How the DEA Scrubbed Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello Poppy Garden from Public Memory

Visitors to Monticello don’t learn how Jefferson cultivated poppies, and his personal opium use may as well never have happened.

Alternet – March 3, 2010

The following is an excerpt from Jim Hogshire’s “Opium for the Masses: Harvesting Nature’s Best Pain Medication” (Feral House, 2009).

Thomas Jefferson was a drug criminal. But he managed to escape the terrible sword of justice by dying a century before the DEA was created. In 1987 agents from the Drug Enforcement Agency showed up at Monticello, Jefferson’s famous estate.

Jefferson had planted opium poppies in his medicinal garden, and opium poppies are now deemed illegal. Now, the trouble was the folks at the Monticello Foundation, which preserves and maintains the historic site, were discovered flagrantly continuing Jefferson’s crimes. The agents were blunt: The poppies had to be immediately uprooted and destroyed or else they were going to start making arrests, and Monticello Foundation personnel would perhaps face lengthy stretches in prison.

The story sounds stupid now, but it scared the hell out of the people at Monticello, who immediately started yanking the forbidden plants. A DEA man noticed the store was selling packets of “Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello Poppies.” The seeds had to go, too. While poppy seeds might be legal, it is never legal to plant them. Not for any reason.

Employees even gathered the store’s souvenir T-shirts — with silkscreened photos of Monticello poppies on the chest — and burned them. Nobody told them to do this, but, under the circumstances, no one dared risk the threat.

Jefferson’s poppies are gone without a trace now. Nobody said much at the time, nor are they saying much now. Visitors to Monticello don’t learn how the Founding Father cultivated poppies for their opium. His personal opium use and poppy cultivation may as well never have happened.

The American War on Drugs started with opium and it continues today. Deception is key to this kind of social control, along with the usual threats of mayhem. Ever since the passage of the Harrison Act made opium America’s first “illicit substance” in 1914, propaganda has proven itself most effective in the war on poppies. This has not been done so much by eradicating the poppy plant from the nation’s soil as by eradicating the poppy from the nation’s mind.

Prosecutions for crimes involving opium or opium poppies are rare. But that has less to do with the frequency of poppy crimes and everything to do with suppressing information about the opium poppy. A public trial might inadvertently publicize forbidden information at odds with the common spin about poppies and opium. This might pique interest in the taboo subject and, worse, undermine faith in the government.

The U.S. government strategy to create and enforce deliberate ignorance about opium, opium poppies, and everything connected with them has proven remarkably effective. The Monticello campaign exemplifies an effective tactic. The poppies were swiftly removed, and sotto voce threats ensured no one would talk about it afterward. Today, visitors to Monticello learn nothing about opium poppy cultivation or why Jefferson cultivated it in his garden.

Disinformation about poppies has been spread far and wide. Some of it is subtle, like when the New York Times talks about people growing “heroin poppies.” Some misinformation is so bald-faced as to stun the listener into silence, as when a DEA agent tells a reporter that the process of getting opium from opium poppies is so complex and dangerous that “I don’t even think a person with a Ph.D. could do it.”

This enforced ignorance reduces the chances of anyone even accidentally discovering the truth about poppies. Poring through back issues of pharmaceutical industry news from Tasmania might yield a mother load of cutting edge poppy science — from genetically altered poppies that ooze double-strength opium to state-of-the-art machines designed to manufacture “poppy straw concentrate.” Tasmania’s output meets roughly a third of the world’s narcotic requirement. But how many people know that Tasmania is the home of the world’s largest and most modern opium industry?

Opium and opium poppy ignorance is augmented by widespread false beliefs, chief among them that it is extremely difficult for opium poppies to grow anywhere in the United States. Opium poppies surely require exotic climates or special climatic conditions, don’t they? They’re found on remote mountainsides in the Golden Triangle and Afghanistan, where growing them is a secret art known only to a few indigenous people who jealously guard the seeds from hostile competitors.

These beliefs are all widely held, but entirely untrue. Opium poppies, in fact, grow nearly everywhere but the North and South Poles. The second prong of the strategy is the copious propaganda that demonizes opium, opium poppies and opiates. At times this demonization has been brazenly racist, catering to the xenophobic American mind at the beginning of the twentieth century. Later propaganda linked opium with the despised German “Hun” who ate babies and (as was reported) had been mixing narcotics into children’s candy and women’s face powder in a diabolical plot to weaken the nation from the inside. Later, Germans were replaced by communists, who also shipped narcotics to America’s youth to weaken and enslave us. This was the authoritative word from Harry Anslinger, the infamous first Commissioner of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics.

Another example of false history is the mythical “soldier’s disease” or “army disease” that supposedly plagued the land after the Civil War. According to the story, opium and morphine were used so extensively during the war as a painkiller for wounded soldiers (especially amputees) that the inevitable result was opium and morphine addiction. As a result, crowds of broken-down men roamed the countryside, ramming themselves full of holes with their crude syringes, having been turned into dope slaves by the good intentions of doctors.

erfect example of anti-drug propaganda sounds plausible enough that few ever question it. And it has endured long after researchers discovered that this mythical legend was purely invention.

There is no documentation of any mass opiate addiction after the Civil War. The term “soldier’s disease” or its variants did not appear in literature until decades later. Yet the story fits the officially approved stereotype by portraying opium and morphine as so powerful and addictive that they could rob anyone’s soul.

If you knew that opium poppies do not grow in the U.S., you would not recognize an opium poppy even if you were staring directly at it. So, the idea of making opium tea from a bunch of dried decorative flowers purchased at K-Mart is ridiculous–absurd, really. If it were that easy, wouldn’t everyone be doing it?

Perhaps. But the establishment prefers to not test it. The idea of an individual having control over one’s own life, especially regarding pain relief, is far too democratic to be embraced by tyrants.

The government and its allies in the narco-military complex have gone to great lengths to set things up as they are, and not allow a shift in control would affect licit or illicit sales of narcotics, poppy seeds, and any products derived from Papaver somniferum. In a market the size of America, nothing is too insignificant to generate huge sums of money. And the opium poppy is hardly insignificant.

UN: Drug money saved banks

I like the casual tone of this article.  It’s like the 800 lb gorilla in the room that people can’t ignore any longer.  We already know about CIA South American coke operations dating back to Iran-Contra and ongoing even now, US troops guarding opium fields in afghanistan, and CIA drug dealing activities in Vietnam.  Drugs have long been a major source of funding for black-budget NWO operations, and its risky to store and move billions in cash.

You think the banks care that they’re laundering money that your daughter stole from you to buy a bag of coke that was shipped in by the CIA, or that the money will be used to kill innocent people to further the NWO agenda?

Rajeev Syal – The Observer
Sunday 13 December 2009

Drugs and crime chief says $352bn in criminal proceeds was effectively laundered by financial institutions

Drugs money worth billions of dollars kept the financial system afloat at the height of the global crisis, the United Nations‘ drugs and crime tsar has told the Observer.

Antonio Maria Costa, head of the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, said he has seen evidence that the proceeds of organised crime were “the only liquid investment capital” available to some banks on the brink of collapse last year. He said that a majority of the $352bn (£216bn) of drugs profits was absorbed into the economic system as a result.

This will raise questions about crime’s influence on the economic system at times of crisis. It will also prompt further examination of the banking sector as world leaders, including Barack Obama and Gordon Brown, call for new International Monetary Fund regulations. Speaking from his office in Vienna, Costa said evidence that illegal money was being absorbed into the financial system was first drawn to his attention by intelligence agencies and prosecutors around 18 months ago. “In many instances, the money from drugs was the only liquid investment capital. In the second half of 2008, liquidity was the banking system’s main problem and hence liquid capital became an important factor,” he said.

Some of the evidence put before his office indicated that gang money was used to save some banks from collapse when lending seized up, he said.

“Inter-bank loans were funded by money that originated from the drugs trade and other illegal activities… There were signs that some banks were rescued that way.” Costa declined to identify countries or banks that may have received any drugs money, saying that would be inappropriate because his office is supposed to address the problem, not apportion blame. But he said the money is now a part of the official system and had been effectively laundered.

“That was the moment [last year] when the system was basically paralysed because of the unwillingness of banks to lend money to one another. The progressive liquidisation to the system and the progressive improvement by some banks of their share values [has meant that] the problem [of illegal money] has become much less serious than it was,” he said.

The IMF estimated that large US and European banks lost more than $1tn on toxic assets and from bad loans from January 2007 to September 2009 and more than 200 mortgage lenders went bankrupt. Many major institutions either failed, were acquired under duress, or were subject to government takeover.

Gangs are now believed to make most of their profits from the drugs trade and are estimated to be worth £352bn, the UN says. They have traditionally kept proceeds in cash or moved it offshore to hide it from the authorities. It is understood that evidence that drug money has flowed into banks came from officials in Britain, Switzerland, Italy and the US.

British bankers would want to see any evidence that Costa has to back his claims. A British Bankers’ Association spokesman said: “We have not been party to any regulatory dialogue that would support a theory of this kind. There was clearly a lack of liquidity in the system and to a large degree this was filled by the intervention of central banks.”

NY Times: Afghan Opium Kingpin On CIA Payroll

But exposé serves as little more than a whitewash because it fails to mention decades-long U.S. agenda to support lucrative Golden Crescent drug trade

Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet.com
Wednesday, October 28, 2009

A bombshell article in today’s edition of the New York Times lifts the lid on how the brother of Afghan President Hamid Karzai, a suspected kingpin of the country’s booming opium trade, has been on the CIA payroll for the past eight years. However, the article serves as little more than a whitewash because it fails to address the fact that one of the primary reasons behind the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan was the agenda to reinstate the Golden Crescent drug trade.

“The agency pays (Ahmed Wali) Karzai for a variety of services, including helping to recruit an Afghan paramilitary force that operates at the C.I.A.’s direction in and around the southern city of Kandahar, Mr. Karzai’s home,” reports the Times.

An October 2008 report from the Times reveals how, after security forces discovered a huge tractor-trailer full of heroin outside Kandahar in 2004, “Before long, the commander, Habibullah Jan, received a telephone call from Ahmed Wali Karzai, the brother of President Hamid Karzai, asking him to release the vehicle and the drugs.”

In 2006, following the discovery of another cache of heroin, “United States investigators told other American officials that they had discovered links between the drug shipment and a bodyguard believed to be an intermediary for Ahmed Wali Karzai.”

The Times article out today also discusses how the CIA uses Karzai as a go-between between the Americans and the Taliban. He is also directly implicated in the manufacturing of phony ballots and polling stations that were attributed to the President’s disputed election victory.

“If it looks like a duck, and it quacks like a duck, it’s probably a duck,” the American officer said of Mr. Karzai. “Our assumption is that he’s benefiting from the drug trade.”

Officials quoted by The Times described Karzai as a Mafia-like figure who expanded his influence over the drug trade with the aid of U.S. efforts to eliminate his competitors.

The Afghan opium trade has exploded since the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, following a lull after the Taliban had imposed a crackdown. According to the U.N., the drug trade is now worth $65 billion. Afghanistan produces 92 per cent of the world’s opium, with the equivalent of 3,500 tonnes leaving the country each year. Other figures put the number far higher, at around 6,100 tonnes a year.

(ARTICLE CONTINUES BELOW)

The New York Times exposé pins the blame on Karzai, but fails to explain that one of the primary reasons behind the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan was the United States’ agenda to restore, not eradicate, the drug trade.

Before the invasion, the Taliban collaborated closely with the U.N. to reduce opium production down to just 185 tonnes, a figure at least 2000% below current levels. The notion that the “Taliban benefits from the drug trade” and that the U.S. is trying to stop it, as both Bush and Obama claimed, is the complete opposite of what is actually happening.

As Professor Michel Chossudovsky has highlighted in a series of essays, the explosion of opium production after the invasion was about the CIA’s drive to restore the lucrative Golden Crescent opium trade that was in place during the time when the Agency were funding the Mujahideen rebels to fight the Soviets, and flood the streets of America and Britain with cheap heroin, destroying lives while making obscene profits.

The Times implies that the drug lord Karzai being on the CIA payroll is little more than an embarrassing coincidence, when in reality he is just a middle manager for the U.S. military-industrial complex’s control of the drug trade in Afghanistan which stretches back decades and was only interrupted when the Taliban came to power.

“Heroin is a multibillion dollar business supported by powerful interests, which requires a steady and secure commodity flow. One of the “hidden” objectives of the war was precisely to restore the CIA sponsored drug trade to its historical levels and exert direct control over the drug routes,” writes Chossudovsky.

“As revealed in the Iran-Contra and Bank of Commerce and Credit International (BCCI) scandals, CIA covert operations in support of the Afghan Mujahideen had been funded through the laundering of drug money. “Dirty money” was recycled –through a number of banking institutions (in the Middle East) as well as through anonymous CIA shell companies–, into “covert money,” used to finance various insurgent groups during the Soviet-Afghan war, and its aftermath.”

Within two years of the CIA’s covert operation in Afghanistan, “CIA assets again controlled this heroin trade. As the Mujahideen guerrillas seized territory inside Afghanistan, they ordered peasants to plant opium as a revolutionary tax. Across the border in Pakistan, Afghan leaders and local syndicates under the protection of Pakistan Intelligence operated hundreds of heroin laboratories. During this decade of wide-open drug-dealing, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency in Islamabad failed to instigate major seizures or arrests.”

This is the history of the Afghan opium trade that the Times won’t tell you, and in failing to do so today’s article serves only to whitewash the true scale of the agenda behind the U.S. occupation of Afghanistan.