(54) After 1979 Afghan opium and heroin entered the world market significantly for the first time and rose from roughly 0 to 60 percent of US consumption by 1980. It soared from 200 metric tons in 1980, the first full year of US support for the drug-trafficking mujahideen Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, to 1,980 metric tons in 1991, when both the United States and the Soviet Union agreed to terminate their aid. (53)Īfghan opium production has been even more responsive to US operations in the area. By 1971, there were also at least seven heroin labs in the region, one of which, close to the CIA base at Ban Houei Sai in Laos, produced an estimated 3.6 tons of heroin a year. In ten years’ time, production had perhaps quadrupled, and at one point during the Vietnam War the output from the Golden Triangle reached 1,200 tons a year. When the CIA airline CAT began its covert flights to Burma in the 1950s, the area produced about 80 tons of opium a year. But the de facto protection conferred on sectors of the opium trade by CIA involvement is clearly a major historical factor for the world crime scourge today. The CIA’s covert operations were not the sole cause for this flood of opium and heroin. In 2003, according to the United Nations, these two areas accounted for 91 percent of the area devoted to illicit opium production and 95 percent of the estimated product in metric tons. It is worth contemplating for a moment the legacy of CIA-supported drug proxies in just two areas - the Golden Triangle and the Golden Crescent. Here is yet another fact that is so alien to our normal view of reality that I myself find it hard to keep in mind: US backdoor covert foreign policy has been the largest single cause of the illicit drugs flooding the world today. Deep History and the Global DrugĬonnection: US Responsibility for the Flood of Heroin in the World. To see Parts 1, 2, 3, and 4, please go here, here, here, and here.Įxcerpt from American War Machine: Deep Politics, the CIA Global Drug Connection, and the Road to Afghanistan ( Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2014), Introduction.

In this final excerpt from his new book, Scott focuses on CIA drug ties into Latin America, and finishes off with the argument that in choosing to tolerate and even work with the drug underworld, the national security state also ends up harming….national security. The details are also highly complex and a challenge to absorb. His decades-long investigation of the connections between the hugely lucrative and unstoppable global drug trade and the national security apparatus is unparalleled. Professor Peter Dale Scott sees what the rest of us miss.

Cocaine Wars by Paul Eddy