The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade Paperback – 1 May 2003

First class first person research, an all time classic on heroin trade..and who has organized and got profit from it. The new edition has added a wonderful short but complete history of the subject from the origins. You can't find a better and more complete book on this theme.

I would strongly recommend this title.Rated. An in depth read for enquiring mindsI give it the highest accolade.

Great book, highly recommend.

Although first published 47 years ago, Alfred W.McCoy's "The Politics of Heroin: CIA complicity in the global drug traffic", is sadly as topical as the day it was first published back in the summer of 1972. At the time the "Company"(as the CIA grandiosly titled itself) issued a heated(if self serving) denial of McCoy's charges, the passage of years (and declassification of relevant internal files from the Agency itself) has pretty much validated his accusations. During the Cold War, the CIA has accepted as allies everyone from war criminals such as Klaus Barbie, to organized crime figures such as Chicago Outfit boss Sam "Mooney" Giancana(in the campaign against Castro), so why not drug traffickers, esp as to quote former CIA Lucien Conein, both groups have an affinity for "the clandestine arts" of working outside normal society. Although charges that the agency engaged in the crack cocaine epidemic that devastated African American inner cities in the US during the 1980s and 1990s are not true(strictly speaking)- the worst that the CIA can be held responsible for is turning a blind eye to drug trafficking by their Contra allies, I think McCoy(who is white) misses the point of this claim. Black America has historically(and with good reason) been inclined to view white officialdom with the blackest(no pun intended) suspicion- from abusive and inhumane medical experiments by doctors(such as the infamous "Tuskegee syphilis study" between 1932 and 1972), J.Edgar Hoover's "COINTELPRO" program against black leaders and groups, be they the late Dr King or the Black Panther Party, so that when claims that the Agency organized the crack cocaine epidemic , it aroused all the deepest suspicions of an already traumatized community. The CIA's apologists(such as Zbigniew Brzezinski) may argue that these activities were justifiable in the campaign against Soviet Communism but this"end justifies the means" argument bears a suggestive and chilling similarity to Marxist ideologues and Soviet leaders such as Lenin and Stalin who blithely asserted that "morality is what serves the interests of Communist revolution". McCoy makes the point that the long term consequences of tolerating or condoning the drug traffic by the "assets" of the Agency have arguably produced effects- drug trafficking and addiction(never mind violent jihadism) that are pretty serious in their own right. To my mind, not just its own citizens but the world at large has a RIGHT to EXPECT better things from the United States of America, than we would the late unlamented Union of Soviet Socialist Republics!

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.

This book is mind boggling, first released in the early 1970's it reported on the recent history of heroin cultivation and trafficking throughout the world for which the CIA tried to suppress its publication. This latest edition brings it up to date and includes sections on the failing war on drugs and recent trends in the market.It is an astonishingly well researched and presented book, facts reel off the page that are sometimes incredulous for their brazenness. The only problem in my opinion is that there are too many facts presented so that one can lose the thread with the introduction of so many characters and goings on.It is a very important book as it demystifies the Heroin trade and reports on how the market works (and one of the most profitable markets on the planet at that)It covers the involvement of governments, military, police, CIA, mafia, taliban, warlords, syndicates and a whole myriad of agencies and organisations. It goes someway to explain the USA's turn around on drugs and the current failing war on drugs and also someway to explain how many countries operate around the world.Fascinating stuff.