SENTIENT TIMES August/September 2003

The Politics of Heroin

An Interview with Alfred McCoy On CIA Complicity in Global Drug Trade

By Derrick Jensen

The debate over illegal drugs in the US has long focused on legalization versus increased prosecution, treatment versus harsher sentences. But what’s been missing on both sides of the debate is a meaningful understanding of the history and politics behind drug production and prohibition. What’s the relationship, for example, between the Cold War and skyrocketing drug use in the US and Europe? And why is it that, in the nearly one hundred years since the US passed its first anti-drug law, the global traffic in drugs has grown astronomically?

Alfred McCoy, author of The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade, has literally written the book on the complex relationship among drugs, prohibition, and power. Now in its third edition, the book got its start in 1970, when McCoy’s editor at Harper & Row suggested he write about the explosion of heroin use among American soldiers in Vietnam. At the outset, McCoy met General Maurice Belleux, former chief of French Intelligence for Indochina, who revealed to him that the CIA, like its French predecessor, was involved in the opium trade. When beat poet and antiwar activist Allen Ginsberg heard what McCoy was writing about, he sent years’ worth of unpublished dispatches from Time-Life correspondents—lifted from the magazine publisher’s files—documenting the involvement of US allies in drug trafficking. Then came the stories from Vietnam veterans of CIA helicopters transporting opium in Laos and truck convoys carrying opium down the Ho Chi Minh trail, destined for American troops in South Vietnam. That’s when the death threats began.

Since then McCoy’s life has been threatened many times. While he was doing research in Laos in 1971, members of the CIA’s secret army ambushed and shot at him and his colleagues. But he persevered, going from the Hmong villages in the Laotian highlands, to the neon bars of Saigon, to the homes of the region’s major drug lords. Everywhere he went, he asked about the history of the drug trade in the region, starting in the past, when the trade was legal, and working his way up to the present. His strategy worked.

Despite the CIA’s attempts to suppress it, The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia came out in 1972. McCoy revised the book in 1991, shortening the title and including the story of the CIA’s involvement in Afghanistan and that country’s subsequent increase in opium production. For the 1991 edition, McCoy wrote, “Over the past twenty years, the CIA has moved from local transport of raw opium in the remote mountains of Laos to apparent complicity in the bulk transport of pure cocaine directly into the United States.” He could now point to a pattern of how, over and over, “America’s drug epidemics have been fueled by narcotics supplied from areas of major CIA operations, while periods of reduced heroin use coincide with the absence of CIA activity.”

Controversy continues to follow McCoy. A few days before I interviewed him at his office at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, a crowd of protesters had gathered outside his building. The town of Madison had turned down a request by its Hmong community to name a park after General Vang Pao, a leader in the CIA’s secret army during the Vietnam War. One of the reasons the city gave for its refusal was McCoy’s account of Pao’s involvement in the opium trade and his disregard for the lives of the Hmong people who fought under him on behalf of the CIA. The protesters included veterans of Pao’s army. McCoy said he had met some of them before. In fact, Pao’s troops were the ones who had ambushed him in Laos years ago.

In addition to writing The Politics of Heroin, McCoy has spent years investi-gating the drug trade in Australia and written and edited other books on drug trafficking, Southeast Asia, and the Philippines. More recently, he has worked as a consultant and commentator on television and film docu-mentaries about the global drug trade. The latest revised and updated edition of The Politics of Heroin—and the last, McCoy says—has just been released by Lawrence Hill & Co. It is, he says, his “life’s work.”

Jensen: What do politics and heroin have to do with each other?
McCoy: Narcotics and addiction are not simply products of individual social deviance or weakness. Narcotics are a major global commodity, and commodities are the building blocks of modern life. They shape our culture. They shape our politics. Whether we encourage trade in a particular commodity or attempt to prohibit it, both acts are intensely political.

Different drugs seem to go in and out of favor. Why is heroin so significant?
The global narcotics trade over the last three centuries has generally been in heroin’s natural source, opium, the most venerable of drugs. Opium’s original home was the eastern Mediterranean, but by the eighth century, it had spread, both in cultivation and trade, across the whole of Asia. Still, for most of its history, opium remained in limited production with very limited use. It didn’t become a major commodity until the nineteenth century, when consumption rose dramatically in both Asia and the West. China, which was plagued by political and cultural turmoil at that time, appeared to have an almost limitless appetite for opium. And there was a tremendous rise in opium’s use in patent medicines both in the United Kingdom and the United States.

In the late nineteenth century, the European pharmaceutical industry discovered diacetylmorphine—a chemical compound created by bonding morphine from the opium poppy with a common industrial chemical, acetic anhydride. In 1898, the Bayer Corporation launched diacetylmorphine as a cure for infant respiratory ailments, giving it the short, snappy trade name heroin. (A year later Bayer came up with an analgesic that it felt was also ideal for children’s respiratory ailments, and it gave that one the short, snappy trade name aspirin.) Heroin was widely used and abused. Historian David Musto has estimated that there were three hundred thousand American opium and heroin addicts in 1900—primarily women, who were banned from barrooms and confined to a nurturing role, so this highly addictive drug marketed as a treatment for children’s ailments was a natural for them. You can find an evocative and very accurate depiction of this problem in Eugene O’Neill’s classic play Long Day’s Journey into Night, about his own mother’s addiction.
Meanwhile, in China, the government did a survey in 1906 and found that 13.5 percent of the population of China was addicted to opium. Today, the highest level of narcotics addiction in the world, according to the United Nations, is Iran, at about 3.5 percent.

What is it in the US?
About 0.7 percent. The 13.5 percent figure was so astronomical that it became an international scandal and sparked a global movement for opium prohibition. This later merged ideologically and politically with the larger temperance movement in Europe, the United States, and the English-speaking colonies.

When the US had conquered and occupied the Philippines in 1898, it had acquired, along with seven thousand islands and 6 million Filipinos, a state opium monopoly. In reaction to moral opposition among Protestant churches, the US made the consumption of opium illegal in the Philippines in 1908. That eventually led to the Harrison Anti-Narcotics Act of 1914, the first of our anti-drug laws.

Since World War II, the United Nations has passed a succession of major conventions on drugs, moving from voluntary compliance and registration to international law enforcement. The interweaving of global conventions and treaties with domestic legislation has created a very powerful worldwide prohibition regime.

If we look back at the history of this regime, we find that international global commerce in illegal drugs has actually flourished during its existence. In 1998, the UN conservatively estimated international drug trafficking at $400 billion a year, equivalent to 8 percent of all world trade—larger than steel, automobiles, or textiles. So the international trade in illicit drugs is larger than the trade in one of the fundamentals of life: clothing.

Didn’t we miss an opportunity at the end of World War II to drastically reduce the traffic in illegal drugs?
There was a confluence of factors in the late 1940s that might have led to a substantial reduction, or even elimination, of the global traffic in illicit drugs. The first factor was the increased effectiveness of the global prohibition regime. The second was the worldwide disruption of all trade and the rigid security imposed upon ports around the globe to stop sabotage, espionage, and the like. The third factor was the Communists’ rise to power in China in 1949, soon after which they ran the world’s most successful opium-eradication campaign, eliminating mass narcotics addiction in the space of about five years.

We’ll never know what might have transpired if Western intelligence agencies hadn’t used the power of the underground drug economy and its criminal syndicates to fight communism. If the CIA hadn’t existed, would we have the levels of addiction we see today? I can’t say. But I can say that covert operations played a significant role in the expansion of drug trafficking after World War II.

Beginning in the late 1940s, the Iron Curtain came crashing down along the southern border of the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China. This was also the Asian opium zone, a mountain rim that stretches five thousand miles, from Turkey to Thailand. Over a period of forty years, from 1950 to 1990, the CIA fought three major covert wars—not just espionage, but actual secret wars—along this rugged southern frontier, the soft underbelly of communism: There was Burma, during the 1950s. There was Laos, from 1964 to 1974. And there was Afghanistan, where the CIA backed the mujaheddin guerillas against the Soviet occupation from 1979 to 1992.

These were long wars. The US was involved in World War I for less than two years, and World War II for four. These are ten- and twelve-year wars that in some cases involved massive military operations. The largest bombing campaign in history was the US air operation in Laos in support of the CIA’s secret war there.

These wars were generally fought at the margins of states that didn’t support our efforts, in ethnic-minority-populated areas where the main cash crop was opium. The CIA found out that, to fight covert wars in such remote regions, it had to ally itself with local warlords—who, in turn, used the CIA’s protection and logistics expertise to transform themselves into drug lords.

At the start of each of these wars, the opium production was localized. Very quickly, however, both the scale and scope of the traffic expanded in order to fund the war. Then, when the operation was over, the region was a wasteland in which only the poppy would flower. Because these wars were conducted outside conventional diplomacy and beyond Congressional oversight, there was no postwar settlement, no treaty or reconstruction. Officially, they never happened. In the absence of any cleanup, expanded drug trafficking served as an ad hoc form of reconstruction.

In 1958, authorities in northeastern Burma estimated annual local opium production at about eighteen tons. By 1970 it was three hundred tons. The net result of the CIA’s covert operation was that northeastern Burma went from localized opium trade to being the heart of the global heroin market. Laos went from similarly limited production to being the world’s number-three opium producer today.

The purest case of transformation, though, was Afghanistan. At the time we got involved in Afghanistan, its annual opium production was no more than two hundred tons, with trade limited to the central Asian region, particularly Iran. There was no heroin production, and no international trafficking. From 1981 to 1991, opium production in Afghanistan grew to two thousand tons—a tenfold increase. Just two years into the secret war, Afghanistan, in concert with western Pakistan, had become the world’s largest heroin producer, supplying, according to the US Attorney General, 60 percent of the heroin in the US and about 80 percent of Europe’s heroin. Today, the world’s three leading producers of illicit opium are Afghanistan, Burma (now Myanmar), and Laos—all sites of former CIA covert wars that ran a decade or more.

How is it in the CIA’s interest to do this?
Basically, when the Agency mounts a covert operation, a handful of operatives form an alliance with one or more local warlords. The warlords raise an army to fight the CIA’s battle, and the agents provide their warlord allies with arms, supplies, funds, food, and political support. They do this not only to make that tribal leader more militarily effective, but also so he’ll increase his power over his tribe and draw more recruits who will fight in a more determined and committed way.

Now, along this southern frontier of Communist territory, the sole cash crop is opium. So as the tribal warlord grows in power, he takes over the opium trade, and thus takes over the household economy of every farming family. It’s in the CIA’s interest to tolerate opium traffic because it increases the political power of the Agency’s chosen ally and makes the CIA’s covert army more effective.

Moreover, as the fighting gets going and the men are drawn into the war, the male labor pool drops. Opium harvesting is, in many highland cultures, women’s work. The men may clear land and plant the seed, but the women harvest, and a poppy field can stay in production in Southeast Asia for as long as a decade. This means the women are productively employed in producing a high-income cash crop, which cuts down the CIA’s cost of supporting its tribal allies.

Where is international law enforcement while all this is going on?
Crucially, these covert war zones be-come enforcement-free zones, where inter-national and local law enforcement don’t venture. The classic case of this was Afghanistan in the 1980s. During that decade, when literally hundreds of heroin kitchens lined the Afghan-Pakistani border, the US Drug Enforcement Administration had a detachment of seventeen officers in the Pakistani capital of Islamabad. These officers conducted no investigations and made no seizures or arrests. They stayed entirely out of the northwest frontier province of Pakistan, where the heroin industry was sited, because the traffickers were our covert allies.

Hasn’t the CIA also allowed its airplanes to be used for transporting illegal drugs?
I know of one particular case of that, in Laos. Let me give you some background: During the Cold War, the Soviet Union and the United States went to the brink over Laos before negotiating a treaty in 1962 in which both sides agreed to remove all combat forces from the country. Two or three years later, the Vietnam War heated up, and suddenly the North Vietnamese were sending troops and supplies from the panhandle of North Vietnam, down through southern Laos, and into South Vietnam—the infamous Ho Chi Minh Trail. Unless the US could cut off that supply route, we had no hope of winning our war of attrition in South Vietnam. Suddenly we had to be involved in a country where we could not be involved. That led to the secret war in Laos, in which the CIA turned the Hmong tribesmen into an army. The Hmong, who were the main opium growers in the region, lived on highland ridges above three thousand feet. With road travel dangerous to impossible during the war, their villages were linked together by a network of two hundred dirt landing strips accessed by a CIA airline called Air America.

In 1971, when I was doing research for The Politics of Heroin, I hiked into Hmong villages in northern Laos, at the western edge of the Plain of Jars region. I went from house to house in the two villages where I was able to conduct my survey, and the picture was pretty clear. Farmers were harvesting about five to ten kilos of opium each. At the end of harvest season, they took the pungent raw opium, wrapped in banana leaves, down to the landing strip—and the farmers’ stories were absolutely consistent on this score—where an Air America helicopter landed. Hmong officers in the CIA’s secret army got out, paid the tribesmen cash for their opium, loaded it onto the helicopters, and flew away in the direction of the CIA’s secret base at Long Tieng.

Up until the midsixties, opium buyers would lead strings of pack horses into Hmong villages to purchase opium, or the farmers would hike down to local markets and sell it there. But as the communist guerillas and the North Vietnamese forces began sweeping through these valleys, all transportation beneath the ridges was disrupted. Air America was the only way in and out of the Hmong villages. If they were going to market their opium, it was going to be on Air America, there was no alternative. And the opium trade was one of the pillars of economic survival for these people.

The use of Air America also increased the power of the warlords. Before the CIA’s aircraft would fly in to pick up opium, there had to be an authorization from the secret army’s commanders. And because of growing casualties as the secret war spread, rice production crashed. The villages were no longer self-sufficient in rice, so Air America would fly over and drop bags of rice. The delivery of relief rice into villages, and the transport of opium out, gave the Hmong warlords a stranglehold on the population.

As this war ground on, the tremendous casualties threatened the tribe with generational extinction of young males. In 1971 a US Air Force report said that the oldest males in many Hmong families were ten years old.

So why did the Hmong keep fighting for the CIA?
Most didn’t want to. When I went into those villages to do my survey, it was at a particularly tense time, because the CIA’s secret army had put out a call for fourteen-year-olds. The village elders had gotten together and said, “No. We’ve lost everybody above this age, and if we start handing over the fourteen-year-olds, then the thirteen-year-olds and all the rest are going to follow, and who will marry the women and produce the next generation? We’re going to die. We can’t do this.”

When this village refused to send its young males to the slaughter, its rice was cut off. And they were hungry. That was actually the reason I was able to do my research, I made a deal with the village leader.

Now, this was a nonliterate person—not illiterate, but nonliterate, because the Hmong had an oral culture. When I told him I wanted to know about opium, he said, “Can you get an article in a newspaper in Washington, D.C., saying that we gave our sons to fight in the CIA’s secret war, and part of the deal was that we would get rice?”

I said I knew a correspondent for the Washington Post, but I couldn’t guarantee anything.

He told me I could ask anybody I wanted about the opium, and he’d send an escort with me, because there was a lot of guerrilla activity in the area.

So I talked to the people in his village, asking: How much opium do you produce? What do you do at harvest time? Where do you take it? How much do you get for it?

We later found out that a Hmong captain was radioing reports to the command of the CIA’s secret army about the questions we were asking. As we made our way to the next village to continue our survey, some soldiers in warlord Vang Pao’s army ambushed us and tried to kill us.

When we got back to the Laotian capital of Vientiane, I went to see the head of the US Agency for International Development [USAID], Charlie Mann, who had ambassadorial rank. I complained both that CIA’s militia had tried to kill us, and that the rice, which was supposed to be humanitarian relief, had been cut off. Then I spoke to the Washington Post correspondent. Within days, a small article appeared in the back pages of the Washington Post. As that nonliterate Hmong leader had expected, Air America’s C-130 cargo planes bombarded his village with rice from USAID.

But that’s how that system operated—control over the opium and rice amplified the warlord’s power and allowed him to extract soldiers, in this case boy soldiers, for slaughter in the CIA’s secret war.

What happened to all the opium? Where was it sold?
Most of it was turned into heroin for sale to US soldiers. The secret war in Laos introduced heroin-refining technology into the region. In 1969 and 1970, the armies that fought alongside the CIA’s secret army in Laos built a complex of seven heroin refineries at the heart of the Golden Triangle, where Burma, Thailand, and Laos converge. Let me make this clear: all the laboratories were built by current or former covert allies of the United States. And they began producing high-grade heroin for shipment to South Vietnam. The local Asian addicts were opium smokers, which means the heroin was targeted purely at American troops. We know from a later White House survey that, by 1971, 34 percent of all US combat forces in South Vietnam were using heroin. That means there were something like eighty thousand heroin addicts in the US Army at a point when there were only about seventy thousand addicts in the entire United States.

You’ve said that the CIA’s secret war in Laos had a broader legacy than just increased opium production.
Yes, it changed the way we fight wars. Up until the Laos operation, conventional military wisdom said that only infantry could take and hold ground; air power could merely provide tactical support for infantry and destroy strategic targets. We couldn’t send troops into Laos, though, without violating our treaty with the Soviet Union. So we dropped 2.1 million tons of bombs on Laos—roughly equal to the tonnage we dropped in the whole of World War II. And we learned that if you bomb intensively and without restraint, you can actually use aerial bombardment as a means to take and hold ground. We used this strategy successfully in Bosnia, where we sent in very few combat forces, and even more successfully in Kosovo.

The problem with this strategy is that it produces serious violations of international law. When the international community saw our destructive use of air power in the Vietnam War, it became concerned about the enormous “collateral damage” the bombing caused. As the Vietnam War was winding down, the international community negotiated Protocol One of the Geneva Convention, which outlawed military attacks on civilians. They went even further and created the International Criminal Court to try those who violated the laws of the convention. Although the United States was one of the prime movers in creating the Geneva Convention in 1949, President Reagan sent the treaty for Protocol One to the Senate with the recommendation that it be rejected, and it was.

On April 4, 2002, the world had a ceremony to celebrate the establishment of the International Criminal Court. The US did not send representatives. We are proposing to lead this “new world order” governed by the rule of law, yet because we’re increasingly wedded to air power and its broad use against both civilian and military targets, we are at odds with the international laws the rest of the world supports. As we move into the twenty-first century, these covert wars have left a very problematic legacy for the conduct of US foreign policy.

Afghanistan is the most recent covert war, and the one most directly related to current events. How did it come about?
In a very similar fashion to the war in Laos. Starting in 1979, the Carter administration—and later the Reagan White House—gave executive orders to the CIA to arm and supply the Afghan resistance to the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. The only difference is that this was an international conflict, not just a US operation. The Saudis, for example, heavily supported the Afghan rebels, as did the Europeans.

Still, from 1979 to 1992 the CIA spent approximately 3 billion dollars on this secret war, routing most of the money through Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence, or ISI. The result was a tenfold expansion of opium production inside Afghanistan, and growth in trade from localized opium distribution to large-scale heroin refining for the international market. In a pattern we see time and again, the tribal warlords inside Afghanistan were transformed into powerful drug lords.

After investing 3 billion dollars in Afghanistan’s destruction, the United States simply walked away at the end of the operation, leaving behind a wasted society. Afghanistan was our longest covert war, and in many ways the most severely devastated of our covert battlegrounds. The fighting left behind a million dead, 4.5 million refugees, and an estimated 10 million landmines—not to mention a ruined economy and a ravaged government. After the Soviets were defeated, the warlords we had created and armed began fighting among themselves for power, adding to the devastation.

As Afghanistan’s postwar problems multiplied, opium offered the simplest solution. In the devastated economy, there was astronomical unemployment, and opium is very labor intensive; it takes nine times as much labor to harvest a hectare of opium than it does a hectare of wheat. So it put people to work. Opium also commands a high international price, which meant the impoverished farmers could finance the rehabilitation of their farms and communities. Another obstacle to reconstruction was that international agricultural commodities are traded through a very complex diplomacy; having no recognized government, Afghanistan didn’t have the capacity for such diplomacy. As an illicit commodity, however, opium could easily pass across every border in the world. And then there were the periodic droughts—opium uses about half the water of food crops. So from every perspective, opium was the ideal solution to Afghanistan’s postwar problems.

Under conditions of civil war in Afghanistan, from 1992 to 1996, opium production continued to climb upward. When the Taliban took power in Kabul in 1996, only three countries in the world recognized the new government, and Afghanistan remained detached from the international economy. The Taliban quickly realized what the warlords they’d superceded had known: the only way to operate a state economy “off the grid” was through narcotics. So they not only continued to tolerate the drug traffic; they imposed a kind of rough order that increased the commerce and made it more efficient. Opium production inside Afghanistan doubled. By 1999, they were producing an extraordinary 4,600 tons of opium a year—enough to supply 75 percent of the world’s heroin users.

Afghanistan had become the first nation in history whose economy was built predominantly upon opium. The drug trade accounted for most government revenue and all foreign exchange. It also absorbed most of the country’s merchant capital and much of its water and prime arable land. And, above all, opium provided employment for about 25 percent of the adult males, which means 25 percent of the workforce, because under the Taliban women couldn’t work.

By 2000, though, the Taliban had become desperate for international recognition. Throughout their brief rule, they had more or less offered the UN a deal, saying indirectly, “We’ll eradicate opium if you’ll give us diplomatic recognition.” Then, in July 2000, the Taliban issued an opium ban and, with characteristic ruthlessness, eradicated 99 percent of the opium crop in their territory, which was most of the country. Afghanistan’s opium production crashed from 4,600 tons to around 100 tons. The Taliban then sent a delegation to the UN, accusing the Northern Alliance, which still held an enclave in the northeast, of being drug lords, heroin traffickers, and thugs, and said, “We’ve eradicated opium. Give us diplomatic recognition.” The UN refused.

So when the US invaded Afghanistan after September 11, 2001, we were invading a country that had been through a decade of covert war, then a decade of civil war, and finally an act of economic suicide. By the time we attacked, there was nothing left except the Taliban’s rather weak, badly led army of forty thousand men. Refugees had been flowing out of Afghanistan for more than a year, not just because of drought, but because the Taliban had destroyed the country’s largest source of employment and only export. Once we invaded, the society quickly collapsed.

When planning the Afghan War, the United States realized that the only allies we had were the Northern Alliance—the same warlords we had armed back in the 1980s, and who in the 1990s had operated pretty much as independent drug lords. The Northern Alliance controlled the one territory inside Afghanistan that hadn’t banned drugs, and they were still very large opium producers and heroin smugglers. More important, they had huge stockpiles of opium left over from the 1999 bumper crop, which the world market simply hadn’t been able to absorb—about 60 percent of the opium had been held back after the harvest. The Northern Alliance now transformed much of that opium into heroin and smuggled it into Europe and Russia.

These are the forces with which the US allied itself to fight the Taliban, and the forces we have since installed in power in Afghanistan. The wisdom of that decision has proven dubious, even militarily speaking. During the bungled Tora Bora operation, when it looked as if the US had Osama Bin Laden and most of al-Qaeda cornered in caves, one of those warlords, Hazarat Ali, controlled the territory between the caves and the Pakistani border. With a warlord’s eye for business, he sold al-Qaeda “Get Out of Afghanistan Alive” cards—for a bargain price of about five thousand dollars a head.

As we speak, there’s a big new crop of opium pushing its way out of the soil across Afghanistan. It’s going to be politically very embarrassing for the US when our invasion and liberation of Afghanistan floods Europe with unprecedented quantities of heroin.

How does all of this relate to the drug war in the United States?
Since 1971, under President Nixon, we’ve spent approximately $150 billion to fight five “drug wars.” That’s not quite half the cost of the Vietnam War. And that doesn’t include state and local costs for prosecution and incarceration. The cost of building and operating prisons for nonviolent drug offenders is enormous.

The expanded drug war that has been fought since the mid-eighties, primarily with longer jail sentences, has created an enormous prison population and done incredible damage to racial harmony in this society. From 1930 to 1980, American society had, on average, a hundred prisoners per hundred thousand people. After Reagan’s drug war started in the 1980s, that grew to four hundred per hundred thousand. We’re now well above six hundred per hundred thousand.

The Sentencing Project has found that about a third of African American males between the ages of eighteen and thirty are either on parole, in prison, or under indictment. And the lion’s share of them are incarcerated for possession or petty sale of narcotics. When these African American men emerge from prison, they’re stripped of their civil rights. In many states, they can’t vote. This represents the criminal-ization and the political disenfranchisement of an entire community. Unless we turn it off, this doomsday machine will keep sweeping the streets for drug users, filling the prisons, and adding to these enormous social costs.

I’m not as familiar with Nixon’s drug war. How was it fought?
From the late 1940s to the early 1970s, the infamous French Connection was the source of about 80 percent of America’s heroin supply. Here’s how it worked: Turkey had farmers producing opium to sell to licensed pharmaceutical companies for use in making morphine. These farmers routinely produced more than their quota, shipping their bootleg opium down to Lebanon, where it was refined into morphine and shipped to France. There, the Corsican syndicates, protected by French Intelligence and the Gaullist government, operated a complex of labs that transformed the morphine into heroin. They shipped it to Montreal, Canada, where the Cotroni Mafia family shipped it down to New York for distribution across the Eastern Seaboard.

Because the farmers in Turkey were all licensed for legal pharmaceutical production, the Turkish government knew who they all were. At Nixon’s demand, the Turks simply went out and eradicated opium. The US provided around $30 million to help the farmers make the transition to other crops. We then leaned on the French, who of course knew exactly who the traffickers were, because they all belonged to a paramilitary organization called the Civic Action Service that actually provided state security for the Gaullist regime. The French police closed down the heroin labs, and the French Connection was destroyed in a matter of months. Nixon scored a total victory.

But every victory in the drug war lays the groundwork for a later defeat. Demand for heroin was still high, and there was now a shortfall in supply, so the international price went up, creating a strong incentive for a boom in production in Southeast Asia. To add to this, the Vietnam War was over, the last of the GIs were gone, and Southeast Asia’s opium producers had a surplus. Suddenly the US began getting large shipments of heroin from Southeast Asia.

So Nixon fought and won another battle in his drug war. He sent thirty Drug Enforcement Agency agents to Bangkok, where they did a very effective job of seizing heroin bound for the United States, imposing a kind of informal customs duty on it. The Southeast Asian traffickers simply turned around and exported to Europe, which had been virtually drug free for decades. You see, the French syndicates had an agreement with the Gaullist government: they could manufacture heroin, but they couldn’t sell it in France. With the French Connection out of the picture, the Southeast Asian syndicates were free to flood Europe with heroin. By the end of the 1970s, Europe had more heroin addicts than the United States.

Each time we bring the blunt baton of law enforcement down upon this illicit global market, we create an increase in price, which in turn stimulates production and geographical proliferation. Intervention at the level of trafficking only forces drug lords to create ever-more-complex smuggling networks. The net result of these drug wars is that there has been a sixfold increase in global opium production since they began.

It’s the same with cocaine in South America. In the fifteen years we’ve been fighting a drug war in the Andes, cocaine production in the region has doubled. During the 1990s, the pursuit of the drug war in Peru brought the CIA into alliance with Vladimiro Montesinos, the head of state security under the Fujimori dictatorship. Today, he is in prison for corruption, and his overseas bank accounts hold a quarter of a billion dollars in drug money. He single-handedly corrupted Peruvian democracy. And for each hectare of cocoa that was taken out in Peru, one was added in Colombia. Now we’re applying pressure on Colombia, and Peruvian production is coming back up. And of course our covert involvement in the politics of these nations damages our relationship with them over the long term.

The UN has the idea, and the United States as well, that because narcotics production is concentrated in a few limited areas, we can make a knockout blow and end this drug problem once and for all. The US favors “aerial defoliation.” The UN favors crop substitution. But they both share a belief that they can, after nearly a century of effort, finally eradicate the narcotics trade. And it’s possible, in theory—and sometimes in reality—to apply enough coercive force to extirpate an illegal commodity from a community. But as we’ve seen, in an age of illicit global commodities and transnational organized crime, the traffic just slips sideways into other areas, to infinity.

Let’s just assume, however, that the US and UN were somehow able to succeed. Let us imagine that, in this new world order, the prohibition regime is finally able to eliminate opium production.

This takes us back to Nixon’s second victory. When we disrupted the flow of heroin from Southeast Asia to America, Mexican syndicates began producing large quantities of cannabis for shipment to the United States. In 1975, the Ford Admini-stration began a massive marijuana eradication effort in Mexico and sealed the border. The result was that much of the marijuana production shifted south to Colombia, laying the economic foundation for the drug cartels that a decade later switched to cocaine production.

The most dramatic change in the last decade has been the global rise of synthetic drugs, especially amphetamine-type substances [ATS]. Currently, there are about 14 million opiate abusers in the world, and about the same number of coca abusers. There are 30 million ATS abusers. It’s as big as opium and cocaine combined. One of the things about ATS is that the labs are sited very close to consumer areas, so interdiction is essentially impossible.

We’ve gone from the simple, straight-line network of the French Connection to an infinitely complex global system that resists intervention. The drug war isn’t simply failing, it’s counterproductive. Prohibition stimulates production. Any economics expert could tell you that. If you told the Federal Reserve that adjusting interest rates has no impact on the American economy, they would laugh at you. That’s the point of adjusting interest rates. That’s the point of market intervention. Yet all these law-enforcement agencies—from the DEA to state police—think they can intervene in the illicit drug market without affecting trade. There is no “immaculate intervention.” Intervention, particularly unwitting intervention, only makes the problem worse.

Where does all of this leave us concerning the war on drugs?
I think prohibition is going to be substantially revised in the years to come, though not completely discarded. Legalization isn’t politically possible in the short term—or even the medium term—given that prohibition is embedded in so many state and federal laws, not to mention international treaties. There’s no political will to unravel all of that at this point.

The debate has now moved from prohibition to pragmatics. We’re no longer talking about whether drugs are moral or immoral. Instead, we’re starting to ask: What works? What are the costs? Drugs may be illegal, but incarceration is not a rational way to treat drug abuse. We’ll hear more states saying, “Let’s give people treatment.” I think there will be a shift toward minimizing the damage, both from drugs and from law enforcement. Within ten years, I expect we’ll see no incarceration for personal possession. Part of the reason is that we can move from mass incarceration to mass treatment without changing state, national, and international drug laws. All we have to do is change sentencing.

The boom economy of the 1990s is over. We’re beyond the dot-com age. Money is now real, and fiscal choices are severe. Faced with a choice between mass incarceration or better education, what will most people choose? What about a choice between more prisons for nonviolent drug offenders or prescription drug benefits for senior citizens? I think economic reality is going to force us to ask whether this drug war is working. With referenda requiring treatment instead of jail terms for first-time drug users in California, Arizona, and Nevada, we can already see the shape of things to come.

Derrick Jensen is the author of A Language Older Than Words and The Culture of Make Believe. His latest book, co-authored with George Draffan, Strangely Like War: The Global Assault on Forests, will be released in the fall. This interview originally appeared in The Sun.

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