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https://books.google.com/books?id=tJS-necJnWgC&printsec=frontcover&dq=cuba+drug+trafficking&hl=en&newbks=1&newbks_redir=0&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwi_7cH72MXnAhVW7J4KHbVcCoYQ6AEwEHoECBQQAg#v=onepage&q=cuba%20drug%20trafficking&f=false
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Doctors had been wary of opioids, fearing patients would get hooked. Reassured by the letter, which called this “rare” in those with no history of addiction, they pulled out their prescription pads and spread the good news in their own published reports.
And that is how a one-paragraph letter with no supporting information helped seed a nationwide epidemic of misuse of drugs like Vicodin and OxyContin by convincing doctors that opioids were safer than we now know them to be. On Wednesday, the journal published an editor’s note about the 1980 letter and an analysis from Canadian researchers of how often it has been cited — more than 600 times, often inaccurately. Most used it as evidence that addiction was rare, and most did not say it only concerned hospitalized patients, not outpatient or chronic pain situations such as bad backs and severe arthritis that opioids came to be used for. https://www.statnews.com/2017/05/31/opioid-epidemic-nejm-letter/
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3-13-2015 Russian president Vladimir Putin and his long-time ally Victor Ivanov, who is currently head of Russia's narcotics agency, have been implicated in helping run a drug smuggling and money laundering ring in St Petersburg in the 1990s. The allegations were made by ex-KGB officer Yuri Shvets who spoke at the inquiry into the death Alexander Litvinenko yesterday. Shvets testified in front of Ben Emmerson QC, expanding on a report he had compiled with fellow ex-Russian intelligence agent Alexander Litvinenko in 2006, a few months prior to the latter's death from polonium poisoning. According to Shvets' sources, which include the late Litvinenko, an anonymous party "sufficiently close to Ivanov to have been his former assistant", as well as the Ukrainian security services, "Mr Putin was directly involved in a company that was laundering drugs from Colombia" [sic]. The 'due diligence' report, which Shvets and Litvinenko compiled for Titon International, a security firm based in Mayfair, explains the alleged historical link between Putin, Ivanov and the infamous St Petersburg criminal gang Tambovskaya in the 1980s and 1990s. https://www.newsweek.com/putin-involved-drug-smuggling-ring-says-ex-kgb-officer-313657
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Karpichkov grew up in a patriotic communist family and became a mechanical engineer. The KGB approached him when he was working in a factory making parts for the aerospace industry. He enrolled at the KGB's academy in Minsk in 1984, learning, among other things, how to shoot and how to kill with his bare hands. He was assigned to the Riga branch of the KGB's prestigious Second Directorate, specialising in counter-intelligence. He reached the rank of Major.
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Born in 1959 in Soviet Latvia,
After the Soviet collapse, Karpichkov stayed in Latvia, now independent and at odds with Moscow, and joined Latvia's new intelligence service. Secretly however he continued to supply information to the KGB – renamed the Federal Security Service or FSB.
For three years he was a classic double agent. He says he broke into and planted bugs in the British embassy in Riga. He ran audacious disinformation operations against the CIA. He still has the tools of his trade: skeleton keys used for breaking into the flats of targets (small pieces of metal that might be mistaken for a bicycle repair kit), and a wide-range "scanner", which looks like a chunky walkie-talkie, for eavesdropping.
But in 1995 Karpichkov's problems began. He grew unhappy with the increasingly corrupt FSB, which, he says, failed to pay him. The Latvians began to suspect, correctly, that he was working for the Russians. Back in Russia with his cover blown, he spent several months in a Moscow prison before slipping into Britain on one of the false passports he was given as a KGB officer. He hasn't been back to Russia or Latvia since. In exile in Britain, Karpichkov has written a colourful memoir about his time in the KGB, for which he is now seeking a publisher. In it he recounts his own clandestine adventures – operations involving psychotropic drugs....https://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/feb/22/confessions-of-a-kgb-spy
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