As Hitler intensified his evil treatment of the Jews, Freud escaped to London in 1938, but four of his sisters were killed in concentration camps. In September 1939, in agony with mouth cancer from smoking, Freud was given enough morphine to end his life. With his decision-making processes scrambled by drugs, Hitler shot himself in the head in 1945 to avoid capture by the Russians.
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Making cocaine illegal created a black market that would remain small at first and wither during the Great Depression and World Wars, only to accelerate in the latter half of the century to generate enough mayhem to make the authors of the early drug laws squirm in their graves, including hundreds of thousands of murders in Colombia and Mexico as rival cartels fought for control. It was a market that would rain dollars down on exporters of coca paste in Peru and Bolivia and generate even bigger profits for their customers in Colombia such as Pablo.
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Prior to 1973, Chile was a centre of cocaine production. Using Peruvian coca leaves and paste, refiners made cocaine in Chilean labs, which was shipped to wealthy US customers. The refiners often hired Colombian smugglers, which is how the Colombians learned the early routes.
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As shown in Narcos, the good times for the Chilean producers ended abruptly due to regime change. As General Pinochet was a sworn enemy of Communism, the CIA backed his coup in 1973. Once in power, he had the army execute thousands of his own citizens, including traffickers. He shut down dozens of cocaine labs and arrested hundreds of people associated with trafficking. This wasn't to stop the cocaine business. It was a takeover.
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Narcos left out that Pinochet and his son organised a production and distribution network, which supplied Europe and America. Pinochet had the army build a lab in Tala-gante, a rural town twenty-four miles from Santiago. Chemists mixed cocaine with other chemicals to make black cocaine, which could be smuggled more easily than the obvious white stuff - a trick that Pablo would employ. Pinochet earned millions from cocaine production.
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In Colombia, three cities set about competing for cocaine business: Bogotá, Medellín and Cali. On November 22, 1975, a plane was busted in Cali with 600 kilos on board. This sparked a cocaine war. In one weekend, over forty people were murdered. But not in Cali. They'd died in the city dominating the cocaine business: Medellín. The authorities started to watch the slum neighbourhoods, where young people armed to the teeth hustled to stay alive and dreamt of raising themselves out of the barrio through fast cash from cocaine.
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Pablo had started in the cocaine business a hundred years after the previous boom in American use, when it had been touted as a cure-all by pharmacists and was an original ingredient in Coca-Cola. The scourge of what followed - addiction, insanity, deaths - had long been forgotten. Cocaine was not a problem in America because it was consumed discreetly by the upper class. The rest of society was receptive to this cool new drug that they were told they couldn't get addicted to. Even the DEA issued a report that stated, "it is not physically addictive and does not usually result in serious consequences, such as crime, hospital emergency room admissions Or both." There was talk of decriminalising it. Pablo compared the illegality of cocaine to the prohibition of alcohol in America, from which the Kennedy family had prospered. Through the legalisation of cocaine, Pablo hoped that his business would be legitimised, and his story would become a legend similar to that of the Kennedys.
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The black market in cocaine became so big that the US government viewed it as a threat to national security. Post-World War Il, the priority of the US government was fighting Communism. Policymakers feared that Communist movements in South America would use cocaine proceeds to obtain arms, topple right-wing dictators favourable to US corporate interests and end up threatening to invade America. Rather than let that happen, the US government through the CIA encouraged right wingers such as General Pinochet to use cocaine proceeds to arm themselves with weapons manufactured in America, of course against Communists, which often resulted in CIA-trained death squads assassinating student protesters, schoolteachers and labourers for the crime of demanding pay rises and better working conditions. Drug laws and the DEA were used to wipe out the cocaine competition, i.e. anyone not working with the CIA. When honest DEA agents tried to indict cocaine kingpins who were contributing to the US anti-Communism crusade, the CLA stepped in and blocked the indictments in the name of national security.
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One DEA whistle-blower, deep undercover agent Mike Levine, was prevented from arresting the big fish so many times that he classified the CIA as the world's biggest Mafia.
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Mike and many other insiders discovered that the CIA-approved traffickers were sending their cocaine to America on planes provided by the CIA - the CIA even had two airlines for this purpose: Air America and Southern Air Transport. On the return journeys, these planes supplied arms to groups fighting Communism.
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While attempting to justify this trafficking in cocaine as an act of patriotism, big money was being made by pilots, politicians and weapons manufacturers. It also put the American government in the odd situation of simultaneously fighting a War on Drugs, while facilitating their importation.
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The Mafia is all about money flowing to the top. If Mike Levine was correct about the CLA being the biggest Mafia, then lesser Mafias would have to pay the CIA to play. There is evidence to suggest that Pablo and his associates made such payments to the CIA.
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Milan Rodriguez, a money manager for the Medellín Cartel, testified that from 1982 to 1985, he funnelled nearly $10 million to Nicaraguan rebels through former CIA operative, Felix Rodriguez, a friend of George HW Bush. The Nicaraguan rebels were a pet project of the Reagan-Bush administration.
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After Congress cut funding off and banned the provision of arms to the Nicaraguan rebels, the Reagan-Bush administration continued to provide arms illegally through the ClA. Cocaine worth billions was imported on the return journeys, some of which sparked the crack epidemic - as exposed by the journalist Gary Webb, who was demonised and committed suicide by shooting himself in the head twice.
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When asked whether the CIA knew the source of the money, Milian Rodriguez said, "But the men who made the contact with me did. I was under indictment at the time. But a tremendous patriot like Felix Rodriguez, all of a sudden he finds his troops are running out of money, for food, for medicine, for supplies. I think for Felix it was something he did out of desperation. He was willing to get it from any source to continue his war... The cartel figured it was buying a little friendship. What the hell is ten million bucks? They thought they were going to buy some good will and take a little heat off of them. They figured [that] maybe the CIA or DEA will not screw around so much."
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In return for paying off the CIA, numerous investigations into the Medellín Cartel were squashed in the early 1980s and Pablo had access to America weapons, including the MAC 10, much favoured by his hit men. With cocaine becoming the world's most profitable drug, the Medellin Cartel was able to generate annual sales in the billions. The CIA has a history of arming and putting people in power, only to wipe them out later on when it suits its interest. Pablo would be no exception.
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