The Real Cause Of America's Opioid Epidemic

The Opioid epidemic is spreading across the heartland of America. The number of drug overdose deaths from both prescription (e.g., Oxycontin) and black market (e.g., heroin) opiates exceeded 30,000 in 2015. Initial estimates for 2016 indicate yet another new record of deaths. It is such an enormous problem that I taught a special class on it at our undergraduate instructional conference, Mises University, which you can listen to here.

Recently the Commission on Combating the Opioid Crisis issued a preliminary report and recommended that the president declare a national emergency.

From 2002 to 2015 the number of such deaths has increased by 280%. The chart below shows that prescription opiates were the main contributor from 2002 to 2011. Illicit opiates have been the main contributor since:

It is vitally important that we understand what is causing this epidemic and even more important, how do we solve it. Plus, we need to avoid becoming a victim of it. In the past, most people ignored the issue of drug overdoses as merely an urban “junkie” problem, but this epidemic is hitting ordinary Americans such as coal miners, teachers, and high school football players.

The Washington Post asserted that the problem arose because of “aggressive marketing” on the part of the pharmaceutical companies that sell opiate painkillers. Others on the left think it is an arbitrary explosion of demand. They make it sound like market failure, but the “aggressive marketing” was not slick TV commercials. Rather, the drug companies targeted doctors, not consumers. They provided many lucrative carrots to doctors and spent resources lobbying to change regulations and pain prescribing guidelines in order to rig the FDA/AMA system in their favor.

In terms of solutions, leftists advocate spending lots of more money on just about everything they can think of, especially drug addiction treatment programs, but such programs are both extremely expensive and ineffective.

Conservatives tend to think of the cause of the epidemic in terms of the evil Mexicans and Chinese, along with street dealers and drug gangs. The Trump administration thinks that building the Mexican wall will help. They have also advocated for policies that have been demonstrated to be failures, such as expanding minimum mandatory prison sentences and asset forfeiture programs. They think expanding the D.A.R.E. program will help solve the problem, but several government-sponsored reports have discredited the effectiveness of the Drug Awareness Resistance Education program.

The real cause of this epidemic is various government policies and the real solution is the dismantling of those same policies, in perpetuum.

The Four Causes

Let us start with drug prohibition which dates back to the Harrison Narcotic Act of 1914. Drug prohibition results in a black market where illegal products are not commercially produced and where suppliers are not constrained by the rule of law and product liability law. The result is that illegal drugs are more dangerous than legal drugs. Potency varies greatly from batch to batch and products often contain dangerous impurities and substitute ingredients. Opiate overdoses often occur when an addict is unaware that a particular dose is highly potent or contains Fentanyl, a pain medication that is 50 to a 1,000 times more potent than morphine.

The next cause is called the Iron Law of Prohibition, a phrase first used by Richard Cowan to describe the phenomenon that when drug law enforcement becomes more powerful, the potency of illegal drugs increases. One of the effects of enhancing prohibition enforcement is that suppliers will produce a higher potency drug. For example, during alcohol prohibition in the 1920s suppliers switched from producing beer and wine to highly potent spirits, such as gin and whiskey.

A second result of more rigorous prohibition enforcement is that suppliers will switch from lower potency drug types to higher potency drug types. For example, during Ronald Reagan’s “war on drugs” during the 1980s, smugglers switched from bulky marijuana to highly concentrated cocaine and domestic suppliers turned much of this cocaine into crack cocaine, resulting in the crack cocaine epidemic. The Iron Law of Prohibition explains why we see more and more dangerous drugs on the black market and why we see decreases in overdoses in states that have legalized cannabis.

Government intervention in the economy is a largely unrecognized cause of addiction. Intervention has at least two distinct channels of creating addicts. The first is war. War creates addicts through both painful physical injuries and painful emotional and psychological disorders, such as Post Traumatic Stress Disorders. The second cause is the general impact of widespread government intervention in the economy. Much of government interventionism results in the creation of privileges and monopoly power. For example, licensing requirements provide members of a profession, such as medical doctors, with monopoly profits by restricting the number of practicing physicians. This enriches licensed doctors and impoverishes potential doctors who must find work in another profession. These excess potential doctors thereby suppress wages in other labor markets. Given the pervasiveness of government intervention, this creates two classes in labor markets — the advantaged and the disadvantaged and addiction tends to develop in disadvantaged labor markets where people are more likely to be despondent and lack hope and economic resources.

The three above causes have been around for a long time creating the environment for drug overdoses, but at much lower levels than we see today.

The final cause has only been around for a couple of decades, but it is now responsible for the majority of deaths. Alluded to above, Big Pharma undertook “aggressive marketing” in order to encourage doctors to write massive numbers of prescriptions for opiate painkillers and to change to pain prescribing guidelines in order to sell more of these heroin-like pills.

As a result, doctors began prescribing drugs such as Oxycontin and Vicodin, which are similar to opiates, such as morphine and heroin, for ordinary injuries and minor surgeries. The problem with this is that if you take these pills for 30 or 60 days, there is a distinct possibility that you will become physically addicted to them. The doctor is not going to write you refills for the prescription once the injury has healed.

This leaves the addict with three bad choices.

One, you can enter a drug addiction rehabilitation program, but these programs are expensive and are not necessarily effective.

Two, you can go cold turkey. However, detoxification comes with a slew of physical and psychological symptoms and can result in suicide and death.

Three, you can go into the black market and buy illegal Oxycontin and Vicodin pills. The problem with this option is that such pills are expensive and have an unstable supply. What happens if you choose this option, but run low on money or have trouble acquiring the pills? Well, very often the drug dealer who sold you the pills can also sell you heroin or tell you where to buy it. Heroin is often cheaper per dose and has a more stable supply. This is how people who would never even consider entering a room in which heroin was present become heroin addicts. This process is what has caused the major surge in drug overdoses.

The solution to the epidemic is to legalize drugs. Doctors should be able to put their patients on drug maintenance and recovery programs. Commercially produced opiates would be pure and relatively safe. Addicts could go about their lives, attempting to recover physically, psychologically, socially, and economically without having to worry about how to obtain and pay for their drugs. Drug addiction is often a multi-faceted problem that simply cannot be fixed with a 30 day rehab experience. Addicts that are successfully detoxed, but without solving more basic problems, often relapse and die because the dose they take is now too strong for their detoxed body.

Legalizing cannabis would also be a key to solving the epidemic. Legal cannabis improves the epidemic through two channels. First, medical formulations of cannabis can be a potent, but non-addictive pain killer. Therefore, legalization leads to a reduced level of opiate use, abuse, and mortality and there are several peer-reviewed studies that confirm this. Second, because cannabis reduces pain and anxiety, and improves sleep and appetite it is very helpful for those who are trying to beat their heroin addiction.

The Opioid epidemic is killing more than 30,000 Americans a year. For most experts, the epidemic is a mystery with regard to its cause and solution. A little progress has been made, but to really eliminate the problem we need to legalize drugs, reduce the size of government, and increase freedom in our lives. We also need to find an answer for the pain epidemic which has shackled too many Americans to Big Pharma and the medical belief that every symptom requires another prescription!

14-Year Veteran Undercover Cop Exposes Truth About The Drug War: "I Used To Believe I Was Doing Good"

Authored by Carey Wedler via TheAntiMedia.org,

Yet another police officer is speaking out against the drug war, this time in the United Kingdom. Former officer Neil Woods worked as an undercover drug cop for 14 years, infiltrating some of the most violent gangs in Britain only to learn his tactics were worsening the drug epidemic. Now, he advocates ending the drug war and decriminalizing drugs as he admits his own role in fueling violence and the proliferation of narcotics.

Woods recently spoke with the Independent to make his case and recount the struggles he faced enforcing the British government’s drug war. He was first enlisted by the Home Office to tackle the crack cocaine epidemic in the early 1990s, an effort that apparently ‘pleased the crown.’

Woods says the tactics he helped develop only exacerbated drug-related crime.

“The first place I was posted was in Derby and it wasn’t actually that difficult,” he says. “There were some proper gangsters selling crack and heroin but they weren’t used to the tactic, so although it was a bit scary it wasn’t tremendously difficult because they weren’t expecting it.”

By bringing in new police tactics, however, the dynamics started to change because, as he says, “the thing the about undercover work is that it doesn’t take long for criminals to learn the tactics.”

Woods recounted several close-call experiences, including one where he was forced to consume amphetamines to prove his credibility. In another, a dealer could sense Woods was a cop and repeatedly pressed him on it before he used intimidation tactics to neutralize the situation.  Though he escaped unscathed, he often put his life on the line only to find his work was futile.

“The ultimate defence against the development of police tactics is an increased use of violence to intimidate the community in which undercover police officers move,” he explained, describing the effects of government efforts to curb drug use.

As the drug war raged on, drug gangs became even more extreme, and Woods began to realize he wasn’t helping.

“I knew that I couldn’t win early on,” he told the Independent. “But I kept being tempted back into it because I was good at my job. The police departments would say ‘Woodsy, we need you. These gangsters are even nastier that the other ones. They’re burning people to death. They’re using rape as a weapon.”

Ultimately, however, he accepted his inability to make a difference as a cop.

“[I]t was because of me that organised crime was getting nasty. I was developing the tactics. I put dealers in prison for over 1000 years and I only disrupted the heroin supply for two hours. Policing can’t affect the demand so policing drugs is completely futile. I can’t emphasise that enough. More people die and it gets more violent. Drugs have got stronger and cheaper and more varied since the Misuse of Drugs Act 1971.”

He also described his experience getting to know drug addicts as he worked undercover. Asked what the biggest misconception about them is, he explained:

“When I went into policing I thought addicts had made the mistake of trying drugs and had no willpower to stop. Actually, problematic drug users – or at least all the ones I knew – were self medicating. Most of the heroin users I knew were self-medicating for childhood trauma, whether physical or sexual. As an undercover officer I spent a great deal of time getting to know these people. The more I knew someone the more I could manipulate them. They’re like puppets. And they trusted me and saw me as a peer.”

Describing one female victim of childhood sexual abuse, he explained, “To the law, she’s a criminal to the law and I as an agent of the state was there to capture people like that. But they were caught in the crossfire between the police and gangs.”

Though Woods doesn’t advocate a “free for all” on drugs, he does believe the war on them must end. “The answer is to regulate drugs and take the power away from organised crime,” he argues. “The illicit drugs market is worth £7billion a year. Our communities are ruined by organised crime intimidating populations to protect themselves so we need to regulate the drug supply like we do with alcohol.”

He cites Switzerland’s establishment of controlled heroin injection centers in the 1990s as an example, an approach recently adopted in Canada, as well. He also cites Portugal, which has had great success with his policy of decriminalization.

Woods seeks to live by his principles to undo the damage he helped inflict on drug-riddled communities by speaking out against past failed policies.

Woods launched the U.K. version of  Law Enforcement Against Prohibition (LEAP), an organization of officers who advocate against the war on drugs. There is also an American LEAP that works toward the same goal.

“…I used to risk my life doing the work because I used to believe I was doing good,” he says.

“Now I realise everything I did only caused harm. Now, I feel duty bound to continue taking risks because it’s a matter of principle.”

The Auto Industry Is About To Drive Off A Cliff, Again

Submitted by Gordon T. Long of MATASII

SELF INFLICTED ABUSE

In the fall of 2015 we released a video study entitled: "The Coming Global Auto Abyss - Too Much Supply, Too Many Brands; Combine with Too Much Credit!".  We concluded that low interest rate monetary policy for the auto industry was like handing crack cocaine to a drug addict. The auto industry would rapidly and irresponsibly abuse it, to such an extent that it would once again "spin out" and careen back to what can only be termed the Washington "substance abuse center". Whether mis-management or clever strategy we are unfortunately being proven right and are now witnessing the reality.

The Washington Keynesian planners mistakenly believe that cheap money still stimulates demand. It historically did this before it became a legally addicting substance, but even its original tenet was essentially based on bringing demand forward. By design this creates a demand hole in the future, but as Keynes himself famously rationalized: "in the long term we are all dead" ... so not to worry when the economic need is urgent! Setting aside for a moment this critical structural reality, we need to remember that cheap credit additionally fosters structural ramifications seldom elucidated:

• EXCESS SUPPLY: Cheap and readily available credit creates excess supply as manufacturer have their capital costs reduced allowing them to competitively pursue market share in the wanton beliefs they can gain competitive advantage due to increased volumes, buyer financing, supply chain leverage, aggressive advertising etc.,


• INDUSTRY CULTURE: Sustained periods of cheap credit unintentionally changes buying behavior patterns, expectations and financing structures of industries.

FORD INADVERTENTLY SIGNALS THE REALITY

During Ford Motor company"s latest earnings call, while defensively attempting to justify a massive 50% shortfall in earnings (falling to $0.30-0.35 from $0.68 in Q1 2016 and versus expectations of $0.48), they disclosed that sales volumes are now expected to fall off this year and next with used car prices dropping for several years!

How could this be with US industry sales at historic levels approaching 18M units per year and no one anywhere with any credibility, even remotely suggesting  that a US recession was imminent?  The answer is that "hole" we referred to above has arrived but it is a much worse chasm because of the industry financing options that have been foisted on the unsuspecting, tapped out US buyers since the "cash-for-clunkers" slight of hand.

The industry has created a minimally two year hole in the market that will flood used and new auto supply inventories while buyers are effectively locked out!

This is not how a well managed industry strategically and responsibly plans, unless of course the game is actually government regulatory arbitrage (think: "Cash-for-Safety" to justify new expensive regulatory features)?

HOW IT WAS ORCHESTRATED - GIVE BUYERS ONLY TWO CHOICES

Auto Leasing has exploded since 2015 and now approaches 35% of all sales. The Lease terms are normally 2-3 years with questionable residuals being used to achieve low lease rates on highly priced units. We have now entered the period where those initially leased units are being returned - in massive. Meanwhile, those Buying versus Leasing have been financing over much longer terms. Ford detailed this with the following charts for their units sold.

THE FORD MOTOR EARNINGS PRESENTATION

Vehicles prices since 2008 are dramatically higher. A $28,000 vehicle in 2008 is now $50-$55,000 and loaded down with new standard equipment features such as backup cameras, WIFI, Seat Warmers etc to justify the higher prices. Prices that can only be sold via cheap credit financing terms.  It was to be an expected marketing strategy to drive profits higher while money was cheap.

As a result:

1. Vehicle Purchases were financed out over periods that bordered on the useful life of the vehicle (based on non- warranted maintenance costs),


2. Vehicles were increasingly leased on 2-3 year leases with high residual values and mileage limitations.

The government wanted it, the central bankers wanted it and the industry wanted it. To achieve this it meant a sustained period of cheap money and creative financing. But it comes with a price tag that must soon be paid!   All of this is now hitting as Ford inadvertently warned!

THE COMING CHASM IN AUTO DEMAND IS "BAKED-IN"

CONSIDER THE FOLLOWING 7 INDUSTRY FACTS

1. HISTORIC SALES LEVELS: Motor vehicle sales have boomed in the years since the Great Recession.

• 2016: U.S. sales of new cars and trucks hit a record annual high of 17.55 million units.


• 2017: J.D.POWER / LMC AUTOMOTIVE: Industry consultants J.D. Power and LMC Automotive reiterated their forecast for a 0.2 percent increase in sales in 2017 to 17.6 million vehicles.


• 2017: MOODYS: Moody"s on the other hand says it expects U.S. new vehicle sales to decline slightly to 17.4 million units in 2017.


• 2017: EDMUNDS: For the full year, Edmund says sales appear to be falling short of last year’s record of 17.55 million vehicles. Edmunds is looking for a 2017 total of 17.2 million vehicles amid softer consumer demand for both cars and utilities as the year progresses.

2. PEAK AUTO SALES: Moody"s Investors Service said in a report  that U.S. auto sales have peaked, competition to finance car loans is set to intensify and drive increased credit risk for auto lenders.

3. TRADE-IN TREADMILL:  Typically, car dealers tack on an amount equal to the negative equity to a loan for the consumers" next vehicle. To keep the monthly payments stable, the new credit is for a greater length of time. Over the course of multiple trade-ins, negative equity accumulates.

• LENDERS = >TERMS: Lenders have supported automotive credit growth with "accommodative financing," including longer loan terms, Lenders could further lower annual percentage rates and keep extending loan terms, though the latter would increase their credit risk.


• MANUFACTURERS=>INCENTIVES: To ease consumers" monthly payments, auto manufacturers are subsidizing lenders or increasing incentives to reduce purchase prices, though either action would reduce their profits.

4. LENDING CREDIT RISK: "The combination of plateauing auto sales, growing negative equity from consumers and lenders" willingness to offer flexible loan terms is a significant credit risk for lenders," Jason Grohotolski, a senior credit officer at Moody"s recently told Reuters.  In the first nine months of 2016, around 32 percent of U.S. vehicle trade-ins carried outstanding loans larger than the worth of the cars, a record high, according to the specialized auto website Edmunds, as cited by Moody"s.

5. INCENTIVES
• Incentives currently average 10.4% of a new-vehicle’s MSRP, which is the highest percentage since March 2009 when rebates averaged 11.3% during the Great Recession.
• SUVs and pickup trucks—with a combined market share of 61.5%—still dominate the sales mix in a market that is bolstered by rich incentives averaging $3,768 per vehicle, according to a March sales update from J.D. Power and auto forecasting partner LMC Automotive.

6. USED CAR PRICES

• A decline in used-car prices is a bad sign for dealerships, which typically see better returns on used vehicles versus new ones.


• Limited supplies have driven up prices in recent years, but analysts have warned that used vehicles would increase in number as leased vehicles are returned to dealer lots.


• Since 2015, consumers looking for lower monthly payments have leased new vehicles at a record pace. Many of those cars, trucks and SUVs that were leased at the start of the recent U.S. sales boom are now reaching the end of their terms.


• Ally, the former finance arm of General Motors (GM), noted in a recent presentation that full-year earnings growth would fall short of expectations, citing the anticipated price drop for used cars.  “We’ve seen a pretty dramatic move in 2016,” said Ally CFO Chris Halmy, adding that the downward trend is expected to continue.


• The used-vehicle price index from the National Automobile Dealers Association posted a 3.8% decline in February compared to the prior month. NADA also said wholesale prices fell 1.6%.


• In the first quarter of 2017, Ally saw used-car values retreat 7%, a steeper move compared to the company’s projection for a 5% drop in 2017.


• Falling used-car prices are a troubling trend for manufacturers, dealers and financial services firms, including Ally and in-house lenders such as Ford (F) Credit. Some bargain hunters will be swayed by affordable used cars, thus reducing demand for new models. When sales begin to slow, automakers often ramp up discounts to attract buyers, a strategy that cuts into profits.


• Incentive spending in March rose 13.5% month-to-month, hitting $3,443 per vehicle, based on data from ALG, TrueCar’s (TRUE) research division. Those gains were slightly offset by an increase in transaction prices.

7. INVENTORIES

Car Inventories Swelled to 13-Year High - highest level since 2004, a potentially troubling sign for automakers.

In February, new vehicles waited in dealer inventory for an average of 74 days before a sale, the most “days to turn” since the government’s Cash for Clunkers program in 2009.

Passenger cars accounted for roughly 38% of all new vehicles sold during the first two months of the year, reflecting a sharp decline.  Sedans have fallen out of favor with many consumers enticed by roomy and fuel-efficient crossovers. Although manufacturers have cut production of some small cars, supplies remain at elevated levels.

Caldwell noted Banks are stretching out loans to make payments more affordable for buyers, extending loan terms as high as 84 months.

The average loan term in February marked an all-time high at 69.1 months, beating the previous record set in September 2016, based on Edmunds data.

For the full year, sales appear to be falling short of last year’s record of 17.55 million vehicles. Edmunds is looking for a 2017 total of 17.2 million vehicles amid softer consumer demand for both cars and utilities as the year progresses.

WHAT WILL WE DO WITH THIS INVENTORY?

There are now approximately 265 million light vehicles registered in the US today compared to 255 million driving age people, or just over 1 car eligible driver. How many cars can we absorb, especially since useful age of vehicles has been increasing by one year every 6.7 years over the last 20 years.

We have a massive problem looming and the auto industry knows it. We are fully expecting broad based problems to emerge over the next 18 months in multiple areas of the auto industry:

1. The US Dealership Network,


2. Auto Manufacturers,


3. Lenders & Financiers,


4. Securitization (ABS, CLO, Synthetics etc) Investors

This is all as predictable as a drunken sailor on shore leave.  We knew cheap money would be too much for auto executives to refuse and oversupply was a sure bet! So will be the industry"s return to the Washington "substance abuse center".  Expect the industry to be back at the government feeding trough asking for help.

Cops are now manufacturing and selling people crack

How can a drug war be won when the police are manufacturing crack?

A reverse buy bust appears to be in the works for the Albuquerque Police Department, but the details of how they plan to go about catching low-level drug users — by becoming crack cocaine manufacturers — signifies everything inherently corrupt about the U.S.’ war on drugs.

Burque Media exclusively revealed APD’s intentions to become temporary crack manufacturers, after a confidential source shared the affidavit about the impending bust.

“Powdered cocaine may be taken into APD’s Criminalistics Unit to be made into crack cocaine,” reads the Affidavit and Motion to Release Evidence, dated February 25, 2016, and signed by a District Court Judge. In addition to the police-manufactured crack, APD is also permitted to use methamphetamine, cocaine, and heroin from its cataloged evidence stores to become drug dealers in order to catch individuals who use those illegal substances.

“Once the transaction is completed,” the document continues, “the individual purchasing the drugs will be arrested and charged with Felony Possession of a Controlled Substance. The detectives will attempt to immediately retrieve the drugs sold.”While high-level, volume-transporting, and sometimes violent drug dealers — created by the illegality of such substances in the State’s failed drug war — won’t be the target of this bust, small-time users will be entrapped by police con-artists and have their lives upended with serious charges. Police, in such a dual operation, become perpetrators of the very problem they claim to be combating — to catch individuals whose only harm is to their own person.

According to Burque Media’s source, police initiated the reverse sting operation, which will run through the end of 2016, pursuant to complaints from area businesses and residents.

“The business[es], residents, and patrons have complained about drug dealing throughout the City of Albuquerque,” claims the affidavit. “Citizens have contacted Detectives complaining about being asked, by people walking/driving through the City of Albuquerque, if they wanted to purchase drugs.”

As the anonymous source noted, APD’s bust likely targets the city’s most precariously situated and vulnerable residents: homeless drug addicts.

“Law enforcement has tried many methods and has been unable to effectively stop the supply of drugs to the street dealers and users in these areas,” the document states. “These methods include but are not limited too [sic] successfully purchasing drugs from drug dealers in the area […]

“It is believed that taking enforcement action against the purchasers of drugs in these areas, if well known, would reduce the demand for drugs in the City of Albuquerque.”

Obviously, Albuquerque isn’t looking to Portugal, where all drugs have been decriminalized to enormous success — including across-the-board drops in both usage and addiction rates — for a model to combat, ironically, issues stemming from America’s drug war. When an open and legal market exists for those who choose to use, and includes ease of obtaining help from treatment centers when necessary, residents and businesses wouldn’t be pestered by addicts on the street.

In fact, APD’s plans are troubling, even for insiders.

“This is a practice I have frowned upon because of the use of seized drugs already tagged into evidence, and I have not seen it for some time,” explained Pete Dinelli, former Chief Deputy District Attorney and former Chief Public Safety Officer, who doubted the veracity of the APD’s plans until the affidavit was filed in court. “It’s downright dangerous to be using drugs seized in other drug busts because of chain-of-custody issues and the risk associated with not being able to track what happens. The city could also be exposed to liability for using tainted drugs that they lose track of.”

Dinelli’s concerns may be justified. As if supplementing the use of logged drug evidence with police-made crack weren’t bad enough, the affidavit points to awareness the APD likely will lose some of its product over the course of the sting.

“Any drugs not used in this operation will be returned to the Albuquerque Police Department’s Evidence Unit,” the document concludes.

As Dinelli summarized of the whole operation, “This is a very poor law enforcement practice.”

When even the cops are manufacturing crack, you know the war on drugs is nothing short of a farce.

Via Free Thought Project

Featured Image: West Midlands Police/Flickr

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The CIA, Washington Post, And Russia: What You're Not Being Told

Submitted by Carey Wedler via TheAntiMedia.org,

According to an unsubstantiated article by the Washington Post, anonymous CIA officials have confirmed that the Russian government hacked the United States election to favor Donald Trump. Though it’s entirely possible the Russian government attempted to influence the election, the Post has been widely criticized — for the second time in a month — for its failure to follow basic journalistic practices. Nevertheless, the narrative is sticking.

But the outlet’s behind-the-scenes relationship with the CIA is nothing new. In 2013, a conflict of interest arose shortly after Jeff Bezos, founder and CEO of Amazon, purchased the newspaper. As the Nation reported at the time:

“[Jeff Bezos] recently secured a $600 million contract from the CIA. That’s at least twice what Bezos paid for the Post this year. Bezos recently disclosed that the company’s Web-services business is building a ‘private cloud’ for the CIA to use for its data needs.”

As this occurred, a petition calling on the Washington Post to disclose its new ties to the CIA when reporting on the agency garnered 30,000 signatures. According to the RootsforAction petition:

“The Post often does reporting on CIA activities. The coverage should include full disclosure that the owner of the Washington Post is also the main owner of Amazon — and Amazon is now gaining huge profits directly from the CIA.”

Robert McChesney of the Institute for Public Accuracy pointed out the glaring conflict of interest:

“If some official enemy of the United States had a comparable situation—say the owner of the dominant newspaper in Caracas was getting $600 million in secretive contracts from the Maduro government—the Post itself would lead the howling chorus impaling that newspaper and that government for making a mockery of a free press. It is time for the Post to take a dose of its own medicine.”

In its most recent article on the CIA’s claims of a Russian hack, the Post made no mention of its ties to the CIA. But while this connection calls into serious question the validity of a newspaper that claims to be a purveyor of “great journalism,” the connections are not enough to prove nefarious collaboration.

Unfortunately, however, history reveals actual collusion between the CIA and news outlets, including the Washington Post.

In 1977, Carl Bernstein, a former Post journalist, wrote about the CIA’s efforts to infiltrate the news media, often with the assistance of top management at the papers. In total, Bernstein reported, over 400 journalists were involved:

“Journalists provided a full range of clandestine services—from simple intelligence gathering to serving as go?betweens with spies in Communist countries. Reporters shared their notebooks with the CIA. Editors shared their staffs. Some of the journalists were Pulitzer Prize winners, distinguished reporters who considered themselves ambassadors without?portfolio for their country…In many instances, CIA documents show, journalists were engaged to perform tasks for the CIA with the consent of the managements of America’s leading news organizations.”

Though Bernstein failed to name the Post as an offender in his article, according to Tim Weiner, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, the CIA worked directly with the Washington Post, among many other outlets. In his comprehensive history of the CIA, Legacy of Ashes, Weiner wrote of the CIA’s first official chief, Allen Dulles:

“Dulles kept in close touch with the men who ran the New York Times, The Washington Post, and the nation’s leading weekly magazines. He could pick up the phone and edit a breaking story, make sure an irritating foreign correspondent was yanked from the field, or hire the services of men such as Time’s Berlin bureau chief and Newsweek’s man in Tokyo.”

He continued:

“It was second nature for Dulles to plant stories in the press. American newsrooms were dominated by veterans of the government’s wartime propaganda branch, the Office of War Information.”

Dulles’ tenure lasted throughout the 1950s, and in 1954, for example, papers like the Washington Post and the New York Times promoted the narrative that Guatemala’s democratically-elected leader had ties to the Soviet Union and needed to be dealt with accordingly. The American news media helped create public support for a coup covertly backed by the CIA (interestingly, the Times also recently came out with an anonymously-sourced article claiming the CIA has determined Russia hacked the election). At the time, Frank Wisner, chair of the CIA’s Directorate of Plans — and whom Bernstein named as a key operator in the CIA’s relationship with news outlets — directly praised the Post’s piece.

Given this historical relationship, it’s no surprise that the Post and CIA have worked together in more recent decades.

In the 1990s, then-CIA Director Bill Casey appointed a man named Max Hugel as chief of the clandestine service, a small department within the CIA. But some agents disagreed with the appointment. Weiner explained:

“They dug up dirt on him, fed it to the Washington Post, and forced him out in less than two months.”

Whether or not the Post knew it was being used as a tool of intrigue by agents within the CIA is of little consequence. At best, they acted as “useful idiots” for schemers within the agency; at best, they knowingly aided the internal machinations of a spy agency.

The Post again served as a platform for warring factions within the CIA during the Bush years, when agents rebelled against Porter Goss, the director who replaced George Tenet after he resigned. Goss had vowed to repair the agency’s broken reputation but angered other agents with his seemingly radical approach. According to Weiner, agents took to the Los Angeles Times to criticize Goss (the Los Angeles Times recently faced backlash after one of its journalists was caught sharing stories with CIA agents before publication). The agents also took to the Washington Post to smear Goss:

“John McLaughin, who had held the agency together as acting director after Tenet’s resignation, delivered another riposte. The CIA was not ‘a dysfunctional and rogue agency,’ he wrote in the Washington Post. ‘The CIA was not institutionally plotting against the president.’”

Weiner notes that “in all the years that the agency had been battered in the press, never had the director been attacked in print, on the record, by the most senior veterans of American intelligence.”

The CIA also used its power in the media to silence a story published in the 1990s regarding the agency’s potential involvement in drug trafficking and the emergence of crack cocaine in black communities. Journalist Gary Webb had written an explosive investigative piece linking the agency to Contra fighters and the domestic drug market. Though the piece had shortcomings and reported on some already known information, as Peter Kornbluh of the Columbia Journalism Review noted, it was able to “revisit a significant story that had been inexplicably abandoned by the mainstream press, report a new dimension to it, and thus put it back on the national agenda where it belong[ed].”

Six weeks after the story broke, the CIA’s PR machine struck back. The Intercept notes the “CIA watched these developments closely, collaborating where it could with outlets who wanted to challenge Webb’s reporting.”

The Intercept summarized the account of Nicholas Dujmovic, who was a staffer at the CIA Directorate of Intelligence at the time:

“The agency supplied the press, ‘as well as former Agency officials, who were themselves representing the Agency in interviews with the media,’ with ‘these more balanced stories,’ Dujmovic wrote. The Washington Post proved particularly useful. ‘Because of the Post‘s national reputation, its articles especially were picked up by other papers, helping to create what the Associated Press called a “firestorm of reaction” against the San Jose Mercury News.’ Over the month that followed, critical media coverage of the series (‘balanced reporting’) far outnumbered supportive stories, a trend the CIA credited to the Post, The New York Times, ‘and especially the Los Angeles Times.’”

Given the CIA’s history of using media to accomplish both internal and external political goals, it’s possible — though admittedly wholly unconfirmed — this Post piece on Russia serves as yet another example of the clandestine agency using the paper as a tool to achieve its own ends.

Regardless, the Post continues to treat anonymous statements from the agency as fact, leading the way as countless other mainstream outlets parrot their narrative. Though it’s possible Russia did attempt to intervene in the U.S. election, there is little reason to trust information from an outlet with a history of collaborating with the agency spreading these claims.

Should any actual evidence of Russian hacking be produced, however, it’s likely the Post will be among the first to let us know.