How Right-Wing Posses Started the Crack Trade, and Other Tales That Will Blow Your Mind. Vivian Blake's War In the late 1970s, a young Jamaican man named Vivian Blake, a scholarship kid from the Tivoli Gardens ghetto of Kingston, arrived in New York as part of a traveling cricket exhibition, stuck around, and began selling marijuana. One of the last great political proxy fights of the Cold War was then unfolding in Jamaica: Both the left-wing party, friendly to Castro, and its right-wing opponents built violent electioneering posses to persuade friendly voters and attack unfriendly ones--800 Jamaicans died. Blake was affiliated with the right-wing Shower Posse. He helped funnel pot and, later, cocaine to the United States and sent guns back home to help the posses intimidate voters. After the election, the new government tried to drive the posses off the island, and many arrived in New York and Miami, fully formed, violent organizations, deprived of their political purpose and looking for something to do. [continues 1329 words]
After Thirty-Five Years and $500 Billion, Drugs Are as Cheap and Plentiful as Ever: An Anatomy of a Failure. 1. After Pablo On the day of his death, December 2nd, 1993, the Colombian billionaire drug kingpin Pablo Escobar was on the run and living in a small, tiled-roof house in a middle-class neighborhood of Medellin, close to the soccer stadium. He died, theatrically, -ridiculously, gunned down by a Colombian police manhunt squad while he tried to flee across the barrio's rooftops, a fat, bearded man who had kicked off his flip-flops to try to outrun the bullets. The first thing the American drug agents who arrived on the scene wanted to do was to make sure that the corpse was actually Escobar's. The second thing was to check his house. [continues 15494 words]
With stark pictures and dire warnings, the federal government's anti-ecstasy campaign strikes exactly its intended tone: scientific fright. In schools around the country, counselors are showing students sleek and sharply contrasting images of the brains of habitual ecstasy users and nonusers. The brain scans of nonusers show plenty of colorful activity. The users' scans are full of ominous black blotches resembling holes. "We tell them, 'Ecstasy eats your brain like a moth eats an old sweater,' " said Susan Billy, who directs the Chester County student-assistance program, a group of teachers who coach public school students on the dangers of drugs and addiction. [continues 1277 words]
On a placid Thursday in November, the phones started ringing at the Radnor Township Police Department as Sgt. Sue Cory had never heard before, with reports of a fight and guns drawn outside the Genuardi's supermarket in St. Davids. Radnor police officers jumped in their cars, sirens as loud as could be. But when they got to the store, they were flashed aside by a more imposing set of badges: the FBI's. "A club-drug bust," Cory said. "They were doing a buy, and we had no idea." [continues 1334 words]
