War and Drugs

The Role of Military Conflict in the Development of Substance Abuse

Dessa K. Bergen-Cico

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317249382
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

War and Drugs explores the relationship between military incursions and substance use and abuse throughout history. For centuries, drugs have been used to weaken enemies, stimulate troops to fight, and quell post-war trauma. They have also served as a source of funding for clandestine military and paramilitary activity. In addition to offering detailed geopolitical perspectives, this book explores the intergenerational trauma that follows military conflict and the rising tide of substance abuse among veterans, especially from the Vietnam and Iraq-Afghan eras. Addiction specialist Bergen-Cico raises important questions about the past and challenges us to consider new approaches in the future to this longest of US wars.

CHAPTER 1

Introduction

The Escalation of War and Drugs in Relation to One Another

Call off the Global Drug War.

Jimmy Carter, June 16, 2011,¹
U.S. president, recipient of the 2002 Nobel Peace Prize

ON JULY 14, 1969, President Richard Nixon identified drug abuse as “a serious national threat.” Two years later, on June 17, 1971, President Nixon sternly faced television cameras, calling drug abuse “public enemy number one in the United States,” and declared a national War on Drugs. The War on Drugs was declared in response to the turmoil of the 1960s, rising crime, and the blowback of the Vietnam War. Recreational use of psychoactive drugs had become popular among the hippie subculture, the white middle class, and black urban populations. Marijuana was part of the larger counterculture tapestry opposing Nixon’s actions in Vietnam.² There was also widespread marijuana, heroin, and amphetamine use among U.S. soldiers in Vietnam. With no end in sight to an unpopular—and unwinnable—Vietnam War, Nixon waged a war that might be won more easily: an all-out offensive on drugs at home.

At the height of the Vietnam War, opiates, such as heroin, marijuana, and amphetamines, were widely available in Vietnam and on the streets of America. As the U.S. negotiated a war settlement, thousands of servicemen would be returning home, addicted to heroin. Fearful of the social ramifications of the influx of potentia addicts, the Nixon Administration dedicated the majority of drug-war funding to treatment rather than to interdiction and law enforcement, which currently receive the majority of funding.

In the early days of the War on Drugs, there was also substantial emphasis on addiction prevention, treatment, and rehabilitation, which presented a balanced approach to the country’s drug problems, but this balance was fleeting. Drug use and addiction were intentionally shifted away from what they are—a health issue—and framed administratively and socially as criminal and a threat to national security. President Nixon strategically pulled the authority for drugs out of the National Institute on Mental Health (NIMH), where it belonged, and in January 1972, with Executive Order 11641, he created the Office of Drug Abuse Law Enforcement (ODALE) to coalesce federal and local forces to fight the illegal drug trade at the street level.³ ODALE enabled the U.S. to launch strategic efforts to prevent the import of illegal drugs and combat the use, manufacturing, and trade of all illicit drugs within its borders.

In a speech on January 3, 1973, New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller proclaimed the crime associated with addiction as a “reign of terror” and neighborhoods were being “as effectively destroyed by addicts as by an invading army.”⁴ In July 1973, Nixon established the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), and from that point forward, the drug war became increasingly focused on securitization and militarization.⁵ The phrase “War on Drugs” implies a militaristic response to the cultivation, distribution, and use of a commodity (psychoactive drugs). What the phrase fails to capture is that drugs are both a byproduct and a tool of war, and that drugs and war are mutually reinforcing and intensifying phenomena. Narcotic trafficking escalates in regions where there are military incursions, often becoming the primary source of funding for many rebel groups and paramilitary operations. At the same time, illicit drugs numb the fear, pain, and grief of military personnel and their victims. Drug use also trends upward among civilians from the countries who deploy troops to combat. An endemic drug trade had taken root with burgeoning groups of narco-traffickers, gunrunners, and paramilitary factions in Central America, South America, and Southeast Asia.

The declaration of the War on Drugs near the end of the Vietnam War was not the beginning of drug warfare. History reveals a lethal synergy between military confrontation and the consumption of mind-altering substances. Nowhere is this more evident than in the two Opium Wars of 1839–1842 and 1856–1860 between Britain and China, during which Britain actively sought to force the sale of the addictive drug opium to the Chinese in order to achieve colonial hegemony. Britain saturated China’s population, government, royalty, and much of its army with highly addictive opium. When China attempted to ban the trafficking of opium, England launched a war to retain access to the Chinese market. England’s victory had devastating consequences for the Chinese people that would last for nearly 100 years.

The Opium Wars further accelerated global trade, not just in opium, but in other addictive consumables such as sugar, tea, and tobacco. Profits from the commercial farming and sale of opium funded Britain’s colonial wars and the resulting expansion of the British Empire, creating a precedent that would be followed by France, the Netherlands, Burma (Myanmar), the CIA, Afghan insurgents, Nicaraguan Contra and numerous paramilitary groups.⁶,⁷,⁸

In all of these associated conflicts and countless others before and since, soldiers, refugees, and civilians have reacted to war-induced suffering by heavy use and abuse of alcohol and other drugs. Escalating drug cultivation, trafficking, and use is a demonstrable and predictable consequence of war. Addiction and drug-related violence in turn produce waves of turbulence that sustain and intensify military conflict.

Two threads connect war and drugs: human suffering and the intent to serve as a defense mechanism. Armed conflict is frequently a mechanism for the defense of territory, resources, and values, as well as a vehicle for greed and aggression. Drugs, including alcohol, are mechanisms of defense from one’s thoughts, emotions, and physical pain. Both war and addiction feed on human frailty, as illustrated by the Vietnam War (1965–1975) and Operation Enduring Freedom (OEF) in Afghanistan (2001–present). The Cold War conflict in Vietnam triggered a tsunami-like global escalation of addiction and drug trafficking in the Golden Triangle, Vietnam, Laos, Thailand, and Burma (now Myanmar), as well as among U.S. Vietnam veterans and civilians. Meanwhile, the war in Afghanistan (OEF) has coincided with the exponential growth of opium cultivation in that region. Within two years of OEF, Afghanistan had regained its position as the world’s largest producer of opium, accounting for nearly 90 percent of the world’s illicit market.

With lethal force begetting more violence in classic tit-for-tat fashion, an approach more in line with peace promotion would seem to hold out greater promise of progress. ⁹ The amplification of armed conflict occasioned by the War on Drugs can be seen in the escalating violence in Mexico. The Mexican drug cartels’ response to President Felipe Calderón’s crackdown on narcotics trafficking has been like attempting to douse a fire with gasoline. Police and government officials who have dared to take action against the cartels have, in tragic retribution, been decapitated and savagely tortured.¹⁰ This nexus suggests that waging a War on Drugs may promote drug use and trade, rather than reducing drug trafficking (through economic development) and addiction (through treatment). With the martial approach to combating addiction having largely failed, a chorus of scholars and policy experts has called for a different tactic.¹¹,¹²,¹³,¹⁴,¹⁵,¹⁶,¹⁷

I certainly do not advocate inaction. For the Mexican and Afghan governments to sit idly by would be to enable lower-level narco-terrorism to escalate into narcostatehood. Thwarting efforts to control this phenomenon, however, is the durable and enormous market for illicit drugs in America, Europe, and the Russian Federation. To effectively reduce the demand for drugs, we must first conduct a global examination of the entwined histories of war and drugs. To date, most efforts to address the intersection of war and drugs have failed to consider the profound influence of each upon the other. Peace studies, for example, focus on the history of conflict, conflict resolution, and avoidance of war. Addiction studies focus on the dynamics of addiction in the hope of treating, preventing, and reversing its progression. Looking at the relationship between addiction and warfare and examining their mutual escalation in response to one another provides fresh insight into the prevention of these problems.

Some wars are nebulous, such as the Cold War (1945–1991), yet its relationship to the proliferation of psychedelic drug use in the United States is clear. In the chapters covering the Cold War, we will examine the triangulation between the peace movement, psychedelic drugs, and the U.S. government. During the Cold War, the U.S. government developed and tested the use of psychedelic drugs as a means of mind-control social manipulation. However, when the CIA lost control over the dissemination of the drugs, and they became synonymous with the anti-war movement, people involved in the peace movement were investigated by the U.S. House Committee on Un-American Activities.¹⁸

For purposes of this book, drugs are defined as psychoactive substances that are capable of being used recreationally and have addictive potential. War is broadly delineated and refers to three frameworks: conflict or armed hostility between nations or between factions within a state or region (e.g., the Vietnam War, the Colombian conflict pitting the government against FARC rebels); antagonistic campaigns against something perceived as destructive (e.g., the War on Drugs); and more generally and often personally, a struggle to overcome (e.g., battling addiction). In the context of armed hostility between nations or factions within nation-states, drugs have long been intertwined with issues of defense, national security, economics, and politics.

This book challenges the reader to consider a broader perspective of alcohol and other drugs in relation to war by dissecting the duality of their relationship to one another. At each level I advance a thesis, and collectively these frame the argument of the book.

1. For those affected by war (soldiers, veterans, refugees, their families, and the countries involved), alcohol and other drugs are pursued as a refuge from suffering.
2. For centuries, drugs have been used as a commodity to fund wars, para-politic groups, and governments.
3. The militaristic approach embodied in the War on Drugs has intensified conflict in regions associated with drug production and consumption, due in large part to the triad of unaddressed addiction, poverty, and the trafficking of drugs and munitions.

If we are to make any progress in controlling the expansion of drug markets and the escalation of drug use, we need to focus on the roots of addiction, drug cultivation, and trafficking and revisit the long-term multigenerational effect of engaging in war—whether war is understood as the drug war, an international conflict, a civil war, a terrorist organization, or another paramilitary conflict. War shapes lives for generations, taking an inevitable and immeasurable human toll.

This book does not endorse a particular policy or solution. Addiction is a multifaceted problem that needs to be examined at the individual (micro) level, the community (mezzo) level, and the national and international (macro) levels; thus, the solutions must be more nuanced and complex than simple prohibition or legalization.

Campaigns against psychoactive substances, such as the temperance movement and the War on Drugs, have been analyzed in relation to issues of power, cultural privilege, and class distinction.¹⁹ Further, war has been appropriated as a metaphor to describe the interpersonal struggle involved in battling addiction. Yet not enough attention has been devoted to the historical examination of the ripple effects of warrelated drug trafficking and addiction.

The covert nature of drug use impedes a full assessment of the economic and human impact of war-related addiction. Consumer spending on illicit drugs is virtually impossible to tabulate. Further complicating the historical analysis of rates of addiction and the financial cost of the War on Drugs is the unreliability of statistical evidence.²⁰,²¹,²² Precise rates of addiction prior to the late 1970s, when valid survey an data-collection methodologies were established, are difficult to track. Furthermore, tallying the financial costs of drug wars can be misleading because spending is dispersed among numerous government agencies and is rarely transparent. For example funds spent by the U.S. military on drug control in the early 2000s were removed from the total figure of what the United States spends annually in the War on Drugs.²³ The data in this book are drawn from both governmental and non-governmental organizations, as well as government accountability and oversight agencies.

This book begins its examination of the duality of war and drugs with the Opium Wars of 1839–1842 and 1856–1860, from which we are currently some seven generations removed, and continues chronologically covering the major U.S. wars that most contributed to global trends in drug use, including the period known as the Cold War (1947–1991); I conclude with the wars in Afghanistan (OEF, 2001 to present) and Iraq (Operation Iraqi Freedom [OIF], 2003–2010).

The Opium Wars established a precedent for the use of drug trafficking to fund governments, military incursions, and colonialism. Colonial-era opium trade played an important role in funding the European, French, and Asian empires and their world trade. Opium provided the capital that built the Briti...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Chapter 1 Introduction: The Escalation of War and Drugs in Relation to One Another
• Chapter 2 Drugs and War
• Chapter 3 The Opium Wars
• Chapter 4 Drugs and the U.S. Civil War
• Chapter 5 French Connections and the Corsican Brothers
• Chapter 6 High Hitler: World War II
• Chapter 7 The Cold War Was Hot for the Drug Trade
• Chapter 8 Project Bluebird and MK-ULTRA
• Chapter 9 The Vietnam War and the Blowback at Home
• Chapter 10 Mexico's Drug War
• Chapter 11 Drugs and the Afghan Wars
• Chapter 12 PTSD and Substance Abuse Among Veterans of the Afghan and Iraq Wars
• Chapter 13 Conclusion: The Seven-Generations Cost of War
• Notes
• Index
• About the Author