"I became convinced," he remembers, "that we're going to look back on the whole war on drugs fifty years from now like we look back on the McCarthy era and say, How did we ever let this stuff get so out of hand? How come nobody ever stood up and said, This is bullshit? I thought I had an obligation because I had the power at that point to tell people, Don't believe what you are being told about this war on drugs, because it is a lie. Very few people were in the position I was in, where I was able to write shit and get it in the newspapers. It was a very rare privilege. The editors at the Mercury gave me a lot of freedom because I produced. Then I got into this thing."

In December 1995, Webb wrote out his project memo, and suddenly, "I realized what we were saying here. I'm sitting at home, and this e-mail comes from a fiend at the Los Angeles Times. And I had told him vaguely about this interesting story I was working on. I told him that he had no idea what his fucking government is capable of.

"And I was depressed because this was so horrible. It was like some guy told me that he had gone through the looking glass and was in this netherworld that 99 percent of the American public would never believe existed. That's where I felt I was. When I sat down and wrote the project memo and said, Here's what we're going to say, and we're going to be accusing the government of bringing drugs into the counting, essentially, and we've spent billions of dollars and locked up Americans for selling shit that the government helps to come into the country--is just... If you believe in democracy and you believe in justice, it's fucking awful."

For six weeks after his series came out, Webb waited in a kind of honeymoon. His e-mail was exploding, he recalls, "from ordinary people who said, 'This has restored my faith in newspapers.' It was from college students, housewives that heard me on the radio; it was really remarkable to think that journalism could have this kind of effect on people, that people were out marching in the streets because of something that you had written. There was a chance that this scab was going to come off, and we were going to see all the stuff that had been hidden from us all these years. The thing that surprised me was that there was no response from the press, from the government. It was total silence."

Finally, in early October, The Washington Post ran a story by Roberto Suro and Walter Pincus headlined, THE CIA AND CRACK: EVIDENCE IS LACKING OF ALLEGED PLOT. The story focused in part on the fact that Webb had given a defense attorney questions to ask Oscar Danilo Blandón about his CIA connections. It also quoted experts who denied that the crack epidemic originated in Los Angeles, disputed that Freeway Rick Ross and Blandón were significant national players in the cocaine trade of the eighties (pegging Blandón's coke business at five tons over the decade, whereas Webb had evidence that it was more like two to five tons per year). And, the article continued, there was no evidence that the black community had been deliberately targeted (the "plot" referred to in the headline and a claim never made by Webb), that the CIA knew about Blandón's drug deals (also a claim never made by Webb, who in the series merely connected Blandón to CIA agents), or that Blandón had ever kicked in more than $60,000 to the contra cause (the Post based this number on unnamed law-enforcement officials; Webb based his estimate of millions of dollars to the contras from dope sales on grand-jury testimony and court documents). Perhaps the best summary of the Post's retort to Webb came from the paper's own ombudsman, Geneva Overholser, some weeks later: "The Post... showed more passion for sniffing out the flaws in San Jose's answer than for sniffing out a better answer themselves. They were stronger on how much less money was contributed to the contras by the Mercury News's villains than their series claimed, how much less cocaine was introduced into L.A., than on how significant it is that any of these assertions are true."

In late October, the Los Angeles Times and The New York Times weighed in on consecutive days. The Los Angeles Times had two years before described Freeway Rick Ross vividly: "If there was an eye to the storm, if there was a criminal mastermind behind crack's decade-long reign, if there was one outlaw capitalist most responsible for flooding Los Angeles's streets with mass-marketed cocaine, his name was Freeway Rick .... Ross did more than anyone else to democratize it, boosting volume, slashing prices, and spreading disease on a scale never before conceived .... While most other dealers toiled at the bottom rungs of the market, his coast-to-coast conglomerate was selling more than five hundred thousand rocks a day, a staggering turnover that put the drug within reach of anyone with a few dollars." In the 1996 response to Webb's series, the Los Angeles Times described Ross as one of many "interchangeable characters" and stated, "How the crack epidemic reached that extreme, on some level, had nothing to do with Ross." Both stories were written by the same reporter, Jesse Katz, and the 1996 story failed to mention his earlier characterization. The long New York Times piece the following day quoted unnamed government officials, CIA personnel, drug agents, and contras, and noted that "officials said the ClA had no record of Mr. Blandón before he appeared as a central figure in the series in the Mercury News."