30 Year Anniversary of Dark Alliance by Gary Webb

This week (Aug 18th – 20th) marks the 30 year anniversary of Gary Webb publishing his Dark Alliance series in the San Jose Mercury News.

This story illuminated the CIA's involvement with cocaine smuggling in order to illegally fund the Contras in Nicaragua; and for the first time linked key figures from the Contras to the crack trade's explosion in South Central LA.

The mainstream media had a field day tearing down Webb's credibility – although none could actually refute the basic facts of the case. Still, reporters from the NYT, to WaPo, to the LA Times took turns attempting to discredit the story and make Webb look like a rube. Two decades later, a FOIA request of internal CIA documents revealed the following:

"A review of the CIA drug conspiracy story shows that a ground base of already productive relations with journalists … helped prevent this story from becoming an unmitigated disaster."

I make a podcast about drugs called The Trip Report Report, and today we published an episode detailing as much of this fucked up affair as we could. I'm really proud of the episode my producer and I made, and would be honored if anyone in this sub unfamiliar with the story would listen.

(mods, please remove if not allowed, but I didn't see any rules against self-promotion)