SACRAMENTO, CA - Back in the 1980s, the CIA had a problem. The spy agency needed a covert way to finance its anti-communist war in Central America. So the CIA devised a scheme to flood America’s inner cities with crack cocaine, using the proceeds they got from poor African Americans to bankroll their illegal war.

That was the charge of “Dark Alliance,” an August 1996 series of articles by Gary Webb in the San Jose Mercury News. In the demonology of the left, CIA is a three-letter code for evil, so naturally the series, as intended, scored big with left-wing types such as Rep. Maxine Waters and professional ethnics such as the Rev. Jesse Jackson. Both of California’s U.S. senators demanded an inquiry and Gary Webb, touted for a Pulitzer Prize, gained instant celebrity. But the story had a problem.

It was neither true nor original. Webb’s story was actually a rehash of a 10-year-old propaganda campaign by the Christic Institute, a group of left-wing fanatics backing Central American communists and whose RICO lawsuit against Gen. John Singlaub and others was tossed out of court. Investigative journalists at the Los Angeles Times, New York Times, and Washington Post examined the “Dark Alliance” series and found that it failed to make the case. Mercury News executive editor Jerry Ceppos even disowned the series in a front-page column. Gary Webb left the paper and wrote The CIA, The Contras and the Crack Explosion, in which he said, near the end, “I never believed, and never wrote, that there was a grand CIA conspiracy behind the crack plague.”

Actually, he did, but there wasn’t. It is as though Melville denied having written about a whale, or Milton Friedman disowned free-market economics. So what happens to someone who gains fame for what turns out to be a bogus story? Good things, it turns out.

Gary Webb now works in California’s capital as an “associate consultant,” for the Assembly Democratic Caucus, and is on the government payroll for an annual salary of $73,836, more than he would have pulled down at the Mercury News. The duties of this associate, according to one report, are to conduct investigations, but one may be certain the position is not too demanding. After all, what consultants do, if anything, is not always clear, making an associate consultant even more nebulous. Think sinecure.

That Webb gained this plum post dispels the notion that writers who play to the left-wing bleachers are somehow persecuted by the establishment. On the contrary, Webb was positively rewarded, even though his story failed to deliver. Writers on the other side, say, the conservative American Spectator crowd, have found themselves out of business.

Conspiracy theories inflame passions, poison public discourse, and divert attention from key issues. Webb’s hiring is a sign that conspiracy theories carry more weight than they should with those in power. This does little to enhance public confidence in legislators. If they are to hire investigators, common sense dictates they should give preference to those whose stories turned out to be true. Legislators should take more than a casual look at any investigation Webb happens to turn up.

No investigation is needed, however, to prove that the state of California is $22 billion in debt. This is yet another reason for taxpayers to wonder about the need for associate consultants.

K. Lloyd Billingsley is editorial director of the Pacific Research Institute in San Francisco. He can be reached via email at klbillingsley@pacificresearch.org.