’s head and said, “Do drugs.”
Let’s set the record straight. Nationwide, the Black demand for crack cocaine didn’t come until the supply of crack flooded ghettoes across the country. Where would these folk find coke? How could they import it, and then distill it down to ready marketability all on their own? Somebody came up with networking with boats and planes, not to mention the upfront capital necessary to bring cocaine here.
Enter new, improved slavery courtesy of Uncle Sam’s very own Central Intelligence Agency that possessed all things needed — starting with money — to establish and sustain drug traffic. This is hardly the first time laws didn’t expediently apply to fouling over Black folk. After all, murder’s illegal, yet how long did America’s history of law enforcement accommodate, indeed, facilitate, lynchings by blithely looking the other way?
Here’s how it went. Congress wouldn’t sign off on a campaign to finance and otherwise support Nicaraguan Contras. No problem. To come up with money, the C.I.A. simply sidestepped the law and went into the drug-dealing business as a wholesaler, supplying, making and marketing crack.
This is not a reckless, finger-pointing conspiracy theory. Gary Webb, an award-winning San Jose Mercury News journalist, documented it. He was consequently hounded out of a job for having the audacity to pull the covers off corruption that everybody knew was right under the government’s nose.
Had crack cocaine turned White bread teenagers and young men into thugs, leading dead-end careers as lifelong criminals; had it induced White girls to peddle themselves on street corners, this illegal enterprise would’ve been stopped dead in its tracks. Indeed, it never would have been allowed to get off the ground.
But, the Black lives it is destroying are deemed wholly expendable. For that matter, Black lives are expediently disposable, and America gets a twofer. The country invests in running another nation while helping Black people kill themselves. Not a bad deal.
As for the nonsensical, knee-jerk “Just Say No” school of thought, the very nature of addiction is that crack cocaine is even more virulently addictive. The C.I.A. knew exactly what kind of powerfully parasitic revenue generating force they were letting loose.
Particularly galling, our bright shining Affirmative Action token, Barack Obama, couldn’t help but know about it, yet didn’t do a damned thing. He never said a word. Time after time, he proved himself to be the White folk’s Black president showing no interest at all in issues that spurred leaders like Bobby C. Hall and Maxine Waters to protest this society’s inhumanity toward African Americans.
The crack cocaine crisis has been swept under the rug in plain sight and allowed to fester and run rampant.
Crack cocaine is a behavioral cancer without so much as hope in hell of a cure.
It is a living death sentence to which the United States has ruthlessly condemned a large part of an entire population.
Dwight Hobbes welcomes readers’ responses to P.O. Box 50357, Minneapolis, MN 55403.
Support Black local news
Help amplify Black voices by donating to the MSR. Your contribution enables critical coverage of issues affecting the community and empowers authentic storytelling.
Mr. Hobbes, You are spot on in your assessment. Having come of age in the 1980’s, these facts ring true based on endless reports at the time, and also being a witness to the deceit.. Yet our own government could not admit. Great article. Looking forward to more truth. – A white guy.