Gary Webb is dead, an apparent suicide.
Webb tried to take a serious look at the ties between US foreign policy in Latin America and the flow of cocaine into the US in those days, and was driven out of journalism for daring to suggest that the US government might have looked the other way while its momentary allies in a proxy war behaved in a less than ethical manner. The New York Times, to its eternal discredit, led the charge. Even the obit, linked above, notes that the series of articles were “later discredited”, which is bullshit. Major newspapers did not “discredit parts of his work” so much as they set up complete straw men and then knocked those straw men right down and declared it a good day’s work done. And in the long run, they may have destroyed a man’s life.
Here’s a cartoon I did about all of this, back in 1996. Not a very good scan, for some reason, but it’s the best available at the moment.