It is no secret that Air America was a CIA front that transported heroin and opium around Vietnam during the war. U.S. soldiers also used the drugs to escape the tremendous horrors of that terribly wrong war, and many of them became addicted.
It is also no secret that the U.S. government protected China’s opium trade in the 1960s. With the help of the CIA office in Laos, the opium from China and Southeast Asia was flown into American cities.
Similar operations have built the cocaine business out of South America, allowing funding for military operations in the Americas. Some of this has been done in cooperation with mob bosses and others living in the U.S.
The Kennedy administration and the CIA participated with the Chicago mob syndicate in planning to take Cuba by assassinating Fidel Castro. The Chicago mob made lots of money from heroin and wanted back into the Cuban casinos and night clubs that they controlled before Castro took over.
Nixon was well aware of the CIA’s interaction with Turkish heroin producers to fund military operations in Turkey just as Nixon was declaring drugs as “public enemy number one.”
It is no secret that the U.S. government has run a U.S. School of the Americas to provide training for those involved with political and military activities in South and Central America. The school has provided instruction in assassination, torture, corrupting vote counts, and other such activities to manipulate the government organizations of Latin America. Some who have attended the training are clearly involved in international cocaine trading to fund military and/or political activities that agree with U.S. government interests – often for the exploitation of natural resources and/or land and labor.
It is no secret that in the 1970s the Israelis were supplying guns to the Christians in exchange for hashish. And it was being done with the cooperation of other governments.
It is no secret that Bolivia’s cocaine production multiplied during the 1980s with the cooperation of the CIA trainees. Peru’s government is another that has been largely funded through its cocaine industry, especially during the 1990s, and in cooperation with both the CIA and DEA. The Columbian drug cartel has made money both because of and in spite of the U.S. government. Nicaragua’s history is rife with U.S. intervention, drug money, and war funded with it.
Most, if not all, of the White House administrations in the last several decades have had some interaction with the international drug trade, often cooperating to get the U.S. political goals met. This may have involved simply looking the other way while the CIA played their games with politics in other countries. The games involve selling U.S. weaponry to governments that buy the equipment using drug money, and the games involve training courtesy of the CIA and U.S. military. Often these games are played at the expense of the lives of innocent people and for the benefit of multinational corporations.
President Carter stands out as an example of one who tried to stop some of the U.S. participation in worldwide drug trafficking. For instance, he cut off funding to Nicaragua’s President Anastasio Somoza Garcia. Carter also wanted to do away with laws against the personal use of marijuana, which would have cut funding to prison construction because fewer people would be locked up. It would also have greatly reduced the price of marijuana, which would have made a lot of powerful people lose money. He also wanted to make the punishment for breaking drug laws no worse than any harm the drug could do to the individual. Carter viewed the country’s reliance on foreign fuel the moral equivalent of conducting warfare. He envisioned a future where people relied less on petroleum and more on plant-based fuels, solar energy, and wind turbines. His administration founded the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden, Colorado. The NREL has been underfunded since the Reagan administration. In 1986 Reagan also foolishly removed the solar panels that Carter had installed on the roof of the White House (they were then moved to Unity College in Main to heat their water system). If there was ever a structure that should be held as an example of environmentally sustainable living it should be the White House. Unfortunately, this has not been the case. But, interestingly, the George W. Bush White House installed solar panels on the roof in 2002. His “ranch” in Texas also uses a lot of green technology, including solar panels.
While the U.S. Bureau of Narcotics had great control on the goings-on in Afghanistan, especially during the early 1970s, it was during Carter’s administration that the CIA became more involved in the Afghanistan fight against the invading Soviets.
A Texas Congressman named Charlie Wilson had a lot to do with how the U.S. funded weaponry for the Afghanistan armies throughout the 1980s to shoot down Soviet military planes and helicopters, and to blow up Soviet tanks. When this story was turned into a feature film, Charlie Wilson’s War, starring actors Tom Hanks and Julia Roberts I was asked if I wanted to work on the movie. I am an extra in the opening scene and am briefly seen standing behind Julia Roberts as she is in an audience listing to Tom Hanks speak.
Many view the U.S. funding of the Afghanistan fighters as the U.S. working to protect its access to petroleum, and to land where petroleum pipelines could be built.
We will likely never know how involved the White House was in these decisions, or how independently the CIA was acting – such as if it were acting against the wishes of the Carter administration. To fund the Afghan fight, the CIA participated in the opium farming in Pakistan and Afghanistan. The CIA not only allowed the opium farming to expand, it also helped transport the drugs to other countries. The laws creating the drug war are what made the drug business so lucrative. The laws were in place before Carter took office. He wanted to get rid of some of them, and soften others, which, as mentioned, would have caused the drug prices to collapse.
Carter was not favored by those in power, who were more than happy to see him go. It would take volumes to describe the events that took place the day Carter left office, and how those events came to be through the people working against him behind the scenes. It wasn’t a coincidence that the American hostages were released in Iran on the day Reagan took office, it was an arrangement. By whom? That’s another book that someone else can write.
The Reagan administration became highly involved in the politics of Central America, specifically with activities to overthrow the Sandinistas in Nicaragua. When Congress cut off funding to the Contras, the U.S. military, CIA, DEA, U.S. Embassy in Costa Rica, and high-ranking officials in the U.S. National Security Council Staff covertly helped the Contras fund their war with cocaine through El Salvador, Costa Rica, and Panama. Large amounts of the drugs were landing in U.S. cities, with the cooperation of the U.S. government. This was all being done while Reagan was talking about fighting drugs, allowing the military and private businesses to begin urine testing to detect drug use, and his wife undertook her “Just Say No!” campaign to encourage children to stay away from drugs.
Similar to most children of modern-day presidents, at least a couple of the Reagan children weren’t exactly perfect examples of drug-free citizens. Nancy took her campaign internationally, and invited First Ladies from dozens of countries to the White House for her “First Ladies Conference on Drug Abuse.” Throughout the next decade it was common to see “Just Say No!” bumper stickers on police cars and school busses, and on many cars confiscated in drug busts.
In 1986, at the height of Nancy Reagan’s anti-drug crusade, the Partnership for a Drug Free America (PDFA) was formed and was supported with millions in tax-deductible “charitable” donations from the petroleum, lumber, alcohol, tobacco, and pharmaceutical industries – The Petroleum, lumber, alcohol, and pharmaceutical industries had financial interests in keeping industrial hemp and medicinal marijuana illegal. Saudi Arabia also donated to the “Just Say No!” campaign, after the Reagan administration agreed to sell them fighter jets. In 1997 the PDFA announced that it no longer accepted donations from the tobacco or alcoholic beverage industries. The pharmaceutical industry, which produces billions of pills that are sold on the streets, lead to addictions (even when taken as prescribed), and result in overdoses and side-effects that cause all sorts of health problems, including over one hundred of thousand fatalities every year, continues to support the PDFA.
By the late 1980s, Partnership for a Drug Free America was producing a series of public service advertisement that ran in both the print and electronic media. One of the PSAs used the image of fried eggs with the slogan, “This is your brain on drugs.” That particular PSA was satirized by lookalike ads featuring a pile of dog poop with the slogan, “This is your country under Reagan’s leadership.”
Meanwhile, the inner cities were erupting in what could be described as drug warfare between gangs, drug smugglers, and law enforcement. And prison populations were quickly increasing as more and more people were charged and convicted of drug crimes. And the endless pit of the U.S. military costs increasingly became tangled with the U.S. drug war that was spreading throughout Latin America. Reagan claimed that he didn’t know about many of the activities taking place in Central America. His own daughter, actress and writer “Patti Davis” Reagan, was one of the most outspoken critics of the Administration, not only about the drug war in the U.S. and Central America, but also about U.S. policy in Columbia, and about many of Ronald and Nancy Reagan’s conservative views.
A series of critical and highly criticized articles about the CIA smuggling cocaine from Central America into Los Angeles was published in the San Jose Mercury News. Written by the late Gary Webb, the 1996 articles, Dark Alliance, can be viewed on the Internet. Webb also came out with a book titled Dark Alliance: The CIA, the Contras, and the Crack Cocaine Explosion.
Another interesting book to read on this topic is Firewall: The Iran-Contra Conspiracy and Cover-Up, by Lawrence E. Walsh, independent counsel for the Iran-Contra investigation. Another that covers a broad range of issues relating to the drug trade and how it works is Drug Wars and Coffeehouses: The Political Economy of the International Drug Trade, by David R. Mares.
During Reagan’s years, under CIA cooperation, Pakistan became a major supplier of heroin, with much of the heroin landing in Europe and America to fund the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan. Among the CIA allies in Afghanistan was a man named Osama bin Laden, who the CIA trained, funded, and supplied with weaponry. Bin Laden’s organization recruited mercenaries to fight against the Soviets. Among the substances grown to raise money for the insurgency was cannabis on slave farms in southern Sudan. Through these operations bin Laden funded his al-Qaeda. When the Soviets retreated, the aftermath left Afghanistan politically divided. These series of events are tied into U.S. political maneuverings in Iran and Iraq. This all led to the situation that exists today.
It is no secret that the U.S. government has a history of funding foreign wars, training people to fight the wars, trading weapons, and doing much of this in ways that broke all sorts of laws – and in ways that involved enormous amounts of drugs, and the deaths of many people – while other people profited from the events, including certain American companies.
Another way the U.S. has been involved in the drug trade is that the U.S. has paid subsidies to farmers (including encouraging and paying farmers to grow tobacco [an addictive health-destroying substance]) in other countries to stop them from producing heroin, cocaine, opium, and cannabis when it is politically savvy for the U.S. to do so, and eliminating the subsidies when it is in U.S. favor (or when it favors U.S. corporations and wealthy businesspeople who donate large sums to certain politicians and their parties). Of course some of these subsidies work more as political bribes because they never make it to the farmers, and instead are used as payoffs to authorities, governments, and military people in both the U.S. and other countries. It is no secret that the U.S. government has been involved in closing down drug farms to prevent certain groups from getting money through the international drug trade. And vice versa.
Airplanes, helicopters, guns, and other equipment provided by or through the workings of the American government to countries to control the drug trade are often used for military activities by the receiving party. Sometimes it very much appears that the supplies are given more for military activity to overthrow governments or to fight against factions the U.S. opposes.
Sometimes these activities backfire when a group that gathers funds through international drug networks with U.S. help then goes about using the money against the U.S. military or U.S. citizens traveling in foreign countries.
The drug trade involves enormous amounts of money, and where that exists, the government gets involved.
All of this has been going on for decades while the administrations have presented an image to the American people that the White House is tough on drugs and is dealing rightfully.
It is a wonder what is really going on in Afghanistan. In 2007, Peter Bergen, the author of Holy War, Inc.: Inside the Secret World of Osama bin Laden, visited the governor’s mansion in Uruzgan in Southern Afghanistan. What he saw were poppy fields “stretching as far as the eyes could see.” The southern parts of the country produced record amounts of opium in 2007. It is estimated that the Helmand Province has increased its opium production by nearly half. This meant that Afghanistan was supplying more than 90% of the world’s opium. In the 1990s it was supplying about 70%, and less than 50% in the 1980s. This increase in Afghanistan opium is at a time when the U.S. has been keeping a huge military presence in the country, which some reasonably call an “occupation.” It is also during a time that the U.S. government claims to be providing $600 million to Afghanistan to eradicate poppy farming, which creates warfare in Afghanistan with poor farmers fighting against armies and security forces funded with international money. European forces do not support the U.S. eradication policies. The U.S. stance is keeps spreading the troublesome U.S. drug war standards into other countries, and into international politics. The 2007 strategy of the U.S. State Department was to spend 6% of its counter-narcotics spending in Afghanistan on funding “alternative livelihoods,” such as getting farmers to grow other crops. The rest of the money was apparently meant to be spent on the intensified drug war: bullets, guns, missiles, prisons, eradication using toxic chemicals that poison the environment, etc.
In August 2007, the United Nations estimated that there were 477,000 acres of poppy fields growing in Afghanistan. It isn’t like thousands of acres of poppies can’t be found. But the main questions I have regarding all of this are, where has all of that money been spent, and who is benefiting by the sale of all of this opium?
I’m a bit weary of the black and white definition of “Taliban.” I also don’t believe we are being told who may be supporting them, what their goals are, and how they fund their activities, including how they get the materials needed to process opium into heroin. I also don’t advocate spraying poppy fields with chemical defoliants or herbicides. Perhaps treating opium and other drugs the way they are treated in the Netherlands would be most beneficial, and it would make the profits of the international drug market plunge while saving many billions of dollars on the drug war, which could then be spent on schools, the environment, infrastructure, healthcare, and other things that benefit society. A world with less reliance on foreign oil, and also on fossil fuels in general, would create a situation where other countries wouldn’t have interest in raiding other countries to exploit their petroleum resources. This is another reason why industrial hemp farming should be legalized, to help create homegrown, “alternative,” non-fossil fuels.
In addition to Central and South America, Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Pakistan, drugs have helped to finance political activities and “crime syndicates” in Africa, Chechnya, Kosovo, Northern Ireland, Serbia, Uzbekistan, and Southeast Asia. While much of this has been financed with opium, heroin, and cocaine, huge amounts of money have been raised by supplying cannabis to the world market. With domestic production of cannabis in any region becoming more common with the use of interior grow rooms, cannabis has lost some of its use as a war and foreign policy fund-raiser. Prices of cannabis would dramatically decrease and billions of dollars of government money would be saved if personal use and possession of small amounts of cannabis were made legal. But maybe it serves certain people in political positions to keep up the price, similar to how the mobsters were working to control alcohol distribution and sales as well as certain politicians and corporations during the 1920s and early 1930s.