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Comment by 1cvmask | Hacker News Reader

Isn't the worlds most successful drug lord ever the CIA. They sold cocaine and the journalist Gary Webb who uncovered it was attacked by the CIA mouthpieces of corporate journalists and corporate media and "suicideded" himself. He shot himself in the head twice to succeed in the "suicide".

Afghanistan after first overturning the Taliban had the biggest increase ever in drug production ever when the CIA was running the country.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gary_Webb

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Alliance_(book)

https://theintercept.com/2014/09/25/managing-nightmare-cia-m...

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Please don't take HN threads on generic tangents and definitely not generic flamewar tangents, regardless of what the CIA has done or you feel the CIA has done. This kind of thing leads to predictably low-quality threads.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I'm tracking on your first paragraph. Your second is a little confusing to me.

I went on opium interdiction missions in Southern Afghanistan. The Taliban runs its own opium ring down there to fund it's activities. I'm not even sure it'd be fair to say the CIA was "running the country". They trained Afghan special forces, whom I only ever saw once and that was near Kajaki Dam. The people who were digging up weapons caches, setting up field hospitals, etc that we fought in the area while doing opium interdiction didn't look anything like Afghan special forces, much less act like them.

Nope that would be the British East India company, they make the CIA look like street dealers. The EIC literally went to war against a dynastic empire in order to sell opium, and won.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_India_Company

Queen Victoria was the largest drug lord in history by many accounts. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Opium_War

From your first Wikipedia link ... that show is pretty good:

> Snowfall is an American crime drama television series set in Los Angeles in 1983. The series revolves around the first crack epidemic and its impact on the culture of the city. The series follows the stories of several characters whose lives are fated to intersect including CIA operative Teddy McDonald who helps to secure guns for the Contras. The character reporter Irene Abe is said by fans of the show to be a stand in character for the real life Gary Webb.

Although I am not to sure if the suicide wasn't really a suicide. On the other hand a group that is known to have done worse than this it doesn't sound implausible.

Not disagreeing about the CIA here but there was a recent r/askhistorians about Webb’s death and it appears multiple gunshot suicides aren’t that uncommon. Plus his wife doesn’t think it was anything but. Asserting things like this undercuts the point.

How do you measure and calculate their success to compare against for instance Tse Chi Lop? Are there market size or valuation estimates?

Obviously they have sold drugs before, so a quantification exercise would be interesting.

Isn't the Afghanistan drug production thing post-9/11 widely discredited at this point?

yep, came here to say similar

CIA & Pablo. Exactly.

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