On the heels of recent statistics showing that illegal drug use among teens is up, Bob Dole has said that he will use the National Guard to stop the flow of drugs into the United States.

He also wants to increase aid to nations who intensify their own efforts to curtail producers and traffickers. While these might be very laudable programs, there’s something else Dole might want to try that hits a little closer to the executive branch itself. Dole’s been around Washington for quite a while, so he probably knows what I’m talking about. Someone in elected office just might—I mean it might help—want to stop the CIA from bringing drugs into the country.

An extensive three-part series, published on August 18-20 by the San Jose Mercury News, documents a CIA drug network that “opened the first pipeline between Colombia’s cocaine cartels and the black neighborhoods of Los Angeles, a city now known as the ‘crack’ capital of the world.” (The Mercury News stories and mountains of supporting documents are available on the World Wide Web at www.sjmercury.com/drugs/ —free of charge.)

During the 1980s a drug-dealing operation sold cocaine to street gangs in Los Angeles and “funneled millions in drug profits to a Latin American guerrilla army run by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency.”

The guerrilla army was known as the Contras — who were called “freedom fighters by President Reagan. Staff reporter Gary Webb embarked on a 13-month investigation. Here’s a sample of some of his conclusions:

* The CIA arranged an alliance between “a U.S.-backed army attempting to overthrow a revolutionary socialist government” in Nicaragua and drug-dealers wielding machine guns in ghetto areas of Southern California.

* Thanks to CIA activities, “the cocaine that flooded in helped spark a crack explosion in urban America —and provided the cash and connections needed for L.A.’s gangs to buy automatic weapons.”

* The Contra financiers “met with CIA agents both before and during the time they were selling the drugs in L.A.”

* Today, “thousands of young black men are serving long prison sentences for selling cocaine—a drug that was virtually unobtainable in black neighborhoods before members of the CIA’s army brought it into South-Central in 1980s at bargain-basement prices.”

On Capital Hill in the summer of 1987, congressional panels had access to Reagan administration official Oliver North, who had notebooks with references to the drug trade. In one note concerning Contra arms supplies, North wrote: “$14 million came from drugs.”

Ollie North, by the way, had critical evidence presented against him in the Senate subcommittee report on terrorism and narcotics and Independent Counsel Lawrence Walsh’s final report on Iran-Contra.

But instead of going to prison Ollie North ran for the U.S. Senate. Though he lost his senatorial bid, don’t weep a tear for Ollie.

He’s got his own radio talk show and can be seen lambasting the ethics of politicians he doesn’t like on shows like “Politically Incorrect with Bill Maher.”

Imagine if Ollie taught ethics classes at Iowa State. How could you fail? Lest you think Iran-Contra is the only example of the CIA’s complicity in drug trade, you might want to read “The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade,” by Alfred McCoy. In Laos in the early 1960s, the CIA transported opium out of the remote villages of the Meo tribes onto major markets via Air America, a CIA-operated airline.

In exchange for CIA help in drug trading, the Meo fought the Pathet Lao tribe. When the story became public, the CIA admitted knowing that the Meo were transporting opium on Air America and said they had tried to stop it. However, CIA pilots reported that they were under orders from their superiors not to interfere with the shipments.

As McCoy documented, opium production by CIA-backed warlords in Southeast Asia increased tenfold soon after the CIA moved in. Around 1947-1950, the CIA hired Sicilian and Corsican mafia to break longshoremen strikes by communist-led unions in France and Italy.

The CIA gave them money and arms. In exchange, the syndicates got a free hand in the transportation of heroin, much of which ended up in the United States according to “Against Empire,” a book by Michael Parenti.

Hopefully the CIA has improved its ways of the past and no longer helps the flow of drugs into the U.S. Many observers might say these CIA actions are examples of U.S. administrative policy in error.

Parenti has a different view. He writes, “Again it was assumed that U.S. leaders were misguided when in fact they were misguiding us…

If the war against drugs is being lost, it is because the national security state is on the side of the traffickers.”

Andrew Chebuhar is a junior in journalism mass communication from Muscatine.