Customer Reviews

Red Cocaine: The Drugging of America and the West

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

The author's contention that it was the Soviet Bloc that kicked the illegal drug industry into high gear as a tool for undermining capitalism is very believable. Indeed, it would be difficult for me to believe that the Soviets would NOT engage in this sort of clandestine social warfare, since its potential for making money and hurting The Main Enemy was so vast. However, what the author does not do a convincing job of is explaining why successive governments, including hard-right-wingers like Reagan, would fail to exploit this for propaganda purposes. He also fails to deal seriously with the CIA's own involvement with drug traffickers to finance its own anti-communist thugs. It is an interesting read, a must for Cold War History buffs, but definitely not the last word on the geopolitics of the drug business, which is, not as many Americans would like to naively believe, just something bad guys do. The reality is the so-called War on Drugs is, just like the sham war on terror, a smoke-screen for more nefarious goals. Will we ever wake up?

My title says it all. Douglass's frequent use of the passive voice allows him to present such an innocent and wide-eyed yet wildly paranoid account of the cause of the drug epidemic in the West. His "documentation" largely consists of cobbled-together newspaper articles and dubious material from various sources. The main thrust of the book is "evidenced" by an account by General Sejna, which of course requires no real documentation. I wonder if Mr. Douglass has heard of Pablo Escobar or any other prominent drug kingpins who actually facilitated the drug epidemic. By Douglass's account, the commies nearly shoved drugs down the throats of the innocent, wide-eyed American youth. Yet even more laughable is his argument that the second wave of feminism was fueled by similar communist machinations. Oh, and I love that Douglass provided a rating for his OWN BOOK here, very objectively giving it a 5 star rating. Pass on this one folks.

The shocking inside story of how the Soviet Union bosses contrived, plotted, planned and then put into action a world-wide drug offensive against the West would be unbelievable if the writing were not so scholarly and well-documented. Douglass's careful work that gets at all the horrible details of the story of our undoing by drugs is worthy of careful reading and rereading by intelligent people everywhere. Beginning with the very effective initiative against our soldiers, up to the present, there are very few families that have not, by this time, been touched by the awful epidemic. But embarrassment, guilt and other intensities apparently have crippled our abilities to even talk about the problem, much less fight an effective war against it. And then there is our government's impotence if not collusion. We are in denial and in the closet. It is time we came out. This unique book helps immensely in that effort. By seeing how the drug plague is really a war being waged against us, we are in a position to come out of the closet of denial and begin to take appropriate action. Red Cocaine is a must read for parents, helping and medical professionals, religious people, educators, employers, the military and our law makers and enforcers. Roberta Gilbert M.D.

Using accurate, verified documentation, confirmed by subsequent Congressional hearings, Douglass, a career NSA employee and US War College professor, records the 1960s Soviet buildup of South American drug cartels and their infrastructure. The goals were to obtain funding for local wars of liberation, destabilize the US military, US inner cities and youth with drugs, and compromise South American politicians. Ironically, liberals sometimes like this information, as it provides a clear rationale for the US countermeasures, which allegedly included similar tactics.

I borrowed this book from the Denver Public Library a few years ago. It documents the development of America's drug industry in detail--so much detail that it can be hard to read. I strongly recommend this book in its original format for those who are comfortable with college-level reading material and with graphs. These will find a highly scholarly and thorough documentation of one of the most important realities in the world today--even after the "fall" of the Soviet Union, and US friendship with China.

The book not only shows the origin of most (not all) of our drug problem, it also documents how the governments of the US were corrupted at all levels to facilitate the drug trade. This means today that the government cannot win the war on drugs, however honest and sincere most of the individual agents may be.

Fortunately, America has a long history of private charities and causes. They have accomplished many things. Such a private effort could destroy the drug scourge--not entirely, for this is Earth and nothing is ever perfect--but mostly, reducing the drugs and crime in general by perhaps 80 to 90%. To do that, this book needs to be reprinted in its original form for those who can read it AND summarized in easy-to-read form, ideally 4th grade, so that youngsters in drug education classes can understand that this is a weapon aimed at them, and to begin healing many of the thugs in prison whose lives have been destroyed by it.

I have to consider Red Cocaine blatant intentional disinformation. I wonder how much the CIA paid this guy to write this. It actually includes a glowing introduction by former deputy director for intelligence of the CIA Ray Cline. It also heaps praise on the scumbag and Marijuana witchhunter Harry Anslinger throughout the book. But the basic gist here is that the drug trade in America is a Communist plot and that the commies control the Lions share of the illegal trade trade in America. Their plan is that drugs would demoralize America and then the commies could step in and take over America. Ha ha! Most of this information supposedly came from a former Soviet Union General named Jan Sejna that defected to the United States in 1968.

Its pretty well documented at this point that the CIA smuggled Heroin into the United States using the CIA front Air America and that they more or less created the crack cocaine plague of the 1980s mainly in order to raise money for the Contras. Like I said all of this is very well documented in various books. Gary Webbs (who was probably murdered by the CIA) Dark Alliance and former DEA agent Cellie Castillos Powderburns are good places to start. I'd also recomend a book called Dope Inc. that was put out by the Larouche organization.

I can only comment on the portions of the book that deal with the People's Republic of China, but I think it is relatively safe to assume that the bias and inaccuracy exhibited by the author in these sections extends to the rest of the book.

The main problem with this book is that it wouldn't stand up to a scholarly critique; Red Cocaine is the not the work of a scholar; it is not the work a historian who carefully documents sources and who does not have an agenda to convey.

The author cites "unpublished papers," books by extreme right wing organizations and testimony by men who were blindly anti-Communist and did not question "evidence" given to them when the evidence seemed to incriminate Communist countries, especially the PRC.

McCoy's "The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia" and the updated "The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade," while also semi-sensational, provide a more accurate picture of the narcotics situation in the mid-to late twentieth century. Also, check out Zhou Yongming "Anti-Drug Crusades in Twentieth Century China" and Chen Yung-fa's recently published article "The Blooming Poppy under the Red Sun: The Yan'an Way and the Opium Trade" for a balanced scholarly approach to the China issue.

As I said, I can only speak to the China sections in the book, but with this kind of bias blatantly evident, this book is not worth the time of someone who is interested in learning more about the world's drug problem.

I'm just quite shocked at how history could be rewritten so quickly in blaming the CIA for drug smuggling while defectors from the KGB have come out of the wood words to state that the KGB has been doing this along with China, Egypt and Communist Czech Republic's involvement with the "anti-Soviet insurgency" in Afghanistan during the late 70's and early to mid-80's.