Dark Alliance: Day Three

War on Drugs Has Unequal Impact on Blacks in U.S.

By Gary Webb
Back on the Internet by Popular Demand

June 30, 2005

Read the reports:

War on drugs has unequal impact on black Americans

Flawed sentencing the main reason for race disparity

San Francisco Bay Area man tangled in drug web

Managing Editor’s Note: In his third set of reports, Webb tackles the racial aspects of his story, asking why the black community has been so disproportionately hit by the crack epidemic. He writes:

Nothing epitomizes the drug war’s uneven impact on black Americans more clearly than the intertwined lives of Ricky Donnell Ross, a high school dropout, and his suave cocaine supplier, Danilo Blandon, who has a master’s degree in marketing and was one of the top civilian leaders in California of an anti-communist guerrilla army formed by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency.

While Ross sits in prison, Blandon leads a comfortable, U.S.-subsidized life back in Nicaragua as a member of the new business class there. Blandon’s white or well-connected, contra-allied associates in both Central and North America also remain free. Webb ties this in to the widely noted disparity in sentencing between whites and blacks in U.S. courts and the general trends that have caused African Americans to bear the brunt of the war on drugs in the U.S. The Dark Alliance story had a particularly strong impact in California’s black community, in large part because of Webb’s ability to lay out such connections between oppressive U.S. foreign policy in the 1980s and the contemporary problems that community faced.

Day Three also marks the unveiling (and unleashing) of the full Dark Alliance website, complete with the additional documentation, multimedia exhibits, reader forums, and links that made it so ahead of its time.

More “Dark Alliance”:

Dark Alliance Website

Introduction: Gary Webb’s “Dark Alliance” Returns to the Internet

Short video of Gary Webb, included on the unreleased Dark Alliance CDROM (Quicktime format)

Day One: U.S. Crack Plague Has Roots in U.S.-Sponsored Nicaraguan War

Day Two: Shadowy Origins of the Crack Epidemic

For more Narco News, click here.