Operation Midnight Climax: How the CIA Used Prostitutes to Lure Americans to Take LSD

Did the Same People Introduce Crack Cocaine to Black America?

By Washington Our Home — Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=111392186

In August 1966, the San Jose Mercury News published a three-part series called “Dark Alliance: The Story Behind the Crack Explosion.” The Dark Alliance series recounted how Ricky Donnell Ross began peddling small quantities of cocaine in the early 1980s and rapidly grew into one of the largest cocaine dealers in southern California until he was convicted of federal drug trafficking charges in March 1996. The series seemed to claim that the CIA and other agencies of the United States government were responsible for the crack epidemic that ravaged Black communities across the country. The newspaper articles suggested that the United States government had protected drug dealers from prosecution and either knowingly permitted them to peddle massive quantities of cocaine to the Black residents of South Central Los Angeles or turned a blind eye to such activity.

The series stated: 

“For t…