The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade by Alfred W. McCoy

The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade Reviews

• 
  Forrest

  I was a Teaching Assistant for Dr. McCoy while in graduate school at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. We taught his highly regarded class on "The Vietnam Wars" together, with him as lecturer and me and another graduate assistant as teachers of the breakout sessions. These were some of my fondest memories of my college career.
  
  Dr. McCoy is an outstanding and rigorous scholar, though this work walks the fine line between journalism and history in a similar way to how Michel Foucault walks the line between philosophy and history. I can vouch for McCoy's authenticity. I've seen his HEAVILY redacted CIA and FBI files. While a graduate student, when he began this research, he had an FBI agent assigned to watch him, even going so far as to follow McCoy for hours at a time and investigate the work that he was doing at the library. Creepy stuff, but not altogether surprising to me. I was raised in the military by a father who had classified clearance and who told me some fairly scary stuff after his clearance ran out post-retirement (though there are still many things that Dad took to the grave with him, things that I will never know). I've also seen OSI (Office of Special Investigations) in action tracking the comings and goings of high school students, GIs, and their families. So, while McCoy's work might seem a bit paranoid, at first blush, don't blow this work off as the work of some crazed conspiracy theorist or paranoid anarchist. You'll find the book thoroughly researched and well-reasoned.
  
  If half of what Dr. McCoy says is true (and I believe much more than half of it is true), then the CIA has a lot to hide and much to answer for. One cannot blame the CIA entirely for their complacency in the Southest Asian, Middle Eastern, and Central American drug trade. To be fair, federal funding maneuvers and congressional budget cuts might have pushed the agency to raise money in whatever way possible (c.f. Iran/Contra scandal). But McCoy's research into the degree to which the CIA was/is involved in the worldwide drug trade is fairly damning of the agency itself.
  
  Not a book for those who like to live with their head in the sand, but too-well documented, researched, and verified to be dismissed as the lunacy of some crackpot. And aren't accusations of insanity a historically-proven way of discrediting one's detractors? Read the book (brace yourself - it's going to take a while) and decide whether or not Dr. McCoy is raving or revealing.
• 
  Erik Graff

  McCoy is an academic historian. His book is an extremely well-researched and well-documented account of the importance of heroin to Southeast Asian politics from the post-war French occupation through their replacement by, first, the C.I.A. and, second, the Armed Forces of the United States of America.
  
  Opium has been produced since time immemorial in the Golden Triangle and has had its place in the lifeways of the peoples indigenous to the area. It is, like alcohol for us, part of the social life of young men, its use usually moderating, without ill effect, with age.
  
  The physiological dangers of habitual opium use were exponentially magnified when European science developed methods of refinement, producing, finally, the quintessential opiate, heroin four--a drug so powerful as to be deadly in overdose.
  
  Until the second world war, the production of heroin for European and American markets was controlled by the Italian Mafia. With Italian fascism's alliance with German Nazism and America's entry into the war, however, heroin was no longer available on our streets, dwindling supplies being carefully controlled by the government for medical use. By war's end, with the possible exception of a few doctor's with access to the precious medicine, heroin addiction was not a social problem in the States. Within a few years all of that changed. Why?
  
  When the U.S.A. and Britain were staging for the invasion of Sicily (my dad was at the Gela landing there), members of military intelligence remembered Lucky Luciano, languishing in SingSing having received a couple of life sentences (with no possibility of parole) after having been successfully prosecuted for "white slavery" by Thomas Dewey. Lucky had connections, particularly with certain relatives of his back in the old country.
  
  Now Mussolini did not get along with Communists and he did not get along with the Mafia, the Reds for principled reasons, the Cosa Nostra for more personal ones. Here, in the States, the F.B.I., under Hoover, did not recognize the existence of the Mafia (for what have been revealed to be very personal reasons on Mr. Hoover's part), but it did recognize the Communist Party, and certain circles such as the military brass and the F.B.I. deemed them a grave threat. Thus, in the councils of government, it was decided to deal with the Mob and cut the Communists out as regards the Sicilian invasion.
  
  In exchange for the release of Luciano to friendlier, foreign climes (Cuba and its mob-owned casinos and ancillary businesses), in exchange for that and for certain other, more important, considerations, the Cosa Nostra cooperated in the planning and process of our occupation of Sicily. Sicily was freed, free to be a virtual safe haven for the Mob, their primary political enemies, the Communists, having been marginalized.
  
  The other considerations, the really important ones, were economic. The Mafia would have its monopoly of the heroin trade and its markets restored. Thus the return of the social plague, quickly, and, until recently, the virtual inability of any other players to get a slice of the heroin business.
  
  The postwar French populace, unlike their military and elements of their elites, were not particularly interested in regaining the Southeast Asian colonies. Indeed, France, like Italy, may well have freely elected a Left government were it not for U.S. interference in their elections. Still, despite that, the voters made it clear enough thru the representatives they were able to elect that no colonial reestablishment would be tolerated in Asia and they expressed that sentiment by denials of funding. The United States, after Roosevelt's death, began to pick up the slack, supplying the French military both openly (starting in '47) and covertly.
  
  Now "covert" means secretly. Only so much money could be made available thru black budget fancy bookkeeping. Besides, the U.S.A had had a long tradition of opposing colonialism and dictatorship, a tradition that the millions who had lived thru the war had thought they were upholding. Indeed, under Roosevelt, there had actually been some serious sentiment in the Executive to allow the peoples of the area the independence they had been fighting for, first against the Chinese, then the Vichy and the Japanese, now the French Republic. Thus the agents on the ground, the operatives of the C.I.A. and its dummy, "civilian" corporations were, like Ollie North fighting for "freedom" from the bowels of Washington, encouraged to find their own means of funding above and beyond. Following the trail already blazed by French intelligence and military circles, our agents got involved in the reestablishment of the lucrative heroin business.
  
  One could go on and on--an McCoy does, taking the story into our period of military involvement in VietNam under Presidents Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon. For that part, probably the most interesting to American readers, read the book.
  
  For the next chapter, the part after his date of publication, for the American defeat and the Communist liquidation of the heroin trade thru their country, read McCoy's subsequent volume about Afghanistan (The Politics of Heroin, reviewed here also).
  
• 
  Julio Pino

  No James Bond thriller is weirder or more provocative than this true life horror. Remember that scene in SID AND NANCY in which the Black methadone dispenser tells our two drug-addled youth, "You ever hear of the Golden Triangle? You know who flies this shit into the U.S.? The CIA. You two should be out making healthy anarchy instead of working for the government by turning into drug zombies." It's all true! Back in 1972 historian Alfred McCoy, who is still with us, bless his erudite soul, published THE POLITICS OF HEROIN IN SOUTHEAST ASIA ,documenting how after World War II and until the Viet Nam War, still raging at the time, the Central Intelligence Agency had collaborated with the Chinese warlords, many of them veterans of Jian Gai Jeck's defeated Nationalist Army, who controlled the opium fields of the Golden Triangle---where Burma, Thailand and Laos meet---to fight their common enemy, the Communists of Indochina, while the CIA either turned a blind eye or collaborated with shipping that heroin, via Air America, a CIA airline front company, to the United States. In other words, the very people flooding the streets of America with heroin during the Viet Nam War were America's allies during that war. Of course McCoy was denounced by the mainstream media as a crank but his conclusions have held up and this book is still in print. With what we now know of CIA collaboration in running cocaine for the Contras in Nicaragua into the U.S. in the 1980s, and the connection between the U.S. government, Afghan warlords and heroin dealers, 1979-present, McCoy's book is both timely and prophetic.
• 
  Yigal Zur

  amazing research. i found it so intetesting
• 
  Erik Graff

  This book constitutes a summary of McCoy's 1972 Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia (see review) and an update leading into the nineties. While the prior book was primarily focused on Southeast Asia, this one points towards Afghanistan, where the opiate trade has retreated since the American retreat from Vietnam.
  
  There is no debate on the simple fact that while once most world heroin production occurred in Southeast Asia, now almost all of it occurs in Afghanistan. Nor is there any question that prior to the United States of America getting involved in trying to drive the Soviets out of the country, Afghanistan produced little more opium than required for domestic consumption. Nor, finally, is there any question that the Communist governments of, first, Peoples' China, second, Vietnam and other Asian states, effectively wiped out the opium/heroin business in their countries soon upon obtaining power. Why is this so?
  
  McCoy tells us why, with ample documentation, and his explanation may go far towards explaining why we are so adamantly committed to controlling the region today.
• 
  Ed

  Odd book. McCoy is a historian but the main part of this book, which was intially published as "The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia" was written based on work he did while following the trail of heroin during the war in Vietnam, generally the kind of stuff done by a journalist or ethnographer. McCoy himself is an accomplished scholar of the area with several important books on the history of the Philippines. The front and back sections of the book, on the history of the drug trade in the early part of the last century through World War II, run by the Corsican and Sicialian Mafia and the post-Vietnam era, run through Columbia and Mexico, seemed tacked on to update and expand the book for a revised edition. They cover nothing new and are based largely on secondary sources.
  
  His main conclusions, that illegal opiates could not be moved into the United States in such huge quantaties and for such a long time without complicity of significant parts of the government, is well known and accepted.
• 
  Kelbaenor (Dan)

  A monumental work of reporting and in depth secret history. The book is very dense and a little repetitive because the updated edition tacks on so much that happened in the 30 years since it was published but very worth it. McCoy documents with meticulous data the complicity between the CIA's covert wars around the world and the nearly ubiquitous rise in drug lords in the regions they're operating in. Only demerit is that McCoy somehow remained a liberal after writing it so theres some naive stuff in his conclusion but overall a vital piece of 20th century history. Highly highly recommended, one of the most important pieces of evidence for the gangster nature of the US imperial security state.
• 
  Andrew

  I cannot believe the amount of information that this book contained. While there were a myriad of topics covered, some of the main topics covered by the book include the way that the British used opium and heroin to create an "enslaved" workforce, the complicity of the Americans--specifically the CIA--in the opium trade, American "confusion" of progressive, southeast Asian governments with communism, the complete denial and concealment of American GIs with heroin problems, and the extreme amounts that Americans were willing to cast a blind eye toward in order to "fight communism." I had no clue what we were guilty of doing in this region.
  
  What a scathing expose that McCoy writes. This book--far from being partisan, as I first expected--simply lays out the facts as seen by one with firsthand experience. These facts are pretty ugly.
• 
  Tentatively, Convenience

  I can't stress enuf how important this bk is to me. While the early edition that I refer to here focuses primarily on the US & Southeast Asia, particularly in the Vietnam War era, its extremely well-researched information is clearly applicable to explaining the covert machinations of ALL GOVERNMENTS. If you want to understand in detail how heroin is used to both control & destroy domestic populations AND 'foreign' ones AND how its production & sale is a major source of war-mongering funding, READ THIS BK.
• 
  Helen

  This book, the 2003 edition of the original 1972 book ¨The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia,¨ was certainly an eye-opener for me. I had no idea that the CIA enlisted criminals, such as members of the Corsican Mafia, as allies in its covert activities throughout the 40 years of the Cold War. The criminals sometimes were drug lords who pursued a drug business which included paying and equipping their militias, heroin processing laboratories, caravans etc. In one covert war, the CIA facilitated the remnants of the Chinese Nationalist (KMT) Army that had retreated into Burma; the sale of opium grown in the tribal areas of northern Burma financed their activities in China such as attempting to destabilize Communist China by trying to get the Chinese to rebel, and maintaining listening posts along the Chinese border which they manned and protected. This book describes in exhaustive detail how the CIA allied itself with anti-communist forces in Burma, Laos, Afghanistan, and Central America - many of whom were also drug traffickers, and then either looked the other way or found ways to dissuade US or UN drug control or investigation efforts, so that the secret wars the opium or cocaine financed could continue. I recommend this book to anyone interested in the 40 year Cold War vs Communism - how it was conducted by the CIA through proxies, sometimes drug lords who also could become warlords who controlled secret armies and territories.
  
  Here are the quotes:
  
  ¨The general...once head of French espionage in Indochina...[explained] ...how he had used the opium trade to finance his...covert operations.¨
  
  ¨...a....Vietnamese Navy captain...laid out charts detailing the movement of heroin from Laos into Phnom Penh on aircraft and then down the Mekong River to Saigon on vietnamese Navy ships.¨
  
  ¨...a Lao general...was shipping heroin to American soldiers fighting in South Vietnam.¨
  
  ¨Opium...the only profitable business in these hills.¨
  
  ¨...[The CIA´s] alliance with Nationalist Chinese irregulars in Burma had expanded opium production...¨
  
  ¨...[The CIA´s] complicity in the disastrous heroin and cocaine epidemics of the 1980s.¨
  
  ¨...narcotics...traded like major global commodities... ...every attempt at interdiction...has contributed...to an expansion of both production and consumption.¨
  
  ¨Narcotics... ...the source of extraordinary profits and power.¨
  
  ¨...the poppy plant...cultivated and traded across Asia for over a millennium, first...legal...then...as an illicit narcotic.¨
  
  ¨Amphetamine first synthesized in 1887, ¨ecstasy¨ (MDMA) ...1914, ...methamphetamine 1919.¨
  
  ¨...the opium poppy...sheds its petals to expose an egg-shaped bulb filled with...narcotic sap.¨
  
  ¨...all early European colonial ventures in Asia ...profited from the commercialization of drugs...caffeine, nicotine, or opiates. ...Java´s coffee exports [were controlled by the Dutch], ...Spanish ... tobacco monopoly in the Philippines. ....British...the Bengal opium trade. European...[transformation of] ...drugs from luxury goods into commodities of mass consumption...¨
  
  ¨...state opium monopolies ....close to 20 percent of total tax revenues in Siam and over 50 percent in British Malaya.¨
  
  ¨In the West...the pharmaceutical industry began mass-producing morphine and heroin.¨
  
  ¨In 1898...Bayer...of Germany...began mass production of...heroin...¨
  
  ¨In 1906, the American Medical Association approved heroin for general use....¨
  
  ¨...Merck ...the first to manufacture cocaine in concentrated crystal form.¨
  
  ¨...drug manufacturers sold massive quantities of cocaine in popular remedies...¨
  
  ¨...Parke-Davis...a line of coca cordials, cocaine cigarettes, hypodermic capsules, ointments, and sprays...¨
  
  ¨..mass narcotics...part of a larger transformation of life and diet in the industrial age.¨
  
  ¨...eighteenth-century diet of ...grains [changed to]...one spiced with large quantities of protein (eggs and beef), glucose (sugar), and caffeine (coffee and tea).¨
  
  ¨Narcotics addiction...rising... ....sales of patent medicines...most...opium-based, increased....¨
  
  ¨...tea and opium became integral to world trade...¨
  
  ¨...U.S. religious movements won legislative reforms.¨
  
  ¨...global movement for prohibition of narcotics...in the 1870s....the Protestant churches of England and America...launched a crusade against the opium trade.¨
  
  ¨...decline in legal sales did not end addiction in America.¨
  
  ¨...prohibition...organized crime expanded...alcohol prohibition ... repealed after ... thirteen years in 1933...ban on narcotics...permanent...heroin a ...source of income for organized crime....¨
  
  ¨....the forty years of the cold war, ...narcotics control...the sum of... interaction between prohibition and protection.¨
  
  ¨...Communism...an immediate global threat. ...Truman...created the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in 1947...espionage and covert action. ...its agents ...alliances with any group, drug merchants included, useful in the fight against Communism.¨
  
  ¨...forty years...covert wars...Burma ...1950s, Laos...1960s, ...Afghanistan...1980s. ...tribal armies...warlords used the agency's arms and protection to become major drug lords.¨
  
  ¨...drug lords...effective anti-Communist allies...agents...tolerated the illicit traffic.¨
  
  ¨...Burma´s opium production...CIA air logistics, Thai military protection, ...Taiwanese financial support. ...Afghanistan...1980s...logistical support of Pakistan's Inter-Service Intelligence, ...protection of...CIA covert operation, ...the services of Pakistani banks, ...the Bank of Credit & Commerce International (BCCI).¨
  
  ¨...the agency tolerated it...blocked investigations...covert war zones enforcement-free areas....¨
  
  ¨...the 1980s, Afghanistan´s harvest increased from...estimated 100 tons in 1971 to 2,000 tons in 1991...to 4,600 tons in the war's aftermath. ...after the cold war´s end, ....Afghanistan, Burma, and Laos....the world's three leading opium producers.¨
  
  ¨...1948 to 1950...allied with the Corsican underworld to fight the French Communist Party for control ...of Marseille.¨
  
  ¨...the Bureau of Narcotics...Bangkok...three agents in the late 1970s...CIA covert operation with hundreds of operatives and a fleet of aircraft, ...an opium army of 12,00 troops in northern Burma.¨
  
  ¨...the U.S. incarceration rate...mandatory drug sentencing...soared from 138 in 1980 to 702 in 2002...a doomsday machine that continues to fill prisons without limit or logic. ...the world's largest prison population...¨
  
  ¨...late 1990s, 180 million people, or 4.2 percent of the world's adult population, were using illicit drugs worldwide...¨
  
  ¨Prohibition...contributed to the growth of drug trafficking... late 1990s, ...the global drug traffic is a $400 billion industry...larger than the trade in textiles, steel, or automobiles.¨
  
  ¨...by 1994, Mexico´s cocaine cartels ...paying annual bribes totaling $460 million ...grossing $30 billion, four times the value of the country's oil exports.¨
  
  ¨...drug prohibition...illicit economy...funds criminal syndicates, highland warriors, ethnic liberation movements, terrorist networks....¨
  
  ¨...the CIA´s willingness to form tactical, anti-Communist alliances with major narcotics dealers...¨
  
  ¨...Dewey...racket-busting district attorney...governorship...presidential nomination...faint compared with Mussolini´s ...vendetta against the Sicilian Mafia.¨
  
  ¨...the beginning of World War II, the Mafia...driven out of the cities...surviving only in the mountain areas of western Sicily.¨
  
  ¨...the Allied military Government selected mafiosi as mayors in...towns across western Sicily. ...fugitive ...gangster Vito Genovese...interpreter....¨
• 
  Corto

  A great companion to "The Honourable Schoolboy". I read this roughly 20+ years ago, and it was fascinating.
• 
  Matthew Petti

  If you’ve ever heard that the CIA caused the crack epidemic, you’re familiar with the journalism of Gary Webb. But before Gary Webb, there was The Politics of Heroin by historian Alfred McCoy, who stumbled upon a link between CIA covert operations in Southeast Asia and the heroin epidemic among American soldiers in Vietnam.
  
  I read McCoy’s updated 2003 edition, which ties his findings from Southeast Asia to other drug hotspots around the world. Over the past few decades, he had discovered a consistent pattern of the U.S. military and intelligence agencies working with drug dealers as part of their covert wars. (Importantly, McCoy does *not* argue that the CIA intentionally hooked Americans on drugs, just that it did not care where the drugs went.) As a result, the War on Drugs has been sabotaged from within, with the White House protecting its favorite dealers even while trying to combat a flood of drugs.
  
  McCoy traces this whole pattern to the colonial era. European powers pushed opium onto Asians as a way to extract money and make their colonies easier to control. (Britain famously fought two “Opium Wars” with China over this.) Once opium and other drugs became a serious social ill, those European countries started to crack down. But instead of abolishing the drug trade, prohibition only pushed it underground, where intelligence services could exploit smuggling networks to their own benefit. When the United States occupied South Vietnam, it inherited these networks of power.
  
  Most of McCoy’s fieldwork took place in 1960s Laos, where a conflict known as the Secret War was raging. In order to fight the Communists, the CIA allied with Hmong warlords, who lived in the hills and grew opium. And in order to keep the warlords loyal, the United States helped smuggle their illegal harvest out of the hills on CIA helicopters. Everyone McCoy talked to was quite honest, as that was “just how things worked” in Laos. Once it left the country, the opium was refined into heroin — and then sold straight to U.S. troops by corrupt South Vietnamese officers.
  
  The Hmong secret army was only part of a network of pro-U.S. drug dealers in the region. French-Vietnamese mafia dons, Laotian princes, Thai police commanders, and Burmese rebels all had their hands in the pot. At one point, the anticommunist Guomindang in Burma got into a fight with some local tribes over opium, only for the (also anticommunist) Royal Laotian Air Force to bomb both sides and steal the opium. McCoy meets some truly bizarre figures while tracing this network, including a Christian missionary turned CIA agent who has the locals worship him as a god.
  
  The same pattern repeated itself throughout the 1980s, even as the War on Drugs was in full swing. When the Communists took over Afghanistan in 1979, the CIA and Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence supported local mujahedin rebels. Those rebels, of course, also smuggled opium, which became Afghanistan’s main industry after brutal Soviet bombing wrecked the rest of the economy. (Neighboring Pakistan went from zero heroin addicts in 1979 to 1.5 million in 1985.) During the Nicaraguan civil war between the Christian socialist Sandinistas and the right-wing Contras, the Reagan administration backed the Contras. And the Contras turned to — you guessed it — cocaine smuggling under CIA protection.
  
  Reports about the Contras’ smuggling started to come out as America was in the grips of the crack epidemic. The journalist Gary Webb eventually discovered that the drug dealer who helped introduce crack cocaine to Los Angeles was getting his supplies from Contra-connected (and thus CIA-backed) drug smugglers. Webb’s report caused outrage in the black community. When the CIA investigated itself in response to the controversy, it was forced to admit that it had worked with known traffickers, including Alan Hyde, the “godfather” of organized crime in western Honduras.
  
  “Just as there is little evidence, and less logic, to the proposition that the CIA in Laos wanted a third of the U.S. troops fighting in South Vietnam to become heroin addicts, so there is no evidence that the CIA later targeted Blacks in South Central Los Angeles,” McCoy writes. “During the 1980s, however, there was every indication that the CIA was aware that its Afghan and Central American operations contributed to the export of cocaine and heroin to the United States — and did nothing to stop this drug flow.”
  
  Surprisingly, McCoy does believe that drug prohibition can work — but only when it is not undermined by governments’ covert dealings with drug lords. (The end of the book is basically a broadside against the CIA’s entire existence.) And, of course, attacking supply has to be accompanied by reducing demand, which means treating drug addiction as a public health problem. Two decades later, the recent U.S. defeat in Afghanistan and shifting American attitudes towards drugs may finally bring McCoy’s ideas to fruition.
• 
  Reid tries to read

  Intro
  This is an overlong and wordy overview of The Politics of Heroin, where I attempt to use the book to trace the growth, increased resilience, and ever changing complexity of global drug production and trade, as well as point out the ways which the CIA helped foster this drug trade to its own benefit.
  
  As a commodity Opium has always been extremely valuable. The opium poppy can be used to produce various drugs (opium, cocaine, heroin), and although addiction to these drugs is obviously very harmful it is hard to combat due to the fact that opium can be grown in any temperate or highland area, meaning crop suppression always simply shifts cultivation, sometimes even across entire continents. At the same time, since the human brain's chemistry makes all humanity potential addicts, repression merely forces traffickers to seek new markets in another neighbor­hood, nation, or continent. Thus, as McCoy aptly demonstrates time and time again throughout The Politics of Heroin, attempts at drug prohibition and wars on drugs have actually contributed, rather than impeded, the growth of the drug trade throughout the world; in turn making the trafficking of illegal drugs one of the modern world’s largest industries. McCoy states that: “In the late 1990s, the United Nations reported that the global drug traffic is a $400 billion industry with 180 million users, 4.2 percent of the world's adults, and 8 percent of world trade­ larger than the trade in textiles, steel, or automobiles”. Freed from formal regulations by its prohibition, the massive illegal enterprise of drug trafficking instead pays informal taxes to police, customs, military, and politicians across the globe. This in turn leads to drug lords amassing large amounts of power and influence. This is why the CIA has both helped protect drug lords and foster the drug trade throughout the agency's existence.
  
  To covertly fight Communism and the Soviet menace in Europe the Central Intelligence Agency (as well as MI6 and various European intelligence agencies created by and subordinate to the CIA) fostered the growth and power of various far right fascist groups through the supplement of weapons, intelligence, cash, and professional training. In Asia, however, the war against communism and China was fought through CIA backed drug lords. The usage of criminals is an integral part of the CIA’s modus operandi because criminal assets are skilled in what CIA agent Lucien Conein once called "the clandestine arts": a unique capacity, shared by spies and criminals, to conduct secretive and major operations outside the bounds of civil society in ways that leave no trace.
  
  1930s
  The CIA’s legacy of complicity in the global drug trade started after America domestically prohibited drugs like opium in the late 1920s, which failed to reduce the number of recreational addicts and simply transferred a large, lucrative clientele to criminal syndicates. By 1930 Lucky Luciano had transformed the American mafia into an organization at the head of America’s heroin and prostitution rackets. This landed Luciano in prison on charges of prostitution. Curiously though, he was later freed by the Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI) during WW2 in exchange for him getting control over the New York waterfront, which had been dealing with sabotage incidents that culminated in the burning of an allied troop transport ship. From this relationship, the ONI sought Luciano’s help for gathering information for an Allied invasion of sicily. In Italy, the local mafia, which had been nearly eradicated by Mussolini, helped Allied troops advance through the country. In exchange, the mafia was given a rebirth: control over towns and cities and were given to local mafia dons who were in turn used to help fight Italy's growing communist resistance movement. The Allied occupation reinstated the Mafia with its full powers, put it once more on the way to becoming a political force, and returned to them the weapons which Fascism had snatched from it. Once in Italy, Lucky Luciano, along with hundreds of other mafioso deported by the United States, created a distribution network so massive that, by McCoy’s numbers: helped raise the rates of narcotics addicts in the United States from an estimated 20,000 at the close of the war to 60,000 in 1952 and to 150,000 by 1965.
  
  Luciano’s mafia had been relying on legal supplies from an Italian drug company to produce its heroin. However, once regulations tightened up he was faced with the choice of expanding his secret drug production labs or seeking a new source of supply. He chose the latter, and by the 1950s Luciano began to rely on Marseille’s Corsican syndicate more and more as his heroin supplier. The Corsicans had major political power and controlled the waterfront of the major port city of Marseille. This was largely due to an alliance they had built with the CIA and French intelligence services who, in exchange for toppling the local communist government and breaking labor strikes in 1947 and 1952, gave the Corsicans full reign to do as they pleased. This allowed the Corsicans, for a full quarter century, from 1948 to 1972, to dominate the U.S. heroin market and dispatched, through their alliance with the Mafia, a steady flow of high-grade heroin across the Atlantic. As McCoy writes: “In supplying the Corsican syndicates with money and support, the CIA broke the last barrier to unrestricted Corsican smuggling operations in Marseille. When control over the docks was compounded with the political influence the milieu had gained with CIA assistance in 1947, conditions were ideal for Marseille's growth as America's heroin laboratory”. By the 1970s a new source of heroin would begin to dominate the world market: that of the Golden Triangle in Southeast Asia. These drug lords were also backed by the CIA.
  
  The Golden Triangle
  The Golden Triangle (Laos, Vietnam, Burma, Thailand) had always been a consistent market for Opium due to the fostering of said market by imperialist European powers throughout much of the 18th and 19th century. China had been the region’s main opium market (against its own will) and producer. However, in 1949, when the Chinese People's Liberation Army won the civil war and drove the last remnants of Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalist Army out of China, Mao began a massive opium eradication campaign. The shortage of illicit opium in southern Asia due to this campaign created a crisis for Southeast Asia's drug trade, long dependent on imports to sustain its large addict population. So, Starting as a drug-deficient region reliant on imports in the 1930s, Southeast Asia became self-sufficient in opium during the 1950s and would by the 1980s emerge as the world's main heroin supplier. In the struggle to contain Asian communism, the United States fought hot wars in Korea and Vietnam using its full array of conventional combat forces. Along China's southern border, however, the West waged the cold war with unconventional tactics. Instead of artillery and infantry, covert combat in the mountains of Southeast Asia became a war by proxy in which local allies were more important than firepower operating beyond the controls of bureaucracy in Paris and Washington, a small cadre of clandestine warriors struck ad hoc alliances with the tribes and warlords who inhabited the mountains of the Golden Triangle.
  
  The CIA’s strategy in the region went as follows: By drawing on the resources of a powerful tribal leader or local warlord, a CIA agent could achieve a covert operational capacity far beyond his budgetary limits. To maintain power these warlords used the CIA's resources-­ arms, ammunition, and, above all, air transport-to increase their control over the opium crop. Instead of opposing the expansion of their ally's opium economic base, most CIA operatives embraced it, knowing it increased their client's combat effectiveness and thereby gave the entire operation a certain independence from Washington's directives. As the warlord's power from opium profits increased, so did the agent's combat capacity and personal power. Thus, the CIA's complicity was not a matter of mere financial pressure. It represented, at a superficial level, a bid for an increase in combat efficiency. By investing these leaders with the authority of its alliance, the CIA provides protection that a drug lord can use to expand his share of the traffic. Not only is a protected opium trader less vulnerable to arrest he gains, through his CIA alliance, access to international transport or commercial contacts that facilitate both the movement and the marketing of drugs.
  
  In the region the CIA fought 2 covert wars, 1 in Burma and 1 in Laos. They also overtly supported military dictatorships in South Vietnam and Thailand, both of which used the opium trade as the main source of revenue. In South Vietnam, complicity in the heroin trade resulted in a large percentage of US soldiers stationed in Vietnam to become heroin addicts, a problem which soon followed them home to America.
  In Burma, remnants of the KMT essentially started their own colony against the wishes of the Burmese government, which they used to conduct unsuccessful raids into China at the behest of the CIA. During the 1950s, the CIA provided Nationalist Chinese (KMT) irregulars in northern Burma with the arms and air logistics that they used to transform this region, in less than a decade, into the world's largest opium producer. Although Burma would not become America's main source of heroin for another thirty years, the CIA's support for the KMT created a vast opium reserve that stood ready to fill any unmet demand anywhere in the world, including America. With CIA support, the KMT remained in Burma until 1961, when a Burmese army offensive drove them into Laos and Thailand. By this time, however, the Kuomintang had already used their control over the tribal populations to expand Shan state opium production by almost 500 percent-from less than 80 tons after World War II to an estimated 300-400 tons by 1962. In 1973, twenty years after the CIA first began supporting KMT troops in the Golden Triangle, the KMT controlled almost one-third of the world's total illicit opium supply.
  
  In Laos, the CIA's covert action assets had become the leading heroin dealers. The CIA's apparent complicity in the traffic was due to the agency's alliance with the Hmong hill tribes. When the CIA began its Laos operation in the late 1950s, it inherited a French paramilitary apparatus that had used Hmong guerrillas to fight the Vietnamese Communists in the First Indochina War. For fifteen years, 1960-1974, the CIA maintained a secret army of 30,000 Hmong tribesmen in the mountains of northern Laos-participants in a covert war that remains the largest single operation in the agency's forty-year history. Control over the opium crop reinforced the authority of the CIA's Hmong commander, General Vang Pao, transforming him from a minor officer into a tribal warrior who could extract adolescent recruits from villages no longer willing to accept the war's high casualties. When fighting reached their mountain villages, the Hmong became isolated from normal highland trade and increasingly dependent on U.S. aircraft for access to markets. By making Vang Pao the man who approved aircraft for movement of rice into villages and opium out, the CIA gave him direct control over the two economic essentials of once autonomous Hmong households. With such power, Vang Pao made the scattered clans and hamlets of Hmong highland society into one people, one army, who fought to the death for the CIA until their eventual defeat.
  
  After pouring billions of dollars into Southeast Asia for more than twenty years, the United States by 1972 had acquired considerable power in the region. And it had used this power to create new nations where none existed, handpick prime ministers, topple governments, and crush revolutions. America had covered up involvement by client governments, CIA contract airlines had carried opium, and individual CIA agents had winked at the opium traffic. As an indirect consequence of American involvement in the Golden Triangle until 1972, opium production steadily increased, no. 4 heroin production flourished, and the area's poppy fields became linked to markets in Europe and the United States. Southeast Asia's Golden Triangle grew 70 percent of the world's illicit opium, supplied an estimated 30 percent of America's heroin, and was capable of supplying the United States with unlimited quantities of heroin for generations to come.
  
  War on Drugs: Nixon
  Following the US’ exit out of the region with the failure of the Vietnam war, President Nixon immediately started a new one: a war on drugs. Inadvertently, this war actually created new markets for heroin and eventually led to the fostering of cocaine and synthetics markets as well. In 1971 Nixon declared the war on drugs to be a national emergency and he therefore issued a formal declaration of war on said drugs. In his opening battle in this new kind of war, Nixon attacked Turkey's opium production, then the second highest in Central Asia and the source o f80 percent of America's heroin supply. Only a week after de­claring his drug war in June 1971, Nixon announced that Turkey would cease all poppy production in a year, terms with which Turkey complied. Soon after, the Nixon administration would target Southeast Asia for opium eradication as well. This did lead to a narcotics drought in the United States; a drought which was soon filled. As the reduced demand raised the prices of street drugs to new heights, laboratories and poppy plantations in the tri-state area of Sinoloa, Durango, and Chihuahua expanded rapidly to fill the void, raising Mexico's share of the U.S. market from 39 percent in 1972 to 90 percent by 1975.
  Although the DEA had accomplished its assigned mission of reducing the heroin flow from Southeast Asia to America, Heroin exported from Asia simply found markets that did not have an informal “DEA customs duty”. So, Australia and Europe, which had effectively been drug-free for decades, became a new market for cheap heroin, where it spread rapidly. “From insignificant levels in 1970, Western Europe had developed an addict population estimated at 190,000 to 330,000 by the end of the decade-a market of the same scale as America's”. By opening up new markets and finding new production zones, the global drug trade had come out of Nixon’s drug war as a complex and more resilient trade network. And what was the response to this now evolved trade? More military suppression of course.
  
  Under pressure from the White House Mexico launched its own drug suppression campaign in 1975. This simply shifted production of Mexican marijuana to Columbia, and previously Mexican heroin production was taken over by Pakistan and Afghanistan. Internally, the United States drug market responded to a decline in available narcotics by substituting them for domestic synthetic drugs. As heroin imports dropped, domestic criminals began building up amphetamine laboratories, which soon dotted the northeastern United States. In time this made cities like Philadelphia the "speed capital of the world”. By 1982, Central Asia's opium harvest surged to 1,600 tons and its heroin met 60 percent of U.S. de­mand. Only a decade after Nixon had declared war on drugs, Attorney General William French Smith announced that the U.S. addict population had climbed to 450,000, which was higher than before the drug war began!
• 
  Lee Tracy

  McCoy was a PhD from Yale, a scholar in Asian history teaching at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia. The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia was widely ignored by mainstream reviewers of the time because it linked drug lords to US military-intelligence men. Much of the information in the book came from interviews with eyewitnesses.
  
  US support of anti-communists in Asia, who often financed their activities through poppy, opium and heroin growing and manufacturing, led to this situation. It really began in WWII, when mobsters like Lucky Luciano and Vito Genovese were let out of jail to help the US invasion of Sicily, and then to keep the unions in southern France out of the hands of the Communists in the post-war years. The latter focused on the port city of Marseille, which soon became a center of heroin refining and exporting (the "French Connection). In the '50s, the Shah of Iran put a stop to the massive poppy industry in that country. Some of the remnants of Chiang Kai-shek's troops fled into the jungles of Burma after their defeat by the Communists; the US pressured Burma into allowing those troops to stay there, and the CIA began supplying them with Company airlines (Civil Air Transport and Sea Supply Corporation, which soon became Air America).
  
  The KMT troops in Burma grew opium to finance themselves, while they used US arms and sometimes CIA planes to fly the opium out to Thailand or Taiwan. The drug center of the region was the town of Chiang Mai in northwest Thailand. The commander of the Thai police, Gen. Phao, was in on the racket and was the CIA's man in that country. In the '50s, heroin became a major problem in the US. The French also cooperated with the heroin trade in Indochina, and most of the leaders of South Vietnam (including Diem and Nhu) were involved as well. The Montagnard (or Hmong, also Meo) tribesmen in the hills were both fierce fighters and poppy farmers. Air America flew opium out of the Montagnard villages. DEA Far East regional director John J. O'Neill: "The kind of people they were dealing with up there, the whole economy was opium. The were dealing with the KMT and the KMT was involved in heroin. I have no doubt that Air America was used to transport opium." The Army's Criminal Investigation Division accidentally discovered a mammoth scheme where GI corpses were split open and stuffed with heroin before being flown to the US. Conspiring officers at the other end took the heroin out - up to 50 pounds of heroin per dead GI.
• 
  Paul

  I read this book a long time ago but it served as a deep education in statecraft, capitalism, and war. The book is extremely well-documented and demonstrates exactly what the subtitle states: The CIA's complicity in the production, transport, and sale of heroin from where it was grown in Southeast asia to markets in America. Beyond the obvious cynicism, the author provides a very simple thesis: Only governments have access to the level of infrastructure required to manufacture and distribute illicit drugs like heroin. The CIA went on to use the money made selling Heroin to fund an illegal war in Cambodia, arming Hmong tribespeople to fight a guerrilla war against communists in Cambodia. I read this well before the current opium epidemic, although at that time (the mid-90s) as well, we were in the midst of an opium epidemic that cost me a lot of friends. The lessons that this book have to offer are startling and reveal the true nature of governments, the US government in particular, and its military and intelligence organizations.
• 
  Stacia

  This is a meticulously researched*, densely written, fascinating analysis of the covert wars waged by the CIA and its effects--intended or otherwise--on the global drug trade. It's not a quick read, but it's worth the time if you're interested in geopolitics and the drug trade. The book was published in 1972, and this is a revised and expanded edition published in 2003. The analysis of the 30 years since the first edition seems to confirm the book's original premise, that the CIA's focus on containing Communism (or now, terrorism) at all costs has led to complicity in the global drug trade, often with horrible and far-reaching consequences.
  
  *That being said, I found a minor but significant error in the final chapter, which mentions a warlord by name but affiliates him incorrectly, so it's impossible to tell which is actually being referenced, the warlord or the group. I'm tempted to track down the source cited in the endnote, just out of curiosity!
• 
  Shea Mastison

  To begin with, this book is not exactly a page turner. It hasn't been thoroughly edited for readability; and I suspect a lack of editing is responsible for a considerable part of this book's length.
  
  With that said, McCoy does a fantastic job analyzing the global drug trade up to the early '90s; and pointing out instances in which the CIA was complicit in shipping drugs, or aiding in the drug trade in general. He analyzes the drug trade and CIA complicity beginning in America, moving to Southeast Asia, the Middle East, and finally ending in South and Central America.
  
  This book is very much a product of its time (the Bush-ista Drug War); and I certainly don't agree with all of McCoy's conclusions. However, if you're under any sort of impression that the "Good Guy/Bad Guy" dichotomy is real in international politics; this could certainly fix that.
• 
  6655321

  Occasionally a tad repetitive (reciting events and claims/sources throughout various sections) and suffering from some wonky editing (why analyse the impact of the contra affair AFTER detailing the rise of the rise of the heroin trade in Pakistan/Afghanistan...) McCoy's work is well written, documented, and manages to (despite my gripes) hold its reader for its fairly substantial length.
• 
  Marc

  An enlightening and detailed look at the heroin trade and its geopolitical influences throughout the world. Very detailed (which can bog the narrative down at times), but obviously well-researched. Quite disheartening in the our (the US) complicity in the heroin trade and its far-reaching effects on the health and lives of people throughout the world.
• 
  John

  Phenomenal book about U.S. sponsorship of opium production in Asia during the Vietnam War. Written by a guy who hung out with drug traffickers and producers, Mafia members, in order to write this thing, got death threats, etc...
• 
  Justin Podur

  I learned a lot from this excellent and thoroughly researched book, which shows that covert operations and the drug trade are inextricably linked. The case he takes on is Southeast Asia during the Vietnam war, but the same thing happened in Latin America and in Afghanistan. Terrific book.
• 
  Cameron

  Seriously readable and very informative.
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  Vana

  Everyone should read this book...maybe their perspective on our government and military would be very different. There are plenty of books just like it, well documented. Just saying!
• 
  Peter Lance

  A landmark book on the explosion of smack during the Vietnam War
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  Roger Mexico

  He was my professor!
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  Nicholas

  Extremely interesting read!! The current opioid issues began 2 centuries ago with the support of U.S. government along the way. A must read!
• 
  James Mc Donald

  CIA Mind Control Program. Guards protect the Opium there & controls the Largest Prison population here. So why 9/11 report?
  
  
  Most strongly recommended publication for mature American adults looking for facts. Most strongly recommended to ID State Crimes. Most strongly recommend for an insight to the BIG picture. For me, this outstanding work IS one of the top 5 publications I've discovered all while traveling through the rabbit hole of discovery. It all leads back here!
  
  Alfred McCoy Studied at Columbia, the University of California-Berkeley, and Yale, where he received a Ph.D. in the history of Southeast Asia. He has written extensively on the region and on U.S. covert operations, including torture and Impunity, Policing America's Empire, A Question of Torture, and The Politiccs of Heroin. He is now the J.R.W. Smail Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
  
  The path I have been following has lead me here as one of the connections associated with the events of 9/11. I read this publication specifically trying to understand about the relationship of the CIA, ISI, the mutaheddin, the Taliban, al Qaeda, Pakistan and Afghanistan and how these elements tied into the tragic events of 9/11 from a source not necessary intent as 9/11 as the primary subject. This profound publication was not in response to 9/11 where as it was already published in 1972 that has been updated, to present the global drug trade with Heroin and the connection with the CIA. Even so, this publication is the proof that the 9/11 commission report was sorely lacking a full accounting, and this profound publication proves that. The 9/11 commission report noted on Page 56, "The international environment for bin Ladin's efforts was ideal. Saudi Arabia and the United States supplied billions of dollars worth of secret assistance to rebel groups in Afghanistan. But, quoting from this publication (The Politics of Heroin), "By ignoring the drug trafficking of its covert allies, the CIA violated the U.S. National Intelligence Act and later executive orders requiring it to provide intelligence to support the drug war." Shows that there are indeed elements within our government that is criminal.
  
  This publication also shows that because of the direct relationship that the CIA had in operational control with the ISI and the fact the CIA created the Taliban & al Qaeda via the ISI, the Commission report on page 333, noted that Mahmud Ahmed (who funded the Taliban) was visited by the Pakistan intelligence chief, conveyed the United States various demands, that included turning over Bin Ladin even though the CIA had created Bin Ladin the CIA was the controlling authority in the first place. Thus, the official 9/11 commission report again failed to be independent, impartial as the law direct as such by the way the information was presented.
  
  "In a society that seeks to prefect the rule of law, willful illegality has lasting repercussions." Page 529
  
  The author's intent was to show the global drug issues and the CIA's relationship, but his documented efforts have reviled that the CIA's involvement most certainly influenced the events of September 11th, 2001.
  
  It's all here.
  
  1) "The CIA's decade-long Afghan war during the 1980's had destabilized a delicate political balance within Central Asia-devastating Afghanistan, destabilizing Pakistan, and mobilizing radical Islam"
  2) "In particulate, the ISI's role as the CIA's surrogate in the Afghan war had invested this military intelligence unit with vast profits from the heroin trade and installed it inside Afghanistan and the patron of radical Islamic parties."
  3) "Though the Soviets had withdrawn their troops, the CIA felt it had a "moral duty to arm the Mujaheddin" for a final assault on Kabul and raised its covert aid to 350 million in 1998"
  4) "Pakistan then backed the formation of a new Pashutun force, the Taliban. With arms from the ISI and fanatical recruits from Pakistan's militant madrasah Islamic schools, the Taliban launched a campaign to capture Kabul in 1995 from its base around the southern city of Kandahar."
  5 "...there was every indication that the CIA was aware that its Afghan and Central American operations contributed to the export of cocaine and heroin to the United States-and did nothing to slow this drug flow"
  6) "Whenever it has been confronted with a expose of drug trafficking by its former allies, the agency has bone to extraordinary lengths to preempt these charges"
  
  With that final observation noted above, how can we assume what is told to us, by elements of our government, is truthful?
  
  Additional publications validating my observations:
  AIDS, Opium, Diamonds, and Empire
  The War on Truth: 9/11, Disinformation and the Anatomy of Terrorism
  Classified Woman-The Sibel Edmonds Story: A Memoir
  Tragedy & Hope: A History of the World in Our Time
  The Iran-Contra Scandal: The Declassified History (The National Security Archive Document Series)The Iran-Contra Scandal (The National Security Archive Document)
  Psychological Warfare and the New World Order: The Secret War Against the American PeopleDefrauding America: Encyclopedia of Secret Operations by the CIA, DEA, and Other Covert Agencies
  The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence
  Dark Alliance: The CIA, the Contras, and the Crack Cocaine Explosion
  None Dare Call It Conspiracy
  American Heart of Darkness: Volume I:The Transformation of the American Republic into a Pathocracy
  
  British East India Company and Opium:
  
  "THE BEIC's premier product was opium. The people running this enterprise learned two major lessons from addicting the Chinese to opium--that narcotizing drugs can weaken an otherwise impermeable society and corrupt it internally making it ripe for control and that there are enormous profits to be made by creating two types of addicts: those who physically crave your product and those who financially crave the perverse rewards from destroying others. These were lessons not lost on the elites of Britain and the United States who ran this dirty business and who have been in charge of the largest global enterprise ever since--the worldwide control and distribution of narcotics. Both drug cultures, legal and illegal as well as the global monetary system that promotes poverty, war and genocide, play a major role in the need to create a disease category called AIDS or Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome. AIDS is a disease pattern that arose out of the confluence of global drug running and global medical, social and economic policies created with intent and malice aforethought at the highest levels. It is the result of the Bretton Woods agreement signed in New Hampshire in 1944.
  
  Beginning in 1913, the Rockefeller backed General Education Board gave millions of dollars to medical schools that disregarded naturopathy, homeopathy and chiropractic or any non toxic healing modality in favor of medicine based on the use of surgery, radiation and especially chemical drugs. Aided by the AMA, a medical monopoly was created. History will note that one of the most cleverly diabolical schemes was the ingenious marketing technique of training a cadre of unsuspecting physicians as a sales force for the drugs manufactured by the Rockefeller Trust. The system allows the doctor to remain aloof from the dirty business of selling while giving him the special privilege of being able to write prescriptions for nostrums he has been trained by the very drug companies who manufacture them to prescribe. Most of these drugs are only for the relief of chronic symptoms and have multiple deleterious side effects. Diseases are managed, they are not cured. Just as the British East India Company learned, repeat customers are wildly profitable." (Dr. Nancy Turner Banks)