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CHUCK GRASSLEY, a Republican senator from Iowa, is known on twitter for expressing his yearning for the History Channel to finally show some history.  Here are two of his many tweets on this subject:

Follow ChuckGrassley ✔ @ChuckGrassleyJust love history.  So occasionally I turn to history channel. " mud cats" when wi they put history back on the channel6:48 PM - 25 Feb 2012 681 681 Retweets 788 788 likesTwitter Ads info and privacy Follow ChuckGrassley ✔ @ChuckGrassleyOcassionally I turn to History channel hope to c history.  Whenevr will the history channel hv a real old fashion histry program8:19 PM - 6 Jan 2012 326 326 Retweets 327 327 likesTwitter Ads info and privacyThe good news for Grassley, and for everyone else, is that starting Sunday night and running through Wednesday the History Channel is showing a new four-part series called “America’s War on Drugs.”  Not only is it an important contribution to recent American history, it’s also the first time U.S. television has ever told the core truth about one of the most important issues of the past fifty years. 

That core truth is: The war on drugs has always been a pointless sham.  For decades the federal government has engaged in a shifting series of alliances of convenience with some of the world’s largest drug cartels.  So while the U.S. incarceration rate has quintupled since President Richard Nixon first declared the war on drugs in 1971, top narcotics dealers have simultaneously enjoyed protection at the highest levels of power in America. 

On the one hand, this shouldn’t be surprising.  The voluminous documentation of this fact in dozens of books has long been available to anyone with curiosity and a library card. 

Yet somehow, despite the fact the U.S. has no formal system of censorship, this monumental scandal has never before been presented in a comprehensive way in the medium where most Americans get their information: TV. 

That’s why “America’s War on Drugs” is a genuine milestone.  We’ve recently seen how ideas that once seemed absolutely preposterous and taboo — for instance, that the Catholic Church was consciously safeguarding priests who sexually abused children, or that Bill Cosby may not have been the best choice for America’s Dad — can after years of silence finally break through into popular consciousness and exact real consequences.  The series could be a watershed in doing the same for the reality behind of one the most cynical and cruel policies in U.S. history. 

The series, executive produced by Julian P. Hobbs, Elli Hakami and Anthony Lappé, is a standard TV documentary; there’s the amalgam of interviews, file footage and dramatic recreations.  What’s not standard is the story told on camera by former Drug Enforcement Administration operatives as well as journalists and drug dealers themselves. ( One of the reporters is Ryan Grim, The Intercept’s Washington bureau chief and author of “This Is Your Country on Drugs: The Secret History of Getting High in America.”) 

There’s no mealy-mouthed truckling about what happened.  The first episode opens with the voice of Lindsay Moran, a one-time clandestine CIA officer, declaring, “The agency was elbow deep with drug traffickers.” 

Then Richard Stratton, a marijuana smuggler turned writer and television producer, explains, “Most Americans would be utterly shocked if they knew the depth of involvement that the Central Intelligence Agency has had in the international drug trade.” 

Next New York University professor Christian Parenti tells viewers, “The CIA is from its very beginning collaborating with mafiosas who are involved in the drug trade because these mafiosas will serve the larger agenda of fighting communism.” 

For the next eight hours, the series sprints through history that’s largely the greatest hits of the U.S. government’s partnership with heroin, hallucinogen and cocaine dealers.  That these greatest hits can fill up most of four two-hour episodes demonstrates how extraordinarily deep and ugly the story is. 

First we learn about the CIA working with Florida mob boss Santo Trafficante, Jr. in the early 1960s.  The CIA wanted Fidel Castro dead and, in return for Trafficante’s help in various assassination plots, was willing to turn a blind eye to the extensive drug trafficking by Trafficante and his allied Cuban exiles. 

Then there’s the extremely odd tale of how the CIA imported significant amounts of LSD from its Swiss manufacturer in hopes that it could used for successful mind control.  Instead, by dosing thousands of young volunteers including Ken Kesey, Whitey Bulger, and Grateful Dead lyricist Robert Hunter, the Agency accidentally helped popularize acid and generate the 1960s counter-culture of psychedelia. 

During the Vietnam War, the U.S. allied with anti-communist forces in Laos that leveraged our support to become some of the largest suppliers of opium on earth.  Air America, a CIA front, flew supplies for the guerrillas into Laos and then flew drugs out, all with the knowledge and protection of U.S. operatives. 

The same dynamic developed in the 1980s as the Reagan administration tried to overthrow the Sandinista government in Nicaragua.  The planes that secretly brought arms to the contras turned around and brought cocaine back to America, again shielded from U.S. law enforcement by the CIA. 

Most recently, there’s our 16-year-long war in Afghanistan.  While less has been uncovered about the CIA’s machinations here, it’s hard not to notice that we installed Hamid Karzai as president while his brother apparently was on the CIA payroll and, simultaneously, one of the country’s biggest opium dealers.  Afghanistan now supplies about 90 percent of the world’s heroin. 

To its credit, the series makes clear that this is not part of a secret government plot to turn Americans into drug addicts.  But, as Moran puts it, “When the CIA is focused on a mission, on a particular end, they’re not going to sit down and pontificate about ‘What are the long-term, global consequences of our actions going to be?’”  Winning their secret wars will always be their top priority, and if that requires cooperation with drug cartels which are flooding the U.S. with their product, so be it. “ A lot of these patterns that have their origins in the 1960s become cyclical,” Moran adds. “ Those relationships develop again and again throughout the war on drugs.” 

What makes this history so grotesque is the government’s mind-breaking levels of hypocrisy.  It’s like Donald Trump declaring a War on Real Estate Developers that fills prisons with people who occasionally rent out their spare bedroom on AirBnb. 

That brings us back to Charles Grassley.  Grassley is now chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, a longtime committed drug warrior and — during the 1980s — a supporter of the contras. 

Yet even Grassley is showing signs that he realizes there may have been some flaws in the war on drugs since the beginning.  He recently has co-sponsored a bill that reduce minimum sentences for drug offenses. 

So now that the History Channel has granted Grassley his wish and is broadcasting this extraordinarily important history, it’s our job to make sure he and everyone like him sits down and watches it.  That this series exists at all shows that we’re at a tipping point with this brazen, catastrophic lie.  We have to push hard enough to knock it over. 

the american government will create problems for their own financial gain, while at the same time taking away your rights.  Just as the wolves lead the sheep to slaughter. 

The stupid ass american public is too busy watching "americas got talent" or some other dumb shit they cant seem to figure out the government is the enemy.  it creates problems in order to create solutions.  the solution is MONEY. 

--------------------Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. 

Vladamir Putin knows it.  i'd trust him before i would trust anyone in government here, and he's a communist.  thats how much i trust this place.  the people here are mostly good tho.  stupid but good. 

--------------------Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. 

Quote:sprinkles said:Vladamir Putin knows it.  i'd trust him before i would trust anyone in government here, and he's a communist.  thats how much i trust this place.  the people here are mostly good tho.  stupid but good. 

Putin is a killer.  Whats wrong with communism though?  Communism itself is just an ideal for a government.  Just like capitalism and democracy.  Dont forget that every democracy in history has eventually killed itself or fell apart. 

Im russian-speaking, and if you trust Putin, damn, something is wrong.  Hes like if Trump was actually a genius who spent his youth on the streets and the rest of his life in the KGB, now hes a dictator/president. 

"Raised on cement" is the way id put it

As for this documentary.  The reason it matters is its mainstream and finally depicts just how bullshit the war on drugs really is and always was.  And its true origins.  These are things that are only briefly mentioned in mainstream media and people take it as seriously as Ghost Hunters. 

Cliffnoted synopsis of the entire story would be: "They" don't want you to be on good drugs that will actually make you better (if used correctly), so "They" give you the drugs "They" prefer to give you on their terms. 

America says "say no to drugs" as the pharmaceutical companies jam them down our throats.  This country is pure hypocracy.  It makes me cringe and projectile vomit on stuff.  Maybe if I just eat their pills I won't care anymore. 

--------------------Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. 

^^ Yep!  After MK-Ultra showed that they couldn't use the LSD for mind control because it is a mind expander, they quickly promptly banned it.  Now that we have no magic mind control drug -- except maybe dileriants like datura -- they had to use the next best thing for their purposes: drugs that numb and cloud your mind and keep it in a docile, uncritical, 'low-vibration' state.