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As a way to pay off the european organised crime gangs US intelligence gave them heroin to sell.
Why did the US need to pay crime gangs?
Because they denied the europeans sovereignty and democracy, and used the mob as a tool to stop political organising.
But the mafia doesn't work for free, and maybe you've wondered why Frank Sinatra spent so much time in pre-revolutionary Havana, and how Lucky Luciano came to be a global leader.
And, why it was such a nuisance that the cubans shrugged off the informal occupation.
This is why. The US hired the mafia, the mafia accepted, then met with the usian mafia in Cuba because you need to sell the heroin somewhere that's not home, when the US felt it had lost control and jailed some of the mafia leaders it was way, way too late.
If this is new to you, read Alfred W. McCoy, plus Wikipedia.
Heroin smuggling is bad, and I've imagined that someone paid for the OP article to have this headline. Putting the same logic together which you employed - it must have been Jose who forced rand to publish the study with such a provocative headline.
This conspiracy garbage is so tiring.
If this is new to you, read arizona court dockets. Trust me, Jose is guilty, the evidence was airtight, so he MUST have paid rand, according to your garbage conspiracy logic
McCoy was a respected academic and scholar. Have you read his books about this?
"I've read about the US government doing bad things in the past, and so, I'm allowed to say that any article with a headline which I find provocative, is paid government propaganda"
That's a garbage line of reasoning and I don't care for it.
Did the "academic and scholar" you cited, write anything at all, to back up the claim that the op link is paid propaganda by the government?
It's conspiracy garbage to cite "huh did you know a highly respected academic says that Jose in Arizona smuggled heroin? Because I read this scholar's work, which means I'm now qualified to read a RAND study headline and conclude that it's worded so provocatively that it must be government propaganda"
That's a garbage line of logic.
It probably defaulted to that because RAND is a government propaganda office whose reason for existence is influencing public opinion. ~60% of it's funding comes from the army and the alphabet agencies.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAND_Corporation
https://www.rand.org/about/how-we-are-funded.html#industry
It's roughly in the same bucket of trustworthiness as something like Pravda. I's good to keep up with it if you want to know what the government wants you to think, and for little else.
Right now, between this and other similar statements about the intelligence community, the government seems to want you to think that the alphabet agencies need more money and/or power.
It's a paper about a study which RAND did. You can click into read the paper and see if the headline fits.
Your fake conspiracy theory so far says - that the government is paying rand to only pretend to do a study. When in fact, the study is just a smokescreen to justify writing a headline to influence people's opinions? What? Why not just read the study and then come back and suggest alternative headlines. If the headline was different, would we still think is a psyop?
> the government seems to want you to think that the alphabet agencies need more money and/or power.
Yeah maybe I guess, but also maybe someone just did a sensible study and titled it appropriately. I think my theory has far more evidence than yours (which is simply: how you felt after reading the page title)
You don't seem to understand either me or the parent poster.
What we're saying is that the government (or parts of it, or whatever hair-splitting you want to do) is currently interested in drumming up funding/influence/power for the intelligence community, so it asks RAND to publish something that will drum up support for it.
This isn't some spontaneous born-from-Zeus' head revelation that the authors have stumbled into. They are given a target, and asked to write something to justify them. You don't need to 'fake' doing a study, to make your 'study' end up supporting whatever pre-conceived thesis you were shooting for. [1]
This is everywhere in the media and the think-tank space. You write what your funders want you to write. Denying this blatant transactionality is the wild conspiratorial thinking.
RAND is an especially egregious example of this, because it marches lock-step with the empire-building geo-political consensus in Washington. It's doing what it's paid to do, if it started drawing conclusions and advocacy its funders didn't like, they wouldn't keep writing cheques.
[1] And if you can't find any way to torture the data into your pre-planned outcome, you can just not publish it. These aren't medical trials, they don't have to be pre-registered.
Please share your evidence for this conjecture, and also share your evidence for how it relates to the OP. Because you are just creating fake conspiracy theories with no evidence, just like the poster above
And do you hold anyone criticizing Pravda.ru to that same standard? Or would suggesting that it's also a mouthpiece for government propaganda also be a baseless fake conspiracy theory with no evidence behind it?
Any evidence at all whatsoever, supporting your claim that
> so it asks RAND to publish something that will drum up support for it.
Or any of the other fake conspiracy theories invented and spread with no evidence, in this comment thread