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Crashed jet carrying cocaine linked to CIA
By Jeremy R. Hammond
Online Journal Contributing Writer


Sep 15, 2008, 00:24


A private jet that crashed last year in eastern Mexico and was found to be carrying more than 3 tons of cocaine was also used by the Central Intelligence Agency for clandestine operations, the Mexican daily El Universal reported September 3.

The newspaper cited documents from the United States and the European Parliament which “show that that plane flew several times to Guantanamo, Cuba, presumably to transfer terrorism suspects.” It said the European Parliament was investigating the jet for its possible use in “extraordinary rendition” flights, whereby prisoners are covertly transferred by the U.S. to a third country.

In June 2006, the British Department for Transport website published flight data on US aircraft into or out of the UK. According to the site, “This data had previously been released by Eurocontrol to the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe to assist with its enquiry into allegations of ‘extraordinary rendition’ flights operating in Europe.” The jet that crashed in Mexico, with registration number N987SA, is listed in the data report.

According to El Universal, FAA records show that the jet flew to Guantanamo on May 30, 2003. From June 23 to July 14, the jet flew from New York to Iceland, France, Italy, and Ireland. From July 16 to 20, it flew from the U.S. to Canada, the UK, Ireland, the UK, Canada, and back to the U.S. again. From April 7 to 12, 2004, it went from New York to Canada, the UK, Canada, and again to the U.S. The jet then flew to Guantanamo again. On April 21, it flew from the U.S. to Canada, France, the UK, Canada, and back to the U.S. It left the U.S. for Guantanamo once more on January 21, 2005.

The jet crashed on September 24, 2007. According to an Aviation Safety Network description of the accident, the Gulfstream Aerospace G-1159 Gulfstream II jet with registration N987SA crashed near Tixkokob in the northern part of the Yucatan Peninsula. ASN describes it as an “Illegal Flight” and reports that “When being chased by Mexican military helicopters, the crew carried out a crash-landing. No bodies were found in the wreckage, but soldiers found 132 bags containing about 3.6 tons (3.3. metric tons) of cocaine.”

An initial Reuters report on the crash noted, “Drug planes packed with South American cocaine -- often with passenger seats ripped out to make space -- frequently fly through Mexico and Central America en route for the United States. Some unload their cargo at clandestine airstrips south of the border where traffickers send it on by road or sea.”

El Universal, in its initial report on the crash in 2007, stated that the cocaine was in 132 bags and noted the registration number of the wrecked plane.

McClatchy Newspapers observed a few days after the crash that “news reports have linked the plane to the transport of terrorist suspects to the U.S. detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, but those reports cite logs that indicate only that the plane flew twice between Washington, D.C., and Guantanamo and once between Oxford, Conn., and Guantanamo.”

In November of last year, reporters from the Tampa Tribune followed up on the international investigation that resulted after the Gulfstream II crash. An expert on the drug trade from the University of Miami told the reporters that cocaine is being moved by air through Florida more frequently, as an alternative to being brought into the U.S. in the southwest.

The Gulfstream II jet was one of two planes being used by the Mexican Sinaloa drug cartel, also known as the Pacific Cartel, to carry cocaine. The other jet, a DC-9, had been seized and was found to be carrying 5.5 tons of cocaine. Both aircraft were purchased by the cartel from St. Petersburg-Clearwater International Airport.

The DC-9 with tail number N00SA, was seized on April 11, 2006, carrying an amount of cocaine valued at an estimated $82.5 million, according to Airport-Dat.com. Reportedly sold in March, the jet was scheduled to depart for Simon Bolivar International airport in Venezuela on April 5. FAA records show that at the time of the seizure, it was still registered to Royal Sons Inc., which operates out of St. Petersburg-Clearwater International Airport. It was deregistered two days after the seizure and listed as exported to Venezuela.

At the time of the crash, the Gulfstream II was registered to Donna Blue Aircraft Inc., owned by Joao Luiz Malago and Eduardo Dias Guimaraes, who had reportedly purchased the jet in July and then sold it to two Florida men on September 16, 2007. Two days later, the jet left Fort Lauderdale for Cancun. Then, according to Mexican authorities, it flew to Columbia to pick up the cocaine and was en route to deliver the drugs when it came to the attention of the military and crashed in the resulting chase.

Some have speculated that Donna Blue Aircraft may have been a front company. The Florida Department of State Division of Corporations lists the “Date Filed” for the company as March 29, 2007. And from June 1, it was listed at an address in Coconut Creek, Florida. Then, on June 18, 2008, the company name was changed to North Atlantic Aircraft Services, Corp., listed at the same address, but with Malago as the sole owner.

Journalist Daniel Hopsicker visited the Coconut Creek location and found no sign that such a business existed there. Hopsicker wrote, “Moreover the brief description of Donna Blue on its Internet page, apparently designed to ‘flesh out the ghost a little,’ is such a clumsy half-hearted effort that it defeats the purpose of helping aid the construction of a plausible ‘legend,’ or cover, and ends up doing more harm than good . . . For example, the website features a quote from a satisfied Donna Blue Aircraft customer. Unfortunately his name is ‘John Doe.’ And the listed phone number is right out of the movies: 415.555-5555.”

The company’s website (now offline) stated only, “we are in this business over 20 years, attending South, North and Central america, with outstanding service, we are today most trusted company in this market. our customer loyality make us different” [sic]. According to Whois, the site was created on August 20, 2007, a month after the Gulfstream II was reportedly bought by the company and less than a month before it crashed carrying the cocaine. Once uploaded, the site was apparently never updated and seems to have gone offline sometime after February 2008. According to the site description still available on Alexa, the company opened in 1995 despite the fact, as noted above, that the date the company was filed with the Florida Department of State was in March 2007.

Malago sold the jet to Clyde O’Connor. The name of Gregory D. Smith also appeared as a co-signer on the bill of sale.

A reporter from the Broward-Palm Beach New Times contacted Gregory D. Smith of Global Jet Solutions. When asked about the plane crash, Smith replied, “I’m not allowed to discuss that -- I’m sorry,” and hung up. Contacted a second time, he said, “I’m not going to divulge anything.”

O’Connor had once written a letter to the editor in response to an article on the death of a police officer saying that “one less cop is not a bad thing.” He was convicted in 2001 for criminal air safety violations. In October 2007, he was detained by Canadian officials after they searched a Cessna 210 he had flown to Nova Scotia and found two Derringer pistols he had failed to report.

Reporters from McClatchy Newspapers attempted to reach O’Connor at one of his companies, Execstar Aviation in Fort Lauderdale, but the number had been disconnected. “Adding to the plane’s mystery,” their article noted, “are allegations that it made trips in 2003, 2004 and 2005 between the United States and Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where the U.S. detention center for suspected terrorists is located.”

Baruch Vega, a Columbian who has worked with the FBI, DEA, and CIA in law enforcement operations told Narco News that one of the main pilots used in operations for flights between Florida and South America was named Greg Smith.

Vega said, “Well originally . . . I met Greg Smith . . . we needed a pilot, a very trustful pilot, someone we could trust to bring in the [Colombian] drug traffickers to surrender. Then the members of the FBI recommended to get in contact with this guy [Smith] because he was very close to them. Ever since we flew only with him. Everything was with him. . . . I never asked anything [about Smith’s background]. But he [Smith] brought a couple of pilots because we always have two pilots in the plane. He occasionally brought pilots from the US Customs. I tell you one thing. We flew with Greg Smith easily 25 to 30 times. All [the] operations [were] between the end of 1997 to 2000.”

He added that there were “DEA agents in the plane and of course drug traffickers who were coming to surrender with attorneys.” He also said the name of the company from which the aircraft were chartered was Aero Group Jets. A court document confirms one instance in which the CIA had worked with the DEA to bring a fugitive Colombian drug trafficker, one Mr. Cristancho, to Florida by means of an aircraft rented from Aero Group Jets.

According to Narco News, “A check of the public records available through Florida’s Department of State lists the registered agent/officer of that now inactive company as Gregory D. Smith.”

When contacted by Narco News, the Gregory Smith identified in the Broward-Palm Beach New Times story denied that he was the same Greg Smith as the one whose signature appeared as co-signer on the bill of sale of the Gulfstream II. He said his middle initial is “J’ and that he had been wrongly identified.

Narco News obtained a copy of a 2007 document with the signature of Gregory Smith from Global Jet Solutions and compared it with the signature Gregory D. Smith in a 1998 annual report from Aero Group Jets filed with the state of Florida. The signatures “appear to be different,” Narco News concluded. They do indeed appear to be different signatures, but the fact that the two samples are nine years apart also must be taken into consideration, as a person’s signature may evolve over time.

In a follow up report, Narco News tracked down Malago, who denied that he operated a front company. “Some people told on Internet,” he said, “that my company is a CIA cover office and that bring me a lot of problems. First this is not true and you can imagine if this people came to talk with me. I have family and don’t want any more problems there.”

Malago also agreed to share a copy of the bill of sale of the Gulfstream II jet with Narco News, which reported, “In comparing the two signatures, there are some differences, such as one is signed as Gregory D. while the other is signed simply as Greg, with no middle initial. However there are some striking similarities as well, including the fact that some of the letters appear to be penned in precisely the same way.”

Mike Levine, a former undercover DEA agent who has worked as an expert witness in court cases, told Narco News, “I did much of this handwriting comparison work, without using an expert, but my opinion was accepted before grand juries as having a significant amount of work experience in comparing handwritings (IRS, BATF, Customs and DEA). I would say the samples you sent me are definitely the same handwriting.”

Although inconclusive, there is compelling evidence that the Gregory Smith who cosigned with O’Connor for the purchase of the Gulfstream II from Malago was indeed the same Gregory Smith who was involved in piloting flights for CIA and DEA operations out of Florida.

The recent article from El Universal noted that the Gulfstream II jet had also been previously owned by AGI Holdings Corp., which sold it to S/A Holdings LLC, a company for which, the paper says, there is virtually no information.

The use of front companies by the CIA to provide cover for its operations is well known and documented.

In December 2005, the Toronto Star ran a story on CIA “ghost flights.” It noted that a plane with registration N196D was registered with the FAA under Devon Holding and Leasing, Inc. -- but that no such company existed.

“There is no Devon Holding and Leasing Inc. at 129 W. Center St. in Lexington, N.C. There is no phone listing. The city offices have never heard of it; neither has the Chamber of Commerce. The law offices of James A. Gleason are at 129 W. Center St., but five days of inquiries there failed to yield an answer to this simple question: Does anyone in this office know of a company called Devon Holding and Leasing? It is almost certainly a CIA shell company, existing on paper only, and the turboprop was likely carrying a ‘ghost’ prisoner to a country where torture is used during interrogations.”

Devon Holding and Leasing was being investigated by the European Parliament for its possible role in the CIA’s rendition program, and was named by investigators as a CIA “shell company.”

In one documented case of extraordinary rendition, the Toronto Star story continues, the CIA flew Maher Arar, who is from Ottawa, from New York’s John F. Kennedy Airport to Syria, where he was tortured as a suspected terrorist. In another case, Osama Moustafa Hassan Nasr was abducted from the streets of Milan and taken to Egypt, where he was tortured. Saad iqbal Madni was similarly taken from Jakarta and flown to Cairo, where he was held for two years before being delivered to Guantanamo Bay. He claims he was tortured in Egypt.

On the use of front companies by the CIA: “It’s careless tradecraft,” says John Pike, an expert on U.S. intelligence matters at GlobalSecurity.org. “They [the CIA] have allowed the tail-spotters into the game and they have not come to grips with the advent of the Internet, and not come to grips with the massive parallel processing which is underway with all those tail-spotters.” The planes are supposed to be registered with legitimate companies, so they just blend in and can’t be traced to the CIA, Pike says. “These are not real companies. They should be using good-looking companies which arouse no suspicion at all.”

The New York Times ran a story in 2005 stating that Aero Contractors Ltd. was a CIA front company. “When the Central Intelligence Agency wants to grab a suspected member of Al Qaeda overseas and deliver him to interrogators in another country,” the Times report said, “an Aero Contractors plane often does the job. If agency experts need to fly overseas in a hurry after the capture of a prized prisoner, a plane will depart Johnston County and stop at Dulles Airport outside Washington to pick up the C.I.A. team on the way.”

The Times also stated, “The company was founded in 1979 by a legendary C.I.A. officer and chief pilot for Air America, the agency’s Vietnam-era air company” and that “Aero appears to be the direct descendant of Air America.”

The article in the Times declined to note, however, the CIA’s well-documented role in heroin trafficking through Air America in Southeast Asia during the war in Vietnam.

Adding to the intrigue, in December 2007, Narco News reported that according to DEA officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity, the crashed Gulfstream II jet “was part of an operation being carried out by a Department of Homeland Security agency” codenamed “Mayan Express.” The effort was “spearheaded by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the sources claim.”

The report continues: “The operation also appears to be badly flawed, the sources say, because it is being carried out unilaterally, (Rambo-style), by ICE and without the knowledge of the Mexican government -- at least it was up until the point of the coke-packed Gulfstream jet’s abrupt impact with the Earth.

“’This is a case of ICE running amok,’ one DEA source told Narco News. ‘If this [operation] was being run by the book, they would not be doing it unilaterally,’ -- without the participation of the DEA -- ‘and without the knowledge of the Mexican government.’”

The DEA confirmed to Narco News that it was handling the investigation into the crash. The pilots were apprehended after their initial escape from the crash site and apparently “spilled the beans on the ICE operation during their interrogation by Mexican authorities, DEA sources tell Narco News.”

“One proposition that all of the law enforcers who spoke with Narco News agreed on with respect to the Mayan Express is that even if DEA was precluded from participating in the effort, the CIA almost certainly was involved on some level.”

Narco News also noted that a report from a British government agency listed the Gulfstream II jet as one “European investigators were interested in obtaining more information about in relation to a probe into CIA rendition flights” and added that other sources also suggested that “Mayan Express” might have been a CIA operation using ICE for cover.

Narco News reported again in 2008 on yet another plane that was apparently involved in a drug trafficking operation. On November 26, 2004, a twin-prop Beechcraft King Air 200 landed and was abandoned on a makeshift runway in a cotton field in Nicaragua. Traces of cocaine were found in the plane. The cocaine had apparently been loaded onto a truck. Several days after the plane was abandoned, law enforcement officials arrested the occupants of a truck carrying 1,100 kilos of cocaine.

The abandoned aircraft’s tail number was N168D, registered to none other than Devon Holding and Leasing Inc., the same company used as a front by the CIA for its extraordinary renditions operations, as noted previously.

Then the story of that plane gets even more convoluted, as FAA records show that the plane registered under Devon Holding and Leasing Inc. with tail number N168D actually belongs to a different kind of plane, model CN-235-300. The Beech 200’s actual tail number is N391SA, registered with the FAA under Sky Way Aircraft Inc.

Sky Way Aircraft Inc. can also be linked to Royal Sons Inc., which, as noted above, was still the registered owner of the DC-9 that was seized carrying more than 5 tons of cocaine. The parent company of Sky Way Aircraft was Skyway Communications Holding Corp., which had originally arranged to purchase the DC-9 that was ultimately registered with Royal Sons Inc. The president of Royal Sons, Frederick J. Geffon, was also a shareholder in Skyway Communications. In addition, the two companies had at one time jointly filed for a loan to purchase another DC-9, tail number N120NE. The CEO of Skyway Communications, James Kent, had also served under contract with the Department of Defense, the National Security Agency, and the Department of the Navy.

Like the DC-9, the Beech 200 was sold to a buyer in Venezuela in October 2004, about one month before it was abandoned in the cotton field and linked by authorities to cocaine trafficking.

The Beech 200 may have been a part of the Mayan Express operation. According to Narco News, “Mark Conrad, a former supervisory special agent with U.S. Customs, ICE’s predecessor agency, speculates that the Mayan Express operation is not controlled by ICE at all, but is, in fact, a CIA-run operation using ICE as a cover. He adds that the CIA has agents operating inside many federal law enforcement agencies utilizing what is known as an ‘official cover.’”

A former ICE agent also told Narco News he suspected the CIA was behind the drug plane operations.

There is no shortage of precedents for alleged CIA involvement in drug trafficking.

Alfred W. McCoy’s The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia, first published in 1972, documented CIA complicity in drug trafficking such as its involvement in the opium and heroin trade in southeast Asia.

Journalist Gary Webb’s Dark Alliance series is a well known investigation into allegations of the CIA’s involvement in the Los Angeles crack epidemic in the 1980s to help finance the Contras in the terrorist war to overthrow the elected government of Nicaragua.

Michael Ruppert, former narcotics officer with the Los Angeles Police Department, famously confronted CIA director John Deutch at a televised conference with information on specific CIA operations, which he cited by name and said he had documentation on, and said the CIA had been dealing drugs in L.A. for a long time.

And there is evidence that the CIA flew drugs into Mena, Arkansas during Bill Clinton’s governorship, in its operations to finance the Contras.

In 1993, CBS 60 Minutes broadcast The CIA’s Cocaine. The former head of the DEA, Judge Robert Bonner, told correspondent Mike Wallace that the CIA had an unauthorized operation to bring drugs into the U.S. “If this has not been approved by DEA or an appropriate law-enforcement authority in the United States,” Bonner said, “then it’s illegal. It’s called drug trafficking.”

Bonner, asked to rationalize the operation, suggested that it might “lead to some valuable drug intelligence about the Colombian cartels.”

A DEA agent interviewed for the show said that she had been told by the CIA officer in charge of the CIA station in Caracas, Venezuela, that they had to keep the cartel happy by delivering their cocaine to their dealers in the U.S. “The CIA and the Guardia Nacional,” she explained, “wanted to let cocaine go on into the traffic without doing anything. They wanted to let it come up to the United States, no surveillance, no nothing.”

The CIA had gone to the DEA with its proposal, which was rejected. “They made this proposal,” said Bonner, “and we said, ‘No, no way. We will not permit this. It should not go forward.’ And then, apparently, it went forward anyway.”

Senator Dennis DeConcini of the Senate Intellience Committee also told Wallace, “It was an operation that I don’t think they should’ve been involved in. . . . I don’t doubt that the drugs got in here.” He called the operation “a mistake.”

Morley Safer closed the piece by saying, “And what happened to the tens of millions that were paid for the CIA’s cocaine? Well, General Guillen insists he didn’t get any of it. But Judge Bonner says one thing is certain, the Colombian cartel did. They got their money once the dope made it to our streets.”

Senator and 2004 presidential candidate John Kerry told NBC’s Dateline that the CIA was complicit in the flow of drugs into the U.S. His Senate Foreign Relations Committee’s Subcommittee on Narcotics, Terrorism, and International Operations found that “it is clear that individuals who provided support for the Contras were involved in drug trafficking” and that this activity did not go unnoticed by the government agencies.

Kerry also headed up a Senate investigation into the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI) that documented the CIA’s involvement in the bank, which was a criminal front for money launderers, drug traffickers, arms dealers, and even nuclear proliferators.

The government went into damage control. In 1997, the Department of Justice issued a report addressing the allegations of CIA involvement in drug trafficking, and the CIA released its own report the following year.

The full story behind the crashed Gulfstream II jet and the other planes that were found to have been involved in drug trafficking is far from known. But the facts that have surfaced to date strongly indicate CIA involvement of one kind or another. The agency’s fingerprints, one might reasonably say, are all over this one.
Jeremy R. Hammond is an independent researcher and writer whose articles have appeared on numerous alternative news websites. He maintains a website, www.yirmeyahureview.com, dedicated to critical analysis of U.S. foreign policy, particularly with regard to the U.S. “war on terrorism” and the Middle East. He currently resides with his wife in Taiwan. You may contact him at [email protected].

Copyright © 1998-2007 Online Journal

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How the US Government Created the "Drug Problem" in the USA

by Michael E. Kreca

"The bottom line on this whole business has not yet been written."
Dr. Sidney Gottlieb
CIA Technical Services Staff director for the MK-ULTRA program

Eighteenth-century German philosopher Georg Friedrich Hegel long ago developed, among other things, what he called the principle of "thesis, antithesis, synthesis" to explain the process of deliberately enacted social disorder and change as a road to power. To achieve a desired result, one deliberately creates a situation ("thesis,") devises a "solution," to solve the "problems" created by that situation ("antithesis,") with the final result being the ultimate goal of more power and control ("synthesis.") It is unsurprising Karl Marx and his disciples like Lenin and Trotsky, as well as the US government in its so-called War On Drugs, made this process a keystone of their drive for total control of all individual actions that, in their views, were not, in Mussolini s terms, "inside the state" and thus controllable by the same.

In September 1942, OSS director and Army Maj. Gen. William "Wild Bill" Donovan began his search for an effective "truth serum" to be used on POWs and captured spies. Beginning with a budget of $5,000 and the blessing of President Franklin Roosevelt, he enlisted the aid of a few prominent physicians and psychiatrists like George Estabrooks and Harry Murray as well as former Prohibition agent and notorious Federal Bureau of Narcotics (FBN) director Harry Anslinger.

The OSS/FBN team first tested a potent marijuana extract, tetrahydrocannabinol acetate (THCA), a colorless, odorless substance, lacing cigarettes or food items with it, and administering them to volunteer US Army and OSS personnel, all who eventually acquired the nickname "Donovan’s Dreamers." Testing was also conducted under the guise of treatment for shell shock.

Donovan’s team found that THCA, which they termed "TD," for "truth drug," induced "a great loquacity and hilarity," and even, in cases where the subject didn’t feel physically threatened, some useable "reefer madness." Peyote, morphine and scopolamine were judged too powerful to be used in effective interrogation. In light of all this, Donovan concluded, "The drug defies all but the most expert and search analysis, and for all practical purposes can be considered beyond analysis." The OSS did not, however, end the program. By that time, faced with the terrifying ship losses the USA was suffering from German U-boats, Donovan pressed on, hoping to find some effective chemical means to help interrogate captured U-boat sailors.

In May 1943, George Hunter White, an Army captain, OSS officer and former FBN agent, gave standard cigarettes laced with THCA to an unwitting August "Augie Dallas" Del Grazio, an influential New York City gangster. Del Grazio, who had by then had done prison stretches for assault and murder, had been one of the Mafia’s most notorious enforcers and narcotics smugglers. He operated an opium alkaloid factory in Turkey and was a key participant in the long-running Istanbul/Marsellies/NYC heroin pipeline commonly known as the "French Connection." Influenced by the THC, Del Grazio (who was also helping to smuggle spies and Mafiosi into German-occupied Italy) revealed volumes of vital information about underworld operations, including the names of several high ranking city and state officials who took bribes from the Mob. Donovan was encouraged by the results of White’s tests when he wrote, "Cigarette experiments indicated that we had a mechanism offering promise in relaxing prisoners to be interrogated."

Unsurprisingly, the extensive wartime German experiments with various hallucinogenic drugs at the Dachau concentration camp, directed by one Dr. Hubertus Strughold, later honored as "the father of aviation medicine," aroused great interest in the USA especially after an October 1945 Navy technical mission to Dachau reported in detail on Strughold’s work. So great, in fact, that when the OSS and its successor, the CIA, imported 800 German scientists of various specialties under the auspices of the infamous "Project Paperclip" during 1945-55, it made sure to include Dr. Strughold.

Dr. Strughold’s barbaric "medical experiments," for which his subordinates were tried and convicted as war criminals at Nuremburg, were nothing more than a series of bizarre and unspeakably brutal tortures. Even so, he learned a lot about human behavior and mescaline, a natural alkaloid present in the peyote cactus. Mescaline, long central to many Native American religious rituals and first chemically isolated in 1896, is a phenethylamine whose ergoline skeleton is also contained in lysergic acid (a tryptamine.)

Sandoz Labs chemist Dr. Albert Hofmann also discovered a lysergic acid derivative called ergonovine, a medication used to retard excessive postpartum uterine bleeding. Based on his work with ergonovine, Dr. Hofmann first derived d-lysergic acid diethylamide tartrate-25 (LSD, a refined alkaloidal liquid byproduct of a rye fungus, ergot) in a series of experiments in Zurich in 1938. He used the naturally occurring lysergic acid radical, the common item in all ergot alkaloids, as the major component of the substance. Further experiments in this vein yielded psilocybin, derived from the Mexican Psilocybe cubensis mushroom, hydergine, essential today in the improvement of cerebral circulation in geriatric patients, and dihydroergotamine, an important ingredient in blood pressure medication.

The well-read and broadly educated Dr. Hofmann knew ergot had a long natural and cultural history as both medicine and poison. Ancient Greek midwives used to give an ergot-based, gruel-like drink, called kykeon, to their patients about to give birth. Kykeon was also consumed during the autumn Eleusinia, the ancient Greek agricultural festival celebrated in honor of the goddess of agriculture, Demeter. Across the Atlantic, sacramental Maya morning glories, beautifully depicted at the ancient Mayan temple-palace complex at Teotihuacán, Mexico, dating to about 1450, also contain ergot-based alkaloids.

However, the mindset the CIA had in its drug research work was far different from that of Dr. Hofmann’s. To our Cold War spymasters, ex-Nazis like Dr. Strughold were definitely evil, but they were definitely useful as well. This pervasive amoral pragmatism led, of course, to the extensive and notorious MK-ULTRA experiments in which, for nearly 25 years, thousands of everyday Americans, both military and civilian, were heavily dosed with numerous very potent artificial psychoactive drugs, often without their knowledge or consent.

This phenomenon of the obsessive "interests of national security" expediency combined with our celebrity-obsessed pop culture that gleefully raises and shamelessly promotes snake oil hustlers as well as the pharmaceutical industry’s pricey "pill for every ill" philosophy, was a form of incompetence and arrogance far more hazardous than any synthetic alkaloid ever developed and came as no surprise to those like Dr. Hofmann. LSD, invaluable in psychiatric treatment – actor Cary Grant was cured of alcoholism by carefully administered doses of the drug under close medical supervision – is thousands of times more potent than the traditional herbal mixtures. In fact, it is thousands of times more potent than the milder of the entheogenic alkaloids. It is effective at doses of as little as a ten-millionth of a gram, which makes it 5,000 times more potent than mescaline. It should not be taken without training or supervision.

The Navy tested mescaline as part of its 1947-53 Project CHATTER. MK-ULTRA was first organized in 1949 by Richard Helms under the direction of Allen Dulles as Project BLUEBIRD. Two years later, it was renamed ARTICHOKE (after one of Dulles’s favorite foods) then termed MK-ULTRA in 1953, finally becoming MK-SEARCH in 1965 until the program's "official termination" eight years later. MK-ULTRA was directly responsible for the wide underground availability of LSD, phencyclidine (PCP – also called "angel dust"), dimethyltryptamine (DMT), 2,5-dimethoxy-4-methylamphetamine (STP) and other powerful synthetic psychoactive drugs in the 1960s. In the early 1950s, the CIA and the Army had contacted Sandoz requesting several kilograms of LSD for use in the test program. Dr. Hofmann and Sandoz refused this request, so Director Dulles persuaded the Indianapolis-based pharmaceutical luminary Eli Lilly (later the pioneers of and chief cheerleaders for the widely prescribed antidepressant Prozac) to synthesize the drug contrary to existing international patent accords--making the US government and Lilly the first illegal domestic manufacturers and distributors of LSD.

These were distributed via the agency’s sometime allies in organized crime and through the FBI’s counterintelligence programs (COINTELPROs) directed against various activist groups of the period. The actual definition of the term MK-ULTRA remains unclear but a former Army Special Forces captain, John McCarthy, who ran the CIA’s Saigon-based Operation Cherry which targeted the Cambodian ruler Prince Sihanouk for assassination, claimed that MK-ULTRA stood for "Manufacturing Killers Utilizing Lethal Tradecraft Requiring Assassination."

On April 10, 1953, in a speech at Princeton University, CIA director Allen Dulles (further feeding the already widespread but misguided fear about the high effectiveness of the alleged Chinese "brainwashing" of US POWs in the Korean conflict) warned that the human mind was a "malleable tool," and that the "brain perversion techniques" of the Reds were "so subtle and so abhorrent" that "the brain&becomes a phonograph playing a disc put on its spindle by an outside genius over which it has no control."

Propaganda, in its simplest form, is condemning one’s opponent publicly for doing what one is already doing privately. Dulles, of course, was that very "outside genius." Three days after warning assembled Princetonians of the disturbing ramifications of these techniques, he had directed MK-ULTRA researchers to perfect them. Dr. Sidney Gottlieb, the CIA’s expert on lethal poisons, (who reputedly was the inspiration for director Stanley Kubrick’s bizarre "Dr. Strangelove" character played by Peter Sellers in the 1964 film of the same title) headed up the operation as director of the Chemical Division of the Technical Services Staff and, via a front organization called "The Society For Human Ecology," distributed $25 million in drug research grants to Harvard, Stanford, UC Berkeley and other institutions.

Meanwhile, George Hunter White, of THCA-laced "Lucky Strikes" fame, had returned to the FBN (now the DEA) at war’s end and continued to research behavior modifying drugs. In 1955, when MK-ULTRA was running full throttle, he was a high ranking FBN administrator who helped the Agency develop and implement a similar operation called Midnight Climax. In this infamous scheme, "safehouses" staffed with prostitutes were established in San Francisco. The hookers lured men from local taverns back to these safehouses after their drinks had been previously spiked with LSD. White’s team secretly filmed the subsequent events in each house. The purpose of these so-called "national security brothels" was to enable the CIA to experiment with the use of sex and mind altering drugs to extract information from test subjects, and it was planned, from spies, POWs, defectors and saboteurs.

Midnight Climax was terminated after eight years when CIA Inspector General John Earman charged that "the concepts involved in manipulating human behavior are found by many people within and outside the Agency to be distasteful and unethical." He stated that "the rights and interest of U.S. citizens were placed in jeopardy." Earman further noted LSD "had been tested on individuals at all social levels, high and low, native American and foreign." Richard Helms, MK-ULTRA’s bureaucratic godfather, summarily rebuffed Earman’s charges, claiming that "positive operational capacity to use drugs is diminishing owing to a lack of realistic testing. Tests," Helms continued, "were necessary to keep up with the Soviets." However, Helms reversed himself a year later when testifying before the Warren Commission investigating the JFK assassination, claiming that "Soviet research has consistently lagged five years behind Western research."

Upon retirement from civil service in 1966, White wrote a startling farewell letter to Dr. Gottlieb. He reminisced about his Midnight Climax work. His comments were frightening:

"I was a very minor missionary, actually a heretic, but I toiled wholeheartedly in the vineyards because it was fun, fun, fun. Where else could a red-blooded American boy lie, kill, cheat, steal, rape and pillage with the sanction and blessing of the all-highest?"

Where else indeed, but as a member of what would later become the hypocritical War on (Some) Drugs?

By the end of the 1950s the CIA was funding just about every qualified LSD researcher and psychologist it could find, through such contractors as the Society for the Study of Human Ecology, the Josiah Macy, Jr. Foundation, and the Geschichter Fund for Medical Research. Author John Marks, in his 1975 book, The Search for the Manchurian Candidate, identified the CIA’s LSD research pioneers as:

* Dr. Robert Hyde at Boston Psychopathic Hospital
* Dr. Harold Abramson at Mt. Sinai Hospital and Columbia University in New York City
* Dr. Carl Pfeiffer at the University of Illinois Medical School, Champaign-Urbana
* Dr. Harris Isbell of the NIMH-sponsored Addiction Research Center in Lexington, Ky.
* Dr. Louis Jolyon West at the University of Oklahoma, Stillwater
* Dr. Harold Hodge at the University of Rochester (N.Y.)

However, there were prominent critics of the US government’s activities, the earliest among them being Aldous Huxley, the famed author of the chillingly prescient 1932 novel Brave New World (which described a totalitarian society whose population was completely controlled by forcible administration of a government-mandated "happiness drug" called "soma.") While taking mescaline supplied by famed English surgeon Dr. Humphrey Osmond (who discovered the close similarities between the molecular structures of adrenaline and mescaline), Huxley completed another novel entitled The Doors of Perception in 1954. In that book, the novelist described his intensely personal vision of the world around him:

"I continued to look at the flowers, and in their living light I seemed to detect the qualitative equivalent of breathing – but of a breathing without returns to a starting point, with no recurrent ebbs but only a repeated flow from beauty to heightened beauty, from deeper to ever deeper meaning. Words like ‘grace’ and ‘transfiguration’ came to my mind&Those idiots (MK-ULTRAns) want to be Pavlovians; Pavlov never saw an animal in its natural state, only under duress. The ‘scientific’ LSD boys do the same with their subjects. No wonder they report psychotics."

Obviously, this isn’t a typical CIA spook writing, and, given Huxley’s incredible mind, creative vision and compassion, we’re not talking about a moron or a mental case either. Which means that giving someone mescaline while they’re being tortured or lobotomized or electrocuted at Dachau will only tell you a lot about torture, lobotomies and electrocution, not about mescaline.

As author Marks noted:

It would become supreme irony that the CIA’s enormous search for weapons among drugs – fueled by the hope that spies could control life with genius and machines – would wind up helping to create the wandering, uncontrollable minds of the counterculture."

Admiral’s son and musician Jim Morrison led The Doors, [of Perception] a quartet of Liverpudlians sang of "Lucy In the Sky With Diamonds," while the Rolling Stones dropped transparent hints about "Mother’s Little Helper." To take a lesson from Orwell, what is more important about the 1960s, indeed, about any period in history, is not so much what really happened as how that period is remembered publicly decades later.

The public memories of that particular era were carefully manipulated in great part by the deliberate creation and promotion (via television and the recording industry) of the phony and in reality quite small "drug/rock/hippie subculture." The first underground LSD labs were actually set up by the FBI in 1963 in both New York City and San Francisco. Many began to incorrectly confuse the ancient medical art of herbalism with the shenanigans of amateur basement "flower-power" and "biker" chemists. Overenthusiastic pitchmen like social psychologist Dr. Timothy Leary and Beat poet Allen Ginsberg sadly failed to sufficiently stress that key difference, although the technically competent Leary clearly understood the artificially high potency of LSD.

Leary (and his longtime associate, psychologist Richard Alpert) matured professionally in a CIA-funded research world. In 1948, Leary, then a UC Berkeley graduate student, attended the yearly convention of the left-wing American Veterans’ Council in Milwaukee. There he met CIA officer Cord Meyer. Meyer’s professional specialty was infiltrating and discrediting various organizations deemed "un-American" or "disloyal." Meyer persuaded Leary to help him. Leary acknowledged Meyer’s influence, crediting him with "helping me understand my political-cultural role more clearly."

During 1954-59 Leary was the director of clinical research and psychology at the Kaiser Foundation Hospital in Oakland, Calif. The personality test that made him famous, "The Leary," was actually used by the CIA to test prospective employees. A grad school classmate of Leary’s, CIA contractor Frank Barron, worked with the Berkeley Institute for Personality Assessment and Research, which was funded and staffed by CIA psychologists. In 1960 Barron, with government funding, founded the Harvard Psychedelic Drug Research Center. Leary followed Barron to Harvard, becoming a lecturer in psychology where he remained for three years. Leary’s Harvard associates included former chief OSS psychologist Harry Murray, who had monitored the early OSS "truth serum" experiments, and numerous other knowing CIA contractors. One of Dr. Murray’s many test subjects was a Harvard undergraduate math major named Theodore Kaczynski.

In the spring of 1963, Leary and Alpert left Harvard and founded the International Foundation for Internal Freedom (IFIF) – later renamed the Castalia Foundation – on a 2,500-acre estate in the small upstate New York community of Millbrook. There, the pair of psychologists continued their hallucinogenic drug research and soon became the chief investigative target of an ambitious Dutchess County district attorney named G. Gordon Liddy. Multimillionaire William Mellon Hitchcock generously bankrolled the founding and operation of IFIF/Castalia and later financed a huge black-market LSD manufacturing operation.

Even so, Leary carefully stressed proper mindset, setting and dosages in a book he coauthored with Alpert and Ralph Metzner, The Psychedelic Experience. It was based on an ancient Tibetan shamanic manual, The Book of the Dead. The latter work referred to an herbal tea similar in content to but far less powerful than LSD, and insisted on mental discipline as an inherent part of the process. The Incans of Andean South America, for instance, were an invaluable source of medical knowledge, and used whole herbs like ayahuasca and the coca leaf, not their artificially refined alkaloids, and spiritual technique was also taught as an key part of the process.

However, much like the crusading "drys" before and during Prohibition, the MK-ULTRA inquisitors with their police state mentality in concert with misinformed and emotionally distressed LSD users, had found their "devil drug," (the term used by the Harrison Tax Act advocates in the 1910s and Marijuana Tax Act backers in the 1930s) replete with tragic tales of already emotionally distressed and lonely young people quite unprepared for such an artificially powerful entheogen. It was also well within CIA policy to randomly distribute LSD laced with the lethal poison strychnine so as to create "horror stories" useful as propaganda. Dr. Hofmann himself chemically confirmed the presence of pure strychnine in several random street samples of LSD.

Consistent with its policy of deliberately confusing the beneficial ancient herbs with extremely dangerous synthetic alkaloid derivatives, the CIA surreptitiously distributed of these synthetic compounds, termed "psychedelics," to the public. One of them was STP, originally developed as an incapacitating agent for the Army in 1964 at Dow Chemical. Dow even made the STP formula public information three years later. This potent synthetic put many unsuspecting people on a three-day trip, and sent many, hysterical with anxiety, to the emergency room. That, of course, was the purpose of its distribution.

During 1955-75, the Army tested LSD (termed EA-1729) and PCP on several of its enlisted men at what was then the headquarters of its Chemical Corps, Edgewood Arsenal in Maryland, something described in detail by Bill Kurtis in a televised 1995 A&E Investigative Reports segment titled "Bad Trip to Edgewood." The CIA also tested PCP (in conjunction with electroshock "therapy" and sleep deprivation) at Allain Memorial Institute in Montreal under the direction of the notorious Canadian psychiatrist Dr. Ewen Cameron. The Chemical Corps (whose commander in the 1950s, Lt. General William Creasy, advocated a new military strategy of LSD-based "nonkill warfare") then stockpiled PCP for use as a "nonlethal incapacitant." Excess doses of PCP, reported the CIA, could "lead to convulsions and death." Soon, PCP was flooding the streets.

Edgewood also received an average of 400 product "rejects" a month from major US pharmaceutical firms. These "rejects" were actually drugs found to be commercially useless because of their demonstrated hazards and numerous undesirable side effects. In 1958, Edgewood obtained its first sample of a "reject" called phenylbenzeneacetic acid (BZ) developed by pharmaceutical giant Hoffmann-LaRoche, later known by its street nickname as "brown acid."

BZ (some 10,000 times as powerful as LSD) inhibits the production of hormones which aid the brain’s transfer of messages and instructions across nerve endings (synapses), thereby severely disrupting normal human perceptual, behavioral and sensory patterns. Its effects generally last about three days, although symptoms-migraine headaches, giddiness, disorientation, auditory and visual hallucinations, and erratic if not maniacal behavior – could persist for as long as six weeks. "During the period of acute effects," noted an Army physician, "the person is completely out of touch with his environment." The Army also developed artillery shells and rockets with warheads able to deliver large dosages of BZ to selected targets.

In the summer of 1964, Beat novelist Ken Kesey (the author of One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest and who had been an MK-ULTRA test subject at Stanford along with Allen Ginsberg and Grateful Dead musician Bob Hunter) launched a yearlong cross-country trip in a Day-Glo painted school bus filled with friends called "Merry Pranksters." The Merry Pranksters distributed thousands of doses of LSD along the way (a phenomenon colorfully described in author Tom Wolfe’s 1969 novel, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test) supplied by one Ronald Hadley Stark. Stark (who died in 1984) was a CIA operative fluent in five languages with access to unlimited public funds and numerous high-level contacts in business and government throughout the world.

For instance, when the underground manufacture and distribution of LSD was suddenly derailed in 1969 due to the scarcity of its key ingredient, ergotamine tartrate, and increasing federal law enforcement pressure, Stark, via the Laguna Beach, Calif.-based Brotherhood of Eternal Love, a small group of local surfers led by chemist Nicholas Sand, got it quickly back on track. For five years, Stark, aided by the Castle Bank of the Bahamas (which pioneered the art of money laundering for the Mob) and his contacts in a French pharmaceutical firm, facilitated the mass production and distribution (via the Brotherhood and other groups) an even more powerful strain of LSD nicknamed "orange sunshine." This firm also manufactured BZ. Stark (who operated LSD labs in Brussels and Paris as well) claimed he was going to supply orange sunshine as an offensive weapon to CIA-backed Tibetan rebels fighting the Chinese occupation.

Stark also was a close friend of the Los Angeles founders of a small breakaway Scientology sect called "The Process Church of the Final Judgement," English expatriates Robert DeGrimston Moore and Mary Ann McClean.

Regular attendees of the Process Church included members of the Beach Boys, the Rolling Stones and other prominent pop performers as well as an ex-convict and wannabe rock musician named Charles Manson. Manson and his followers became heavy users of orange sunshine – the trademark "bad acid" of the day – which they were all on when, on Manson’s orders, they carried out the brutal August 1969 Tate-LaBianca murders. When Stark (who is believed to have distributed an estimated 50 million doses of LSD during his Agency career) was arrested for drug trafficking in Bologna in 1975, Italian magistrate Giorgio Floridia ordered his release on the grounds that he had been a CIA agent since 1960. Judge Floridia documented and justified this using a list of Stark’s numerous intelligence contacts.

These were and are all classic government COINTELPRO-style tricks – this is how natural herbs and their mild, pharmaceutical-grade derivatives were quickly and easily made lethal and consequently demonized. How was this done? First, foolish claims were made that there was no difference between safe whole herbs and their potentially deadly ultra-refined alkaloids, next, the best of the traditional herbs and the milder of the pharmaceutical-grade alkaloid derivatives were made unavailable, and finally, the streets were flooded with potentially deadly synthetics. Deliberate perversions of science like angel dust continue to be a great propaganda tool for our diehard drug warriors, and the worn catchall excuse of "the interest of national security" is used to justify appalling covert drug capers ranging from CIA-sponsored heroin production and trafficking in Southeast Asia in the 1960s to the Bush/Clinton/Mena/Nicaragua cocaine-for-arms smuggling schemes in the 1980s.

These Constitution-shredding police state methods were adapted from the Nazis and the Soviets by and large and were applied by the CIA, NSA, DEA, BATF, IRS and FBI against us. Scores of groups, ranging from the American Indian Movement and Black Panthers to militias and religious organizations like the Branch Davidians in Waco, Texas (in which the government first falsely charged as illegal methamphetamine dealers in order to get a Posse Comitatus Act waiver to use military force against them) were either disrupted by agents provocateur-style riots, bombings and armed standoffs, smeared in the mainstream news media through the "Reichstag Fire" approach, or, in the case of the Davidians, physically exterminated. The War on Some Drugs is merely a horrible extension and intensification of these tried-and-true Hegelian methods, a "war" in which we all lose.
Short Bibliography

* Bowart, Walter; Operation Mind Control, Dell Publishing, 1978.
* Delgado, Jose, Physical Control of the Mind, Harper, NYC, 1969.
* Huxley, Aldous, The Doors of Perception, Harper, NYC, 1954.
* Lee, Martin; Shalin, Bruce, Acid Dreams, 1986.
* Marchetti, Victor, The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence, New York, 1974.
* Marks, John, The Search for the Manchurian Candidate, New York, 1975.
* Masters, Robert & Houston, Jean, The Varieties of Psychedelic Experience: The Classic Guide to the Effects of LSD on the Human Psyche, 2000.
* McCoy, Alfred, The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade, Lawrence Hill, 1972, rev. 1991.
* Meerloo, Joost, The Rape of the Mind, Crowell, NYC, 1956.
* Skinner, B.F., Beyond Freedom and Dignity," Knopf, NYC, 1971
* Smith, Harris R. OSS: The Secret History of America’s First Central Intelligence Agency, Berkeley, 1972.
* Stevens, Jay, Storming Heaven – LSD and the American Dream, 1998.

April 19, 2001

Michael E. Kreca lives in San Diego and has been a financial reporter for Knight-Ridder, Business Week and the Financial Times of London.

Copyright © 2001 LewRockwell.com

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REPORTER: Jessica Savitch

(Chicago, Illinois) Pills mixed to produce substitute for heroin reported to be legal, inexpensive prescription drugs, Talwin and Pyribenzamine. Decr. in availability of heroin supplies in cities like Chicago, Detroit and New Orleans and pushers' turn to T's and Blues instead noted. House narcotics abuse select committee probe of ways to federal restrict use of Talwin stated. [DEA admin. Peter BENSINGER - says this is no longer single-city problem and is arising from lack of serious penalty.] Disagreement with this view by Dr. Robert Speir, medical director for Winthrop Labs which is sole manufacturer of Talwin, mentioned. [SPEIR - states position that it is localized problem and not like that of narcotics around cntry.] Use of Medicaid funds to provide T's and Blues to drug addicts complaining of backaches and colds detailed. Expected classification of Talwin as federal controlled substance by end of year reported
REPORTER: Norma Quarles

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Los Angeles sits in the middle of a huge desert. Only the water stolen from the Colorado River or the lakes in the northern part of the state and pumped in through aqueducts or pulled from wells in the ground keep the L.A. basin from returning to scrub of tumbleweeds and yucca cactus that it used to be. The city and county consume millions of cubic feet of water every day, but it is still a desert.


The tiny pueblo mission “Queen of the Angels” was founded by mostly mulatto and mestizo pilgrims and built from the adobe mud bricks and the sweat of their brows. But in 1849 gold was discovered in California, and Los Angeles enjoyed the financial boom of the gold rush. The Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department was founded in 1850, and the first weapon issued to a sheriff’s deputy to aid in keeping the peace was not a pistol or a rifle. It was a lance.


Back in the mid-1800s, Los Angeles drew good men like the mission fathers or the first Los Angeles Sheriff George Thompson Burrill. It was also the home of good men like Native American Chief Juan Antonio of the Coahuilla tribe, who twice saved the pueblo from marauders. Bad men also were attracted to the tiny town. Texas gunman and outlaw Jim Irving and his gang called the Irving Party roamed the vast territory. They say the gold fever drove some of these men to madness.


Today, mad men continue to roam the great expanses and remote areas surrounding Los Angeles.


In 2003 a new form of treasure hunter and prospector searched this desert.
The remote areas around Los Angeles are littered with “old cooks,” or the remains of old clandestine methamphetamine labs. The toxic byproducts of the illicit production of meth are normally just dumped into the soil to contaminate the ground with their poison.


But one man’s poison is another man’s treasure. Destitute meth users called “treasure hunters” have started mining these sites. These bottom-of-the-barrel users find an old cook site and shovel the contaminated soil into barrels or vats and then mix the residue with acetone or kerosene and wash the chemicals through filters to yield methamphetamine.

One such “treasure hunter” was Donald Charles Kueck, a male white of 52 years. He stood 6 foot, 2 inches and weighed about 160 pounds. Kueck had dirty brown hair pulled back into a pony tail and brown eyes. He wore a mustache and a long goatee and looked like some one who might have roamed the 1850’s desert of L.A. A petty criminal with associations to the Hells Angels motorcycle gang and the Peckerwoods, he had succeeded in alienating even these “good” citizens. He was unemployed and unable to work because of a back injury and received about $200 a month disability income. He was addicted to pain medication and meth and very paranoid. In September of 2001 he sliced a victim with a box cutter in Riverside California for menacing him.


Donald Kueck had a stepdaughter and grand daughter living in the city of Riverside. Kueck’s sister was a commander in the U.S. Navy stationed in Pensacola, Fla. He gave the address of 19100 East Avenue S-8, Llano, Calif., when booked. However, it was his habit to roam the remote areas near Lake Los Angeles and squat when he found a treasure site. Llano is an unincorporated section of Los Angeles County and the “lake” would be considered a small pond in most places. It is east of Palmdale and Lancaster and south of the huge Edwards Air Force base.


One of the major problems in these remote areas is squatters. People without resources or who have given up on our society just drive out into the desert and park a trailer or bus or old car somewhere. This becomes their squatter’s home site. No rent or association dues are collected. In fact no electric bills, gas bills, telephone bills, or utilities of any type are required.


Sometimes the squatters will form small groups or communities for protection. These group sites sometimes take up a fortress like formation. Trailers and vehicles are parked in the center and then lean-tos and tin and board structures are built around them with a protecting wall of wooden pallets sometimes several stories high surrounding the center. If you have ever watched Mel Gibson in one of the “Mad Max” movies you have an idea about what such a compound looks like.


There are no addresses on these structures; many of them are not on any surveyed street or even on a dirt road. If you approach these sites in a vehicle your dust can be seen for a great distance away. If you approach on foot, the dogs and small children announce your drawing close. It was like Vietnam for me; walking toward a village not knowing if it was friendly or hostile. This required moving in the open across open fields vulnerable to ambush on every side.


But even in these hermit communities there are individuals who choose to be loners. Donald Charles Kueck was one of these. He considered himself a survivalist and stashed cashes of water, food, and ammunition for his Daewoo K-2 .223 rifle in hiding places scattered in the desert. The meth and its toxins, the desert, and his own personal paranoia combined to make him a dangerous man.


One of the good men working this area was Resident Deputy Sheriff Stephen Sorenson. A resident deputy does not work out of a police station, he or she lives in the rural community he or she polices and works from home. You may find it hard to believe that this actually still exists in Los Angeles County, but it does. There are advantages to working and living in this remote rural setting. You get to know everybody over the years, where they live, what they drive, and what they are about. There are disadvantages too. The bad guys know where you live and who your family members are.

Dep. Stephen Sorensen and Donald Charles Kueck knew each other. They had a history. In 1994 Kueck had supposedly threatened Sorenson after he was involved in a traffic accident with Sorenson. Sorenson had run Kueck off from trespassing or squatting on private property and “prospecting” for chemical treasure in the past. Since then things had been tense, but Sorenson had successfully handled each encounter.


Recently there had been reports that Kueck and another treasure hunter had been squatting on private land on a semi-abandoned dirt air field. The field was near Sorenson’s home so he checked on it as he drove by on and off duty.


On a hot, lazy Saturday morning, August 2, 2003, Sorenson arrived home and jumped into his uniform and started up his Sheriff’s SUV Patrol Vehicle. He told his wife that he had seen a small trailer trespassing on the airport property and thought it might be Kueck. He drove off toward the airport. He parked and approached a small travel trailer, the kind you would pull behind a sedan. He confronted the man who walked out of the trailer; it was one of Kueck’s associates. After a quick look around, Sorenson ordered the treasure hunter off the property.


“Where is Kueck?” Sorenson asked. He was told that Kueck was about 200 yards further down the dirt path. As he drove toward the tiny trailer used by Kueck, he was unaware that Kueck had spotted his approach. In another fit of paranoia, Kueck had armed himself with his Daewoo K-2 South Korean assault rifle. Some speculate that Kueck may have thought that he had an outstanding warrant for his arrest in another matter.


He was on the makeshift porch of the trailer as Sorenson exited his patrol SUV and approached. Kueck unleashed his weapon firing numerous times at the vulnerable Sorenson. The .223 rounds ripped through Sorenson’s body armor. Sorenson managed to draw and fire his 9MM Beretta 92 F but missed Kueck and struck the trailer. Sorenson was down. Kueck approached the mortally wounded Deputy and fired his Daewoo point blank into his head.


Donald Charles Kueck then took the Beretta and police radio from the fallen Sorenson. He then tried to take the patrol vehicle but for some reason was unable to start it with Sorenson’s keys. Witnesses passing the scene some distance away on a nearby road would later report hearing shots and seeing someone (not a Deputy) trying to start the LASD vehicle. Kueck then tied the Deputy’s body to the rear bumper of his car. He dragged the body away from the trailer into the desert. Apparently the rope he used broke and he continued driving for a while then abandoned his vehicle and walked into the vast desert taking the Daewoo, Sorenson’s Beretta and police radio.

Patrol cars from the Lancaster and Palmdale Sheriff’s Station responded to the area following up on the witness reports of gunfire and a suspect trying to take a sheriff’s SUV. They located Kueck’s trailer and followed the blood and drag marks to Sorenson’s body. The suspect had managed to dump the body very near Sorenson’s home.


Dep. Javier Clift, Dep. Mike McCravy, and I happened to be in Palmdale area with an informant at the time of the shooting and responded to the command post. Soon most of our Major Crimes Unit would form up in three squads and begin a weeklong search of the desert bad lands.
My unit was a plainclothes detective unit. We had only three AR-15 patrol rifles and several shotguns to supplement our 9mm Berettas and 15 men and women. So I authorized an additional three “civilian” ARs to be carried. We wore the field equipment we could find including an assortment of ballistic vests and camelback hydration systems. Nylon web gear and nylon raid jackets completed our uniforms, and we stepped out across the open desert. We drove our vehicles when we could but often we had to move on foot searching for this armed and dangerous cop killer.


I then became aware that very few of my detectives knew how to move tacitly across open ground. They were all proficient in urban settings and dynamic entries but few had experience in approaching armed suspects on open ground. Luckily two or three detectives were recently active duty military, so they became valuable in helping the others learn how to move in wedge and line formations.


We also received unexpected aid from the Riverside District Attorney’s Office. DA Investigators Bob Creed and my old Compton High School friend Bernie Skiles, had provided us with information on the suspect’s stepdaughter and cell phone numbers. Kueck had been calling his stepdaughter. Kueck had gone into hiding in the desert near the home of a friend. My unit surrounded the home and maintained surveillance of the several wooden structures around the main house.

LASD Homicide Detectives Sgt. J. Percell and Det. P. Guzman had contacted Donald Kueck on his cell phone. Kueck admitted the murder of Dep. Sorenson but refused to surrender. He was somewhere on the property we were survelling.


LASD SEB (SWAT) was called in. They approached the structures in an armored car. Suspect Kueck engaged the SEB vehicle with his .223 assault rifle giving away his position. A heavier LAPD SWAT armored battering ram was brought up and tear gas was fired into the wooden structure.


Kueck continued to fire at the armored vehicles and the tactical officers, but the house began to smoke and eventually was completely engulfed in flames. Soon officers could hear rounds going off inside the house, but were unsure if Kueck was still firing his Daewoo or the rounds were just cooking off in his 30-round magazines from the fire.


By the next morning it was all over. Donald Charles Kueck’s charred body was found smoldering alongside his Daewoo K-2 rifle. Dep. Sorenson’s Beretta and police radio were also found in the burned wreakage.


Dep. Stephen Sorenson was 46 years old and a 12-year veteran of the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department. He is survived by his wife and son.

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"I was involved in a lot of burglaries," the pretty blonde told Kansas City police, "and I couldn't have done it without a shot. When you're on that stuff, you just don't care. I was even a prostitute for three months." The "stuff," explained Sharon Pollard, 21, and now in jail for smuggling a revolver to her jailed boy friend and partner in crime, comes from a 75¢ inhaler intended only for clearing stuffy noses. But if its active chemical ingredient, amphetamine, is dissolved and injected into a vein, it packs a wallop. Last week the abuse of amphetamine was growing so fast that it had the Kansas City police, Missouri legislators, federal officials, even the U.S. Congress seriously concerned.

Society's troubles with amphetamine go back almost 20 years to a time when the most popular inhaler contained Benzedrine (Smith, Kline, & French Laboratories' trade name for one form of amphetamine). Prison wardens complained that accordion-pleated paper fillers loaded with 250 mg. of amphetamine (15 times the average daily dose a doctor would prescribe for reducing or lethargic patients) were being smuggled to convicts, who chewed them and went on violent rampages. Then S.K.F. chemists found a better decongestant, propylhexedrine (not an amphetamine or a stimulant), to put in inhalers, and changed the name to Benze-drex. The problem died down until five years ago, when St. Louis' Pfeiffer Co. began marketing a 200-mg. inhaler called Valo, once again containing amphetamine. It sold well, and the old problem of misuse soon recurred.

Hypos & Photos. The current Missouri flurry got its impetus two football seasons ago, when eight Kansas City high-school students piled into two jalopies and roared off to see a game in Oklahoma City. Local teen-agers showed them how to extract the amphetamine from a Valo inhaler and inject it with a hypodermic needle. (Oldfashioned ways of getting the kick by chewing the cartridge or drinking beer in which it had been swished around were no longer popular, because Pfeiffer had added a bitter, nauseating chemical.) The venturesome eight had a ball -and spread the craze back home.

Each week, recently, at least ten users of amphetamine for kicks have been questioned at Kansas City police headquarters. Virtually all, says Lieut. John Flavin of the narcotics bureau, have admitted robberies, holdups and muggings, committed while they were hopped up. Adds Flavin: "There are at least 200 known users in the city, and at least twice as many that we don't know about. The men range from 18 up, with most in their early 20s. The women are mainly from 14 to 25. They come from the most expensive neighborhoods and the poorest, and some are in the city's best high schools."

In one case Flavin had the best selfincriminating evidence imaginable. Gary A. Hamilton, 22, ordered tea at a drugstore lunch counter, poured the hot water into an inhaler, and while still in the store went into an automatic photo booth and took six pictures of himself injecting the soup into his arm. Why the pictures? Said Hamilton: to impress his friends, and also to show them the technique. Sentence: 60 days.
Prescription & Records. With Valo sales running 1,000 a week above normal, thanks to the kick trade, the city council has already banned their sale without prescription in Kansas City. When the ban was proved unenforceable, Missouri's Thomas C. Hennings Jr. introduced a bill in the U.S. Senate to put sales of amphetamine inhalers on prescription only,* require druggists to keep records of sales. Now the Food and Drug Administration has decided to issue an order, under its present legal powers, to accomplish the same result. As for the Pfeiffer Co., it has resolved to drop amphetamine and, like S.K.F., put a nonstimulating product in its inhalers.

* As amphetamines to be taken internally already are.

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When methadone was first proposed for the treatment of heroin addiction, it sounded like a pointless gambit — sort of like substituting vodka for gin. That's enabling addicts, critics said, not helping them.
But over the years, maintenance treatment with methadone and other synthetic opiates like buprenorphine has proved successful — more than any other heroin-addiction therapy — in getting people off illicit drugs and lowering HIV transmission rates, crime and death among users. That success, in part, has got researchers wondering whether addiction to other drugs — namely to the stimulants cocaine and methamphetamine — could be curbed in the same way, by substituting a chemically similar alternative. (See the Year in Health, from A to Z.)

"It's an idea that really does need to be rigorously evaluated," says Frank Vocci, director of the pharmacotherapy division at the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA). "But right now there is more discussion than data."

The problem of stimulant addiction in the U.S. has dropped out of the spotlight of late, but it has not disappeared. According to a 2007 government survey, 2.1 million Americans had used cocaine in the month prior to the survey and 1 million had taken other stimulants for nonmedical purposes, including more than half a million users of methamphetamine. There are currently no overwhelmingly effective addiction treatments. Abstinence-based rehab therapy for meth and cocaine work about as well as rehab for other drugs — meaning that about one-third of users improve following treatment, but most relapse repeatedly. And despite decades of study of dozens of compounds, there are as yet no federally approved medications for cocaine or meth addiction.

Asked whether NIDA thought the concept of stimulant maintenance treatment holds promise, Vocci says, "If putting your money where your mouth is means [that we consider it promising], then, yes, we're funding a fair number of studies."

To date, the research has been mixed but intriguing. The best-studied drugs so far are dexamphetamine, a form of amphetamine contained in the antihyperactivity drug Adderall, and modafinil, the wakefulness drug used to treat narcolepsy and shift-work sleep disorder. Most studies have been small and focused on safety rather than efficacy. Some have found no effect — but because of their size, it's difficult to determine whether that's meaningful.

One British study followed 60 stimulant addicts who were treated with dexamphetamine in a Cornwall clinic. Doctors tracked how well these patients fared compared with 120 heroin addicts being treated with methadone, and found an equivalent reduction in illicit drug use and drug injection. In both groups, about two-thirds of patients stopped injecting over 10 months.

Another trial in Australia followed 30 cocaine injectors, 16 of whom were treated with dexamphetamine and 14 with a placebo. Cocaine-positive urine tests in the dexamphetamine group fell from 94% to 56%, while the placebo group showed no change after 14 weeks. A similar study of modafinil at the University of Pennsylvania in 2005 found reduced cocaine use in addicts.

But there are reasons that stimulant maintenance treatment was not initially studied more extensively. For one, high doses of amphetamines can cause brain damage, psychosis, heart attack and stroke. (High doses of opioids like methadone, in contrast, can also be dangerous, but once a patient develops a tolerance to them, even very high doses of the drugs are not toxic.) The consequences of high-dose use are important, since addicts in treatment often try at least once to use illegal drugs "on top" of their maintenance drug. So far, however, studies of dexamphetamine and similar drugs have not revealed major safety problems. Although a few patients have had psychotic episodes from using "on top," those particular patients turned out to have previously suffered psychosis. "There's pretty consistent evidence that the side effects are generally nominal," says John Grabowski, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Minnesota who has championed the study of stimulant maintenance treatment in the U.S.

Another problem is that stimulants appear to increase users' desire subjectively, rather than satisfying it. While a heroin high is calming and lasts for several hours, cocaine and amphetamine feel different. As actor Robin Williams, an admitted ex-user, put it, cocaine makes you feel like a new man, and the first thing the new man wants is more cocaine. It produces excitement, not relaxation. And the concern is that a maintenance drug would have the same escalating effect.

"That's one argument, but the data doesn't seem to support it," says Craig Rush, professor of behavioral science at the University of Kentucky. In a study of seven cocaine-dependent patients, Rush treated them with dexamphetamine maintenance, then gave them cocaine in the lab. The effects of cocaine were blunted. Rush is now looking at what happens when dexamphetamine-maintained patients are given a choice whether or not to take cocaine in the lab — preliminary results suggest they "just say no" more often.

The newer stimulant drug, modafinil, does not carry the same addiction risk as amphetamines, making it a promising alternative as a maintenance drug. But it's also less effective in treating the most severe addictions, according to Grabowski. "In our research, we were able to separate out [the more and less severely addicted patients], and the more severe people were more responsive to the more potent stimulants," says Grabowski, who has conducted two randomized controlled trials involving nearly 200 patients, which found that dexamphetamine treatment reduced cocaine use better than a placebo.

Proponents of stimulant maintenance treatment also note this significant detail: Many stimulant abusers suffer from attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). While ADHD affects about 1% of the general population, according to Rush, it shows up in about 30% of cocaine and amphetamine addicts. Psychiatrists often hesitate to give hyperactivity drugs to patients with a history of addiction, but some studies suggest that maintenance may be exactly what this group needs — and that their drug abuse is an attempt to self-medicate. The studies that have included ADHD patients (many studies exclude them to avoid confounding) showed positive results. In one pilot study, conducted at Columbia University, maintenance treatment reduced cocaine use and craving in 12 cocaine addicts with ADHD.

None of the researchers believe that stimulant maintenance is a panacea or that it will work for every cocaine or meth addict. But there is no medical treatment that works 100% of the time. "I think we have found something of potential benefit, and it should be met with interest and further research, rather than disdain," Grabowski says.

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It is common knowledge that Afghanistan remains the primary source of the world’s supply of opium and heroin. A recent United Nations’ report claims that three quarters of the world’s heroin comes from the provinces of Helmand and Kandahar. But there is also recognition that poppies are grown in almost all of the country’s 34 provinces.

The western media argues that most of the production of illegal drugs is being done by the Taliban or that the Taliban is protecting the farmers. The fact that there are well known drug lords in the government of President Hamid Karzai, and many are members of the parliament, is usually ignored. Yet the Asian press carries photos of “narco palaces” in Kabul and describes the local “narcotecture.” The Afghan population is well aware of the close ties between the drug lords and the government.

Of course this is quite embarrassing to the U.S. government, which put Karzai in office and created the present Afghan constitution and system of government. Thus Hillary Clinton, nominated for Secretary of State, created quite a shock when she referred to Afghanistan as a “narco state” in her testimony before the U.S. Senate.

Forgotten in all this is the key role that the U.S. government played in the development and expansion of the illegal drug industry in Afghanistan. It goes back to the decision made in July 1978 by the administration of Jimmy Carter to give aid and assistance to the radical Islamists in their rebellion against the leftist government of the Peoples Democratic Party of Afghanistan.

The CIA and the Afghan Drug Trade

The U.S. government devoted billions of dollars to the proxy war in Afghanistan. Most of this was funneled through the Pentagon’s infamous Black Budget, secret funds for secret operations. In 1981 this budget was estimated at $9 billion but rose to $36 billion by 1990. The CIA obtained cash to buy weapons and other equipment which was then channeled to the Islamist rebels.

In the Afghan operation the CIA provided cash to the Pakistan government, primarily through its accounts with the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI), best known for laundering illegal drug money. As John Cooley notes, “The CIA already had a history of using corrupt or criminal banks for its overseas operations.” In the 1980s the CIA and the Pentagon’s Defense Intelligence Agency were using the BCCI for covert operations. First American, in Washington, D.C., was one of the CIA banks of choice, and it had been acquired by BCCI.

BCCI had close links to the Pakistan government. During the Afghan jihad BCCI officials actually took control of the customs house at the port of Karachi where shipments of arms were sent by the CIA to Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate (ISI). They made cash payments to the ISI, part of which were payoffs, but large sums were also needed to finance the transportation of armaments to the Afghan border and beyond. As Brigadier Mohammad Yousaf reports, much of the CIA aid came in the form of cash. This was used to purchase hundreds of trucks and thousands of horses, mules and camels, in addition to the materials needed to build the training bases for the mujahideen fighters.

The CIA would inform the Pakistan government about the shipments. When the armaments and supplies were landed in Karachi they came under the control of the National Logistics Cell of the Pakistan army and the ISI. They trucked the materials north to the various bases. On the way back the trucks carried opium and heroin for export from Karachi, mainly to the United States. Some of the heroin factories were directly under the control of the ISI, and the whole operation had the support of Pakistan General Fazle Haq, the protector of the industry. President Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq had appointed him the military commander of the Northwest Frontier Province. He was also directly involved in the heroin trade and laundering money through the BCCI.

The Islamist Drug Lords

Many of the key Islamist commanders and warlords were heavily involved in the illegal drug industry. One was Yunas Khalis, a brutal commander who boasted of the slaughter of prisoners of war as well as defectors from the PDPA government. Based in Helmand province, he spent much of his time fighting with other commanders over the control of the poppy crop and the roads and passes from the poppy fields to his seven heroin laboratories at his headquarters in Ribat al Ali. As Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair point out, at this time around 60% of the crop was produced under irrigation in the Helmand Valley, developed with a grant from USAID. This is still largely true today.

The biggest producer of heroin was Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, the primary recipient of CIA funds, who maintained six heroin factories at Koh-i-Soltan. He was in competition with another favourite commander of the U.S. government, Mullah Nassim Akhundzada, for control of the poppy crop produced in the Helmand Valley. The cash from the sale of the opium and heroin was channeled through accounts in the BCCI.

In the north, poppy cultivation and heroin production were primarily under the control of commanders Abdul Rashid Dostum and Ahmad Shah Massoud, both of whom were key allies of the U.S. government, particularly after the fall of the Marxist government in 1992. The fruits of this industry were exported through the Central Asian Republics via Kosovo and Albania and into Europe. It was estimated that this source accounted for around 60% of the European market. To this day commanders in the North, now in the Karzai government and the parliament, engage in production and trade. But this is overlooked by the North American media.

It was not only the U.S.-backed radical Islamists who were in the drug business. One of the key players was Sayad Ahmed Gaylani of the moderate National Islamic Front, who was very close to the exiled King Zahir Shah. The Soviets argued that Gaylani produced and exported more illegal drugs than Hekmatyar.

Afghan poppy production tripled between 1979-82, and according to figures from the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency, came to dominate the heroin market in the United States and Europe. The DEA reported that by 1984 51% of the heroin supply in the United States came from the operations of the U.S. allies on the Pakistan border. The situation remains the same today. It is estimated that the illegal drug industry presently accounts for around 50% of Afghanistan’s gross domestic product.

John W. Warnock is author of Creating a Failed State: the US and Canada in Afghanistan. Halifax: Fernwood Publishing, 2008.

References:

Cockburn, Alexander and Jeffrey St. Clair. 1998. Whiteout: The CIA, Drugs and the Press. New York: Pluto Press.

Coll, Steve. 2004. Ghost Wars: the Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001. New York: Penguin Books.

Cooley, John. 2002. Unholy Wars: Afghanistan, American and International Terrorism. London: Pluto Press.

McCoy, Alfred W. 2003. The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade. Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books.

Potts, Mark, Nicholas Kochan and Robert Whittington. 1992. Dirty Money: BCCI – the Inside Story of the World’s Sleaziest Bank. Washington, D.C.: National Press Books.

Scott, Peter Dale. 2007. The Road to 9/11: Wealth, Empire and the Future of America. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Yousaf, Mohammad and Mark Adkin. 2004. Afghanistan – The Bear Trap: the Defeat of a Superpower. Havertown, Pa.: Casemate.

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a drug in high demand for euthanasia- and a drug that gives an outstanding high- to its accolades. Wish I would have thought of this one before getting clean. Love to hear people post about the scene in TJ currently- and if the new drug policy has in fact changed things on the TJ drug scene.

Courtesy of NY times, July, 2008

TJ A Market for Death in a Bottle
Sandy Huffaker for The New York Times


Published: July 21, 2008
TIJUANA, Mexico — “Cocaine?” a hustler working Tijuana’s seedy Avenida Revolución called out on a recent night, his voice not the least bit muted.


The New York Times
Tijuana is a destination for so-called death tourists.
“How about girls?”

When neither offering elicited the desired response, he tried another: “Cuban cigars?”

He could have continued for quite a bit longer reciting from Tijuana’s extensive menu of contraband. One product from this border town, though, trumps all others in terms of shock value: death in a bottle, a liquid more potent than even the strongest tequila.

The drug, pentobarbital, literally takes a person’s breath away. It can kill by putting people to sleep, and it is tightly regulated in most countries. But aging and ailing people seeking a quick and painless way to end their lives say there is no easier place on earth than Mexico to obtain pentobarbital, a barbiturate commonly known as Nembutal.

Once widely available as a sleep aid, it is now used mostly to anesthetize animals during surgery and to euthanize them. Small bottles of its concentrated liquid form, enough to kill, can be found not on the shelves of the many discount pharmacies in Tijuana but in its pet shops, which sell a wide variety of animals, as well as medications and other supplies for them.

“It is Mexico where Nembutal is most readily available,” says “The Peaceful Pill Handbook,” a book that lays out methods to end one’s life. Co-written by Philip Nitschke, founder of Exit International, an Australian group that helps people who want to end their lives early, the book is banned in Australia and New Zealand. In the United States, though, it is only a few mouse clicks away online.

The book, as well as seminars that Mr. Nitschke offers, lays out strategies for dying. The most trouble-free and painless form of suicide, he contends, is to buy Mexican pentobarbital, which goes by brand names like Sedal-Vet, Sedalphorte and Barbithal.

Those in search of the drug, so-called death tourists, scout out the veterinary pharmacies that abound in Tijuana. The shelves are fully stocked with tick medication for dogs, vitamins for horses and an array of bottles and boxes that make little sense to anyone but a veterinarian.

Mr. Nitschke’s book, however, provides glossy photos of the many versions of pentobarbital that are most suitable for suicide. Buying pentobarbital can be as easy as showing the pictures to a clerk and paying as little as $30 for a dose.

Pet shop clerks throughout Tijuana acknowledge that foreigners regularly inquire about the drug. “We’ve probably had 100 people come in asking for the drug in the last couple years,” said Pepe Velazquez, a veterinarian and owner of El Toro pharmacy.

Until El Norte, a regional newspaper, published an article recently that detailed how easy it was to buy pentobarbital — and how foreigners intended to use it — many store owners and clerks said they assumed the customers were using the drug to end the lives of their animals.

“We didn’t have any idea what they were doing,” said a sales clerk at a pet shop called California. “It’s for animals. Everything here is for animals. We thought they were giving it to their animals.”

It turns out that they were buying it for human consumption. Mr. Nitschke estimates that 300 members of his group, most of them from Australia but some from the United States and Europe, have bought the drug in Mexico in recent years. Some save it for when their health fails to the point that they no longer wish to live. In a few instances, buyers took the drug while in Mexico.

“To witness it, it looks as peaceful as can be,” Mr. Nitschke said of death by pentobarbital. “I usually recommend that they take it with their favorite drink since it has a bitter taste. I’ve never seen anyone finish their whiskey or Champagne. There isn’t enough time to give a speech. You go to sleep and then you die.”

But now that word is out that the drug is being used for human consumption, local authorities are seeking to clamp down on unauthorized purchases. Shops are now supposed to sell the drug only to licensed veterinarians who present a prescription.

Don Flounders, 78, has mesothelioma, a rare and deadly form of cancer usually linked to asbestos exposure. He had no problem getting pentobarbital when he traveled from Australia to Los Angeles in January and then crossed the border to Tijuana.

“I went into the first shop that was advertised as being a vet, and I showed the photo and they handed it over,” he said in a telephone interview from Australia. Getting it home was more of a challenge. It is illegal to bring pentobarbital into the United States, and Exit International says United States customs officers have seized the drug from at least three of its members. The group says no members have been caught with the drug by Australian customs officers.

But once he was home, Mr. Flounders, who advocates for euthanasia, talked to a television news crew about his purchase. He was filmed taking a bottle to a friend, Angie Belecciu, 56, who is dying of cancer and who helped to finance his trip to Mexico.

Both of their houses were later searched by the Australian Federal Police. Assisted suicide is illegal in Australia.

“It was an affront,” Mr. Flounders said of the raid. “I’m 78, and my wife is 85. I’ve got this incurable disease, and when four very big policemen came marching up the front steps it was very disconcerting.”

Neither Mr. Flounders nor Ms. Belecciu has used the pentobarbital, and charges have not been filed against either of them.

Another Australian who bought the drug in Mexico, Caren Jenning, was convicted in June of accessory to manslaughter because a friend, Graeme Wylie, who had advanced Alzheimer’s disease and had long expressed a desire to end his life, used it to commit suicide two years ago.

Also convicted of manslaughter in the case was Shirley Justins, Mr. Wylie’s partner, who opened a bottle of Nembutal purchased by Ms. Jenning and told him that if he took it he would die.

“The whole issue was whether this man had the mental capacity at the time he took the drug to end his life,” said Sam Macedone, Ms. Jenning’s lawyer. The court was apparently swayed by the prosecution’s argument that Mr. Wylie had such severe dementia that he was unable to make an informed decision to take his life.

Ms. Jenning has cancer, Mr. Macedone said. She faces up to 25 years in prison but probably has less than a year to live, he said. If he lodges an appeal, Mr. Macedone said, it will probably not be resolved until after her death.

He said it was terribly sad “that we put someone like this through all that when all she did was help a friend get where he wanted to go.”

Assisted suicide has emerged as an issue in Mexico, where the Senate voted in April to allow doctors to withdraw life-sustaining medicines from some patients but not to actively take steps to cause death. Euthanasia is also strongly opposed by the Catholic Church.

“It’s awful to me,” Mr. Velazquez, the Tijuana veterinarian and pharmacy owner, said of euthanasia. “I think people should live as long as God decides.”

All the publicity over the unauthorized use of pentobarbital has made it somewhat harder to find along Mexico’s northern border. “Oh, no, we don’t have that,” said a clerk at El Grano de Oro, the answer given by workers approached at six veterinary shops in Tijuana’s tourist zone on a recent afternoon.

At the seventh shop, however, just a few blocks off Avenida Revolución, the clerk said the drug was in stock. She reached up to a shelf behind her and pulled down a box of Sedalphorte, one of the brands Mr. Nitschke recommends. The package bore photos of a dog and a cat and said in bold letters that it could be sold only with a prescription.

Asked if she would sell it, the clerk gave a confused look. “Of course,” she said, ringing up a bottle for $45.

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This is probably more "drugs in the news" forum material

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It is fucked up that people don't have a right to end their own lives when they choose. Its a shame this has had enough publicity that they are cracking down on it now, all these people want is a peaceful death for fucks sake.

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OP if you would like to talk about the TJ drug scene there is a thread in DC titled "foreign drug scenes". You can chat about it there. (please stick to the BLUA and forum guidelines though)

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