Salon has a fascinating, detailed and complex piece that describes Sen. John Kerry's thorny efforts in the 1980s to take on one of the Reagan administration's more troubling dualities: leading the drug war while also supporting Nicaragua's Contras, who were actively involved in the drug trade. Perhaps the most fascinating fact pointed out in the article is the mainstream press's confusing decision to virtually shun the story.

The Reagan administration's tolerance and protection of this dark underbelly of the Contra war represented one of the most sordid scandals in the history of U.S. foreign policy. Yet when Kerry's bombshell findings were released in 1989, they were greeted by the mainstream press with disdain and disinterest. The New York Times, which had long denigrated the Contra-drug allegations, buried the story of Kerry's report on its inside pages, as did the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times. For his tireless efforts, Kerry earned a reputation as a reckless investigator. Newsweek's Conventional Wisdom Watch dubbed Kerry a "randy conspiracy buff."

But almost a decade later, in 1998, Kerry's trailblazing investigation was vindicated by the CIA's own inspector general, who found that scores of Contra operatives were implicated in the cocaine trade and that U.S. agencies had looked the other way rather than reveal information that could have embarrassed the Reagan-Bush administration.

Read the Salon piece, courtesy of Cannabis News, here.

A synopsis of the key points of a Senate foreign relations committee report cited in the Salon article -- a committee chaired by Kerry at the time -- appears here.