A post submitted by CGI member Leathur.

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By
Daniel Hopsicker
June 13, 2023

I got an email yesterday, from an Amazon customer who hasn’t yet received his copy of “Barry ‘the boys,’” my book about the biggest drug smuggler in American history, and it has prompted me to do something I’ve been reluctant to do:

Announce my coming—but not quite yet imminent—demise.

My reply to the customer whose book was tardy included the disclosure I hoped to have made in a slightly more elegant fashion. (I think it’s called being “Overtaken by Events.”) I needed to notify customers that in future my Amazon fulfillment will be in the hands of someone who’s relatively pain-free.

Handled.

MadCow is Dying?

What it is I do, I’ve always felt, is not about me. But about the work. Alas, at a `certain point, it is about me. This is one of those times.

No sooner was that crisis averted when I got a broadcast email from a longtime correspondent with a subject line reading (in all caps) MADCOW IS DYING.

And I realized things wouldn’t get any easier until I divulged my current status and publicized it to that small fraction of humanity that follows my work.

“Yeah, you know, like Stage 4”

I was recently diagnosed with Stage 4 cancer, and am currently in a hospice in Venice, Florida. Apparently, Stage 4 is the wrong end of the scale to be on.

In my day job, I mostly covered drug trafficking. And I had the same goal journalist Gary Webb did regarding CIA drug trafficking. He told me once that all he wanted was to be able to say that he’d helped drag the dead body out from underneath the bed just a few more inches.

It’s a noble ambition, and one we both found to be harder than it looked. But since Gary is at least indirectly responsible for my neurodivergent career path, he’s a good place to start.

Back in those long-ago halcyon days during the 1990’s, Webb reported a series of bombshell articles in the San Jose Mercury News entitled “Dark Alliance,” about the CIA having allowed that colorful gang 0f freedom-loving thugs called the Contras to sell cocaine to fuel their insurgency. I’m sure a few of you remember it.

It happened right after the Civil War.

CONTINUE READING: https://www.madcowprod.com/2023/06/13/in-a-new-york-minute-everything-can-change/