Trickle Down

I didn't know it at the time , but I got fucked by Ronald Reagan on my 20th birthday, Sept. 15, 1986. That was the day he signed Executive Order 12564, which called for a drug- free Federal workplace. This is ironic, because at the time ,the CIA was using money raised from domestic cocaine sales to fund arms purchases for the Contras, a brutally violent group of Central American terrorist organizations and drug-smugglers supported by Reagan's administration.

During the Reagan years, cocaine became cheap and plentiful- what was once a 'Hollywood' drug suddenly became a wide-spread ghetto commodity - the CIA and the DEA tacitly allowed tons of cocaine into America; the law of supply and demand soon made the drug affordable to the working-class.

Before Reagan (and former CIA head G.H.W. Bush) took office, most drug users had never heard of 'crack' cocaine. That, obviously, has changed.

This is not Internet rubbish, it's a matter of public record. A Freedom of Information lawsuit forced the National Security Administration to declassify thousands of documents pertaining to the US-Contra narco-trafficking. Oliver North's personal diaries were included. It's all here.

It was Reagan's dealings with the Contras that spawned the American crack epidemic in the first place. All of that blow had to go somewhere- new markets needed to be created.

It wasn't long before the lower-class, i.e., urban blacks, discovered that they could make a lot of money acting as unwitting middlemen in the distribution of coke from the CIA to the American middle-class. i.e., white people. The introduction of the 'crack economy' to urban America not only destroyed countless African-American lives, it's destructive tentacles reached deep into 'White' America's middle and working class families who became the customer base for the nascent crack industry. A suburban white would drive into the city, buy cocaine from a street hustler working for the new 'Gangsta industry', who then passed the money up to his boss and so on until it came back to the white men at the CIA, who used the money to buy illegal weapons to support covert wars overseas, none of which involved 'white' countries.
Again, I'm not making any of this up- it's in public government records such as Oliver North's handwritten notebooks:

In a July 12, 1985 entry, North noted a call from retired Air Force general Richard Secord in which the two discussed a Honduran arms warehouse from which the contras planned to purchase weapons. (The contras did eventually buy the arms, using money the Reagan administration secretly raised from Saudi Arabia.) According to the notebook, Secord told North that "14 M to finance [the arms in the warehouse] came from drugs."

Reagan's crack epidemic didn't merely spawn a new generation of gangsters, it also created a lot of jobs. For example, it was a huge windfall for the prison industry. Suddenly , there were record numbers of minorities to incarcerate- the for-profit prison business seized this great chance to expand as the conservatives moved to privatize the prison industry- for the results of this expansion, see the Dept. of Justice's own website.

• At yearend 2001, over 5.6 million U.S. adults had ever served time in State or Federal prison
  
• Of adults in 2001 who had ever served time in prison, nearly as many were black (2,166,000) as were white (2,203,000). An estimated 997,000 were Hispanic.
  
• If incarceration rates remain unchanged, 6.6% of U.S. residents born in 2001 will go to prison at some time during their lifetime.
  
• U.S. residents ages 35 to 39 in 2001 were more likely to have gone to prison (3.8%) than any other age group, up from 2.3% in 1991.

If you are a young black man, current odds say that your chances of spending time in prison are roughly one in six. (16%)
One in six.
That is unacceptable.

Back to my original point, it was EO 12564 that laid the foundation for the creation of a huge new industry- corporate, for-profit drug-testing laboratories. Today, the pre-employment drug-screen is nearly ubiquitous for every job, regardless of how menial or low-paying.

Every time an employer hires a new employee, they have to pay a corporation such as LabCorp a fee for the prospective worker's drug-screen. This testing costs money, therefore it stands to reason that employers would become more cautious in their hiring practices as a result. Which trickles down to fewer job openings- which become even more scarce if you have a criminal record (see stats above). Drug testing has been a huge cashcow for the shareholders at BigPharmCo, but has it improved America?

During the 1980 Presidential campaign Ronald Reagan famously asked America:

"Are you better off now than you were four years ago?"

My fellow Americans, it has been well over a decade since drug screening became almost mandatory and I ask you to ask yourself:

Are you better off now than ten years ago?

There is an obscure clause in an obsolete document that -at one time- was used to protect the American citizen from unwarranted searches and groundless seizures of personal property, which I believe should extend to the contents of one's bladder.

According to that same document, an individual is also presumed innocent until proven guilty.

Unfortunately, that document- the United States Constitution- is no longer in effect.
Today, an employee is considered stoned until proven sober.

But it's not just stoners who have to worry about having their right to privacy invaded by an amalgamated corporate and Federal inquisition, it's now everybody's problem.

Everybody that uses the Internet or a telephone, that is. The rest of you can breathe easy.

As information is traded between users it flows also into a locked, secret room on the sixth floor of AT&T's San Francisco offices and other rooms around the country -- where the U.S. government can sift through and find the information it wants, former AT&T employee Mark Klein alleged Wednesday at a press conference on Capitol Hill.

"An exact copy of all Internet traffic that flowed through critical AT&T cables -- e-mails, documents, pictures, Web browsing, voice-over-Internet phone conversations, everything -- was being diverted to equipment inside the secret room," he said.

Klein, who worked for more than 20 years as a technician at AT&T, said that the highly secretive electronics-focused National Security Agency began working with telecom companies to gain wholesale access to vast amounts of data traveling over the Internet.

Are we better off now than we were ten years ago?