Ryan Grim’s “This is Your Country on Drugs” looks at the Iran-Contra scandal and black community

I met Ryan Grim online back in 2007 when he was with Politico and have kept in touch with him over the years.  I was excited to learn about his new book that I’m hoping to get my hands sometime soon.  It’s titled This is Your Country on Drugs.  I hope to get an interview with Ryan after I read through his book, but until then, I’ll post a few of excepts that appeared at The Root.

• In the summer of 1996, the San Jose Mercury News broke the story of the connection between L.A. crack dealers and the U.S. funded Nicaraguan Contras. More than a month later, the Washington Post weighed in with a five-story, roughly 10,000-word broadside that ripped the series apart, debunking its central tenets and wondering aloud what it is about black people that makes them so paranoid.

• The Post’s editorial board explained that “the shock of the story for many was not simply the sheer monstrousness of the idea of an official agency contributing to a modern-day plague—and to a plague targeted on blacks. The shock was the credibility the story seems to have generated when it reached some parts of the black community.”But it wasn’t their fault they were so gullible, the Postassured in a separate piece, blaming a “history of victimization” that had led to “outright paranoia.”
• The Post’s longtime Central American correspondent, Douglas Farah, was in El Salvador when the story, written by the Mercury News’ Gary Webb, broke, revealing that the Contras, a confederation of paramilitary rebels sponsored by the CIA, had been funding some of their operations by importing cocaine into the United States. One of their best customers was a man named Freeway Rick—Ricky Donnell Ross—then a Southern California dealer who was running an operation that the Los Angeles Times dubbed “the Wal-Mart of crack dealing.”
• “My first thought was, ‘Holy shit!’ because there’d been so many rumors in the region of this going on,” Farah said when I interviewed him for a book on the history of drugs in America 12 years later. “There had always been these stories floating around about [the Contras and] cocaine. I knew [Contra leader] Adolfo Calero and some of the other folks there, and they were all sleazebags. You wouldn’t read the story and say, ‘Oh my god, these guys would never do that.’ It was more like, ‘Oh, one more dirty thing they were doing.’ So I took it seriously.”

Read the rest of Ryan’s Black, Paranoid and Absolutely Right at TheRoot.com