America’s Drug Wars, by Alfred McCoy
9:49 am on July 9, 2021Between the 1960s and 2021, the United States fought two disastrous drug wars in distant lands and historian Alfred McCoy covered them both. The initial one was, of course, the Vietnam War, which, as he reminds us today, left staggering numbers of American soldiers hooked on heroin. In those years, McCoy quite literally tramped the “heroin trail” in Laos, “meeting gangsters and warlords in isolated places,” while covering the grim role our leading intelligence agency played in drugging American troops, first for Harper’s Magazine and then in his book (which the CIA tried to suppress), The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade.
America’s second disastrous drug war was, of course, the Afghan one that the U.S. is now, at least theoretically, leaving in its wake almost 20 years after its 2001 invasion. Meanwhile, the Taliban, which kept itself afloat all those years at least in part on money made from growing, refining, and marketing opium, now threatens to fell the U.S.-supported regime there. And McCoy covered that drug war (even if from a distance) for TomDispatch. From 2010 on, he’s written vividly and repeatedly about how, as he put it in 2016, “Washington’s single and singular accomplishment in all its years there has been to oversee the country’s transformation into the planet’s number one narco-state.” How grimly true.
And for this, unfortunately, there’s a long history. As he wrote in 2010 in the first of his TomDispatch pieces on the subject, the CIA’s covert Afghan war against the Soviet Union in the 1980s “served as the catalyst that transformed the Afghan-Pakistan borderlands into the world’s largest heroin-producing region.” Oh, the irony of it all!
Today, McCoy, author of In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power and the upcoming To Govern the Globe: World Orders and Catastrophic Change, turns to the third drug war this country has been involved in since the Vietnam era. As it happens, this one has been taking place not thousands of miles away in distant war zones, but right here at home and it couldn’t be grimmer.
