The Strength of the Pack

The Strength of the Pack documents previously unknown aspects of the history of federal drug law enforcement, from the formation of the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs in 1968 through the early years of the Drug Enforcement Administration. Picking up where The Strength of the Wolf left off, the book shows how successive administrations expanded federal drug law enforcement operations under the pervasive but hidden influence of the CIA. The “wolf pack” is a metaphor for the multitude of agencies and their offshoots that comprise the labyrinth system currently waging the eternal war on drugs. Once upon a time, the “lone wolf” federal narcotics agent, last of the noir detectives, hard-boiled and streetwise, stalked his prey: vicious Mafia drug dealers and their international connections. But the rise of the American Superpower and the opium-infused Vietnam War saw the lone wolf replaced by a dehumanized bureaucratic system more suitable to empire: the wolf pack, secretly led by the CIA and designed specifically for using the war on drugs as a covert means of advancing the interests of the U.S. ruling class at home and abroad. Based largely on interviews with former federal narcotics agents and CIA officers, as well as the influential politicians and government bureaucrats they worked with, The Strength of the Pack focuses on the CIA's steady infiltration and corruption of federal drug law enforcement for the purpose of waging political and psychological warfare against the American public. Many books have focused on the public policy aspects of federal drug law enforcement, but no book to date has plumbed as deeply into the secret policies, or taken as comprehensive a view of them, as this one.