Answer to —

2. True or False? The CIA has always acted against the use and trade of illicit drugs.

Answer: False

In the 1980s, under President Ronald Reagan, the CIA flew planes to mainland U.S. bases loaded with cocaine—which paid for the arms loaded on planes that then flew back to Central America to supply the Contras, the counter-revolutionary force being used by the U.S. against the government of Nicaragua. The flood of cocaine helped create the “crack epidemic” that hit U.S. inner cities in the 1980s, which was in turn one of the factors that drove the huge expansion of mass incarceration of Black and Latino people.

Another example involved the CIA “experimenting” with drugs, including on their own personnel: From the early 1950s to the early1970s, the CIA conducted a secret project, known as MK-Ultra, to test LSD and other drugs and methods to find ways to manipulate and alter people’s minds in order to extract information. The drugs were administered to people who were unaware what they were being given, including prisoners in secret detention centers in various parts of the world. According to one researcher, some of these “experiments” were “undoubtedly fatal”: “We don’t know how many people died, but a number did, and many lives were permanently destroyed.” One of the lives ruined was an American scientist working for the CIA, Frank Olson, who died from a fall out of a New York City hotel window a few days after he was given LSD by the agency without his knowledge. His family has alleged in a lawsuit that Olson was killed by the agency after he said he was disturbed by the work he was doing for the agency and wanted to quit.

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Wreckage of a plane shot down by Sandinista forces after it had air-dropped supplies to Contras in Nicaragua. (Photo: AP)

Frank Olsen