CIA Town Hall Meeting on Drugs
On Nov. 15, I attended the meeting at Locke High School in Watts, where I listened to John Deutch, the head of the CIA, say something about the drugs and guns that were being given to the gang kids (Nov. 16). I was working in South-Central Los Angeles during the 1980s when my students were telling me that the CIA was giving them the guns and drugs.
I was using CETA funds during the early 1980s to put gang kids to work and to get women off welfare. There were few gang killings until 1983, when CETA ended and the drugs started to appear. The kids did not go to Colombia to get the drugs. They did not manufacture the guns. They did not launder drug money through banks that they owned.
Whether or not the CIA gave the drugs to the gang kids is not the issue. Someone delivered the drugs and guns to my students, who traveled to other cities with their computers to set up drug selling and gangs. Nothing was done to stop those kids from organizing in nearly every state.
I wrote about what happened in my book, “Gangs and Schools,” in 1992.
The children of the Crips and Bloods, as well as the gangs called the 13s and 14s, will be the predators and killers soon. There will be 23% more teenagers going to horrible inner-city schools. The governor is building 40 more prisons for them, but no schools.
All of us are too sick to end the madness. Head for the hills.
RICHARD ARTHUR
Long Beach
* I really cannot comprehend the behavior of many of the people who attended the public forum at Locke with Deutch. Their hostility was hard to understand.
Deutch’s appearance was un- precedented. How many times in history has the director of the CIA ever attended a question-and- answer town hall meeting anywhere? His attendance was a personal act of courage and showed a willingness, going in, to listen.
Deutch sure wasn’t CIA director way back when all this drug dealing was allegedly taking place.
Who taught these people to believe that treating someone like a dog is going to make them meow like a cat?
JOHN R. JOHNSON
Calabasas
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