The first thing I looked for was the amount of cocaine that the story said “the CIA’s army” had brought into the country and funneled into the crack trade. It turned out to be relatively small: a ton in 1981, 100 kilos a week by the mid-1980s, nowhere near enough to flood the country with crack.
...
There was no response from the CIA in the story. But the claims Gary made, man, were they extraordinary:
“For the better part of a decade, a San Francisco Bay Area drug ring sold tons of cocaine to the Crips and Bloods street gangs of Los Angeles and funneled millions in drug profits to a Latin American guerrilla army run by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, a Mercury News investigation has found.
Wow, man, extraordinary, that a ton of cocaine in one year could mean that over a decade there would be tons.
And a ton of cocaine is a shit-ton of cocaine.
As I understand it, the only real quibble in this story is "active encouragement" versus "turning a blind eye." The idea that our supposedly all-knowing intelligence agencies were unaware is ridiculous. They knew what they were doing. And in supporting these people, they were encouraging it.