For decades black community leaders have accused the government of deliberately flooding their neighborhoods with cheap drugs. Better black criminals than black activists, was the theory. With new revelations by the San Jose Mercury News of covert government involvement in drug dealing in Los Angeles, reality justifies so-called black paranoia -- but you'd never know it judging from the presidential candidates. PNS commentator Linn Washington Jr., a graduate of the Yale Law Journalism Fellowship Program, writes frequently on criminal justice issues.

PHILADELPHIA, PA. -- The biggest drug smuggling scandal in recent years is being ignored by Bill Clinton and Bob Dole despite the spectacle of these two presidential candidates pounding each other daily over who is toughest on the drug trade.

It's not surprising that Clinton and Dole are ignoring this scandal because it involves a Pandora's Box that top government officials have sought to keep closed for decades -- the domestic impact of clandestine collaboration with international drug lords.

The scandal involves disturbing documentation of a CIA operative providing massive amounts of crack cocaine and sophisticated weapons to Los Angeles street gangs during the early 1980s in a scheme to raise funds for the Nicaraguan Contras. The documentation was presented in a series published by the San Jose Mercury News in August.

Violent drug dealing by these gangs turned sections of L.A. into war zones. Further, the sudden influx of tons of cheap cocaine into inner cities across America -- coinciding with Reagan Administration covert operations to aid the Contras -- unleashed a crack cocaine epidemic that caused unprecedented crime and chaos.

This crack epidemic also inspired Congressional passage of draconian drug laws that has produced blatantly racist federal law enforcement. Tens of thousands of blacks have been disproportionately imprisoned. This military-style enforcement has tragically impacted law abiding blacks who have suffered erroneous forfeitures of their assets, false imprisonment and scores of "accidental" shooting deaths by drug agents.

The Mercury's series has sparked outrage in black communities nationwide. It is the topic of town meetings and radio talk shows. Civil rights leaders have picketed the headquarters of the CIA and Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA). (The CIA operative identified in the series is currently a DEA informant.)

Ominously, the series has revived long held suspicions in black communities about a dark connection between the proliferation of drugs and covert government operations.

During the Vietnam War, Congressional investigations detailed how U.S. embassies in southeast Asia covered up involvement of client governments in heroin trafficking and CIA contract airlines flew heroin from jungle bases of drug lords recruited to provide assistance in America's battle against communism.

Tons of high grade heroin mysteriously flooded black communities during the early seventies and many black leaders charged this heroin epidemic was contrived deliberately to cripple black neighborhoods, then energized by the civil rights movement and "Great Society" programs.

But these charges were rejected as the ranting of paranoid conspiracy mongers by officials who indignantly justified contacts with drug lords as furthering U.S. foreign policy goals, not facilitating drug dealing.

Over a decade later, Congressional investigators documented how Colombian drug lords were authorized to fly tons of cocaine into the U.S. in exchange for allowing their planes to carry arms and other supplies to the Contras on the return flights to South America.

However, Congressional efforts to conclusively connect the drug dealing of America's allegedly anti-Communist allies with drug epidemics that devastated inner cities were constantly stymied by the cloak of "national security."

Compounding this travesty is the fact that everyone even remotely responsible shirks responsibility for rectifying the devastation caused by covert operations while self-righteously demanding maximum responsibility from small time offenders caught up in drugs traceable to these operations.

The Congressional Black Caucus, civil rights leaders nationwide and even Clinton's Drug Czar have called for a Congressional investigation into the CIA-LA crack connection.

If candidates Clinton and Dole want to prove themselves to be more than wimp drug lord warriors they should do more than just endorse the calls for a Congressional investigation. They should pursue realistic drug prevention strategies that go beyond the political hype of more police and prisons.