A One-Way Ticket to Happiness

"I told Ronnie that these people aren't just going to poison themselves," said Crystalbrain.

He went on, "Ronnie considered what I had to say, and seemed perturbed by it, when this guy from the CIA says 'Don't worry, they indeed will poison themselves, if we tell them that they're supposed to.'"

"We just sort of looked at the CIA guy, and then he said, 'We'll make them think that all their friends are poisoning themselves, that it's the thing that all the cool people are doing, that it's hip to poison themselves.' And then I realized what he was trying to say."

"The underground people would take care of getting rid of all the guys that are opposed to the whole thing, the people who won't let the dealers in, and then we'll flood the entire country with the most toxic of drugs: crack cocaine. And it'll be a test, a test of obedience. You weren't obedient if you did what your friends were doing, because we'd be doing our best to make sure they were disobedient. You'd only be obedient if you followed the law."

"We'd lie about drugs, sure. That's par for the course. That would be part of the con too. But we didn't want followers who thought we were doing the 'right thing', we wanted people who would follow the law even if they knew we were lying."

I replied to Crystalbrain, "So, just blindly obedient people."

Crystalbrain said "Total and completely docile sheep who wouldn't raise an eyebrow if we fleeced them once in a while. No thinkers. No one but nine-to-five family men. Believers. Churchgoers. People who would turn on the TV and see Oral Roberts and actually believe him. And you know what we would reward them with?"

"What?"

"Money. They'd make money, have a comfortable house, a nice place to live in the suburbs, no need to worry about the criminals. Reagan, I mean...Jesus would forgive all the sins where they stomped on people, drove them into the dirt. Just a total blissful life of nice things and ignorance, where they ignored the 'ways of the world' we'd set up for minorities which were terrible traps meant to ensnare them. But we'd give them that 'rich man's house' they see in all the pictures of Heaven."

"But you wouldn't actually be agents of 'Heaven', would you?"

"Hell no, Heaven would be full of crack cocaine, and Hell would be full of speed. We'd change the narrative. At one point Heaven was full of booze and bread. At another point it was full of LSD and peyote, and we were bringing cocaine around as this really poisonous thing that would just corrupt the Hell out of everything. Because, face it, we were liars. Having a big house doesn't mean you're in Heaven, you could get depressed and blow your brains and out and splatter them all over your living room in your nice house. But we had to sell that notion, that if you left the drugs alone, joined the 'good guys', went to church, and voted Republican, you'd have a one-way ticket to happiness."

"But you wanted people to smoke crack cocaine?" I asked.

"Yes, of course we did. We wanted our enemies to smoke crack, we wanted all the people who wanted to be different to smoke crack; we had to go real extreme, make things as destructive as possible for our enemies. They had to fall into something really nasty, and then we'd keep the nasty neighborhoods away, we'd keep them from invading our little artificial conservative paradise, and we'd make tons and tons of money playing both sides. That was the grand plan."

I said, "So you wanted to control the people who destroyed lives in the underground, and also to control the people who didn't want anything to do with being different?"

"Precisely, we would control literally everything, because we'd tell the people on our bad side to do what we considered wrong, and tell the people on our good side to do what we considered right. It was all about control, controlling everything, pitting people against each other so we could rule them all."