Published at: 01/10/2025 09:00 PM

(LIFE, May 1965)

• By May 1965, heroin use in the United States was a public health problem. Coming from the poppy fields of Central Asia, through the Middle East, Italy (Sicily) and France, drug trafficking made its appearance as a post-war organized crime phenomenon, controlled by the Sicilian Mafia, the New York Mafia and the approval of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).
• At the time of this publication, heroin was flowing rapidly through all metropolitan thoroughfares as efficiently and regularly as newspapers, bread and milk were distributed at home.
• All the major hospitals in the United States were fighting a desperate battle to treat the thousands of addicts who came voluntarily or were picked up on the streets. The landscape of zombies that still roam today, helpless, victims of drug trafficking networks, was beginning to form.
• Thanks to some areas of Central Park, it was called “The Needle Park”, in reference to the hundreds of syringes stuck in the stems of trees that addicts left stuck as a sign of their addiction. The shared use of these syringes by several consumers led, in turn, to the epidemic of hepatitis and other incurable blood-borne diseases.
• To alleviate the effects of this chaos and heroin boom, scattered through streets, squares and neighborhoods of major cities, detoxification (detox) wards were installed for the first time inside hospitals.
• To address this pandemic, in New York alone, 40 rehabilitation and detoxification centers for heroin addicts were opened, in the rest of the United States there were 20 specialized centers for drug treatment and in all hospitals there were beds reserved for this purpose.
• Thirty years earlier, in 1935, the first detoxification center for heroin addicts had opened. Indicator of the cult that this society had already been doing to the consumption of narcotic substances.
• Some specialized treatment centers even housed 1,900 volunteer patients and 500 patients from federal prisons.
• Forty years earlier, since 1925, opiates in the United States were sold without any restrictions under the formula of certain analgesics known as laudanum or sedatives for coughs, such as Codeine and Codelase.
• In another “Needle Square”, Sherman Square, an addict spent $30 a day to satisfy his addiction. The “dealer” or microtrafficker bought an ounce of 32 grams of pure heroin for $750 and converted it, mixing it, into 50 doses, making a profit of $2,500.
• However, behind the emergency in hospitals and the human misery in the streets or squares where the derivative of “the poppy” is purchased, there is a pact of mutual coexistence and non-aggression between the mafias that control New York's ports and airports, the CIA and the FBI and the Sicilian Mafia, dating back to the time of World War II.
• Through this well-documented “code of silence”, known as “Omerta” or “Il Sasso in Bocca”, in Spanish “The Stone in the Mouth”, the capos helped the United States with information and logistics in landing troops in Italy and capturing German submarines. In exchange, Sicilian, New York and port mafias began carrying out smuggling and drug trafficking operations in combination with the American secret services.

Mazo News Team