Narcotics and Counter-revolution

Postscript to The Political History of Smack and Crack

The real political history of smack and crack has very little to do with the attitude of one British parliamentary party or another, or the doings of some particular Home Secretary during the brief time he or she is allowed to handle a lever or two of state power.

They have a lot to say about narcotics, these people, and write a lot of white papers allegedly to deal with the tsunami of hard drugs that floods Britain from just after the time Margaret Thatcher wins her famous landslide in 1979, when 27% of the electorate vote for her, the moment modern British history begins to really take shape.

Decades of chaos and ruin follow as the hard-drug epidemic spreads in tandem with what is known as ‘Thatcherism’, but which is more properly called ‘neo-liberal economic policy’, as it rips through working-class districts, tearing the old communities apart, helping reshape them in the new mould.

As the narcotics take hold, parliamentarians of all colours huff with indignation, boil with anger, or voice concern for the victims of the accompanying crime wave – and even occasionally for some of the addicts. But they pass ever more laws to make criminals of the victims of the disaster, massively increase police powers of all kinds – supposedly to deal with the accompanying crime wave – and wake up too late to the Aids and hepatitis epidemics exacerbated by the very criminal culture they help to create.

Never do British parliamentarians seem able or willing to grasp the bigger picture, or even realise there might be one.

To relate the history of the politics of hard drugs within the framework of British parliamentary practice hobbles the story completely. From the point of view of smack and crack, it hardly counts as politics at all, being more of a reaction to the politics – a distraction or a distorting element, an aggravating factor, but mostly an irrelevance.

My play The Political History of Smack and Crack highlights only one of the main aspects of the real political history: its emergence in the wake of Thatcherism and in particular of the 1981 inner-city uprisings. But in the end a play has to follow its characters and operate within the laws of dramatic structure/entertainment. I tried in earlier drafts to include more of the international background but when we tried it out on a variety of audiences – from semi-professional boxers in Barnsley, to students in Bolton and recovering addicts in Manchester – the feeling was that while these details are very interesting they are too difficult to grasp during the play itself and anyway a distraction from the main thrust of Neil and Mandy’s story.

So what follows is a brief summary of the international story, which is covered elsewhere by historians in more detail, but which vastly reinforces the message of the play when you take it all as a whole.

It all comes from respectable public sources – US congressional hearings, declassified government documents, carefully researched academic writing, etc. And there’s a short must-read list at the end if you want to know more, or do some in depth fact-checking.

The Prehistory

The prehistory of the modern narcotic trade runs through different eras, beginning in earnest with the Opium Wars against China. In the 1870s, Queen Victoria’s navy ruthlessly oversee the birth of the greatest opium addiction epidemic in history for the purposes of oiling the wheels of commerce and Empire, which go together like a toot of heroin and a hit on the crack pipe.

For details of how the Chinese opium epidemic of the late 1800s and early 1900s is later completely eradicated, see the 1949 communist revolution, touched on below.

Heroin itself is only invented and produced on an industrial scale in the 1870s by the German corporation that also gives us Germolene. The new wonder drug is originally marketed as a non-addictive alternative to opium, but then again Bayer Corporation also use and kill Jewish prisoners from Auschwitz in medical experiments during the Nazi period, so what do you expect from a company like that.1

From here the history of heroin appears as an insane kaleidoscope of colourfully villainous characters and tangled plots spanning the globe, dazzling in its daring, shocking in its depravity. See the Mafia, the French Connection, the Golden Triangle, the Vietnam War, the carnage in Colombia, the war in Afghanistan and more recently the almost total collapse of Mexican towns and cities. But buried in this apparently chaotic and anarchic narrative are ragged but distinct through-lines of meaning, waiting to be unearthed like themes in a Beckett play.

In truth, as we shall see here, history shows that since World War II the international narcotics trade has been blood brother to the politics of counter-revolution – ‘counter-subversion’, or ‘counter-insurgency’ to them – a tool in the desperate struggle of the world’s capitalist powers to prevail at all costs in the face of equally desperate resistance.

The Birth of the Modern Mafia

Bayer Corporation’s pharmaceutical heroin of the late 1800s and early 1900s isn’t yet the smack of Neil and Mandy’s story, but the accompanying shenanigans does begin to sketch a rough early draft of the script.

Many private disasters are undoubtedly spawned by Bayer Corps’ ruthless mismarketing of the super-addictive new substance, but the tragedy only becomes political in 1920 with Prohibition, the complete banning of alcohol sales in the USA, which gives heroin a double boost.

During Prohibition, consumption of pharmaceutical heroin is an obvious alcohol substitute and this want-satisfaction creates for the first time a wider market for heroin, and encourages the beginnings of an organised illegal trade within the USA.

At this point in the US there is no access to independently manufactured heroin. Supply is mostly stolen from corporate laboratories, with many a willing addicted worker helping in what soon becomes industrial-scale theft.

In the early 1930s the looming end of Prohibition suddenly creates for the first time a climate of insecurity among the younger generation of Mafia bootleggers and illegal alcohol distributers, giving heroin its second big boost.2

A shooting war breaks out between, on the one side, forces supporting the already rich, socially conservative and therefore more anti-drug generation of gangsters – personified by Al Capone – and on the other, the pro-narcotic young guns running day-to-day bootlegging and distribution networks, yet to make their fortunes. Without the lucrative trade in illicit alcohol, the young guns face reduced prospects of maintaining themselves in the style to which they have become accustomed in the post-Wall Street-crash economic climate. Out of this colourful maelstrom, loosely illustrated by a new generation of film-makers and actors, such as Cecil B. DeMille and Edward G. Robinson, emerges a new and ruthlessly well-organised Mafia.³

The necessities of this armed, intergenerational struggle dictate new, tightly bound forms of organisation, inspired by, but exceeding in scale, the traditional methods of organisation imported from Sicily where, however, the new Mafia still has strong ties. By the end of 1931, a new leader has emerged to consolidate the first, modern, fully national crime/business syndicate: Lucky Luciano. The central body of this organisation is known as ‘The Commission’, which has its own armed wing known as ‘Murder Incorporated’ – holy muse to many a black-and-white movie-maker. So now Mafia scores and disputes are settled nationally, staving off future gang wars and enabling the smooth running of core businesses – gambling, prostitution and now heroin.⁴

But gambling quickly hits economic limits. Prostitutes, forced to live by wit and guile, are often ungovernable and are understandably prone to stealing what is, after all, their own income, especially when they discover heroin. Heroin itself soon proves the most reliable and profitable modern Mafia business; it’s the perfect capitalist commodity, demand magically expanding with supply.5

The Death of the Modern Mafia

By the mid-1930s a Mafia/US government synergy has emerged, evidenced by the well-documented state-sponsored use of Mafia violence against trade-union, working-class and other political activists.⁶ But with the rise of fascism in Europe and the looming prospect of a world war, it seems the FBI has become concerned about the demoralising spread of heroin among the poorer communities and the impact of gangsterism on popular morale which may undermine a future war effort. Anyway, a highly effective nationwide campaign of intimidation and imprisonment is mounted by the Federal authorities against their former, unofficial allies. In a few short years the supposedly indestructible national organisation of the modern Mafia is crushed almost completely.

By 1936, Lucky Luciano has gone from a celebrated public figure, invited to all the fanciest New York parties where he rubs shoulders with the rich, the glamorous and the powerful, to Sing Sing’s most notorious prisoner, serving thirty to fifty years.⁷

Enter Mussolini.

During the consolidation of fascist power in Italy, the Sicilian Mafia make a near-fatal miscalculation and meet a fate similar to that of their US counterpart.

Legend has it that the Sicilian leadership sees the new Roman Emperor as a rude upstart – perhaps understandable considering Mafia sway on the Island of Sicily stretches back centuries. When ‘Il Duce’ visits Sicily, local Mafia bosses demonstrate their power by calling for a boycott of Mussolini’s public speeches. Meeting everywhere with empty plazas, the duly insulted Emperor carries out a demonstration of his own: with a fully modern, newly acquired state power behind him, and the new national vehemence at his side, Mussolini quickly and ruthlessly crushes what is essentially a primitive, Sicilian-clan hangover. Using fascist muscle and all the finery of a state machine, the new Emperor dispatches those Mafiosi who escape the bullet and the torture chamber back to the hills to continue their time-honoured tradition of goat farming.8

It’s a colourful tale, but whatever the true detail, the outcome is the same: Mussolini all but destroys the organisation of the Italian Mafia in Sicily, where defeated Mafiosi burn with hatred for the new Emperor.⁹

The Resurrection of the Modern Mafia

With war comes revolution.

At home during the war, US authorities witness an alarming upswing in radical industrial activity and grass-roots agitation. Abroad, following Hitler’s defeat at Stalingrad in 1943, the battle-hardened Soviet Red Army sweeps across Europe towards Berlin, bringing in its wake, as far as US Army generals are concerned, the threat of a communist takeover of the whole of ruined Europe.¹⁰

Add to this the anti-capitalist feeling among many European resistance leaders who have witnessed the majority of their national leaders capitulate to, or collaborate with, fascism. There must be a suspicion too among these fighters that US and British Empire generals have scrambled round Africa defending their colonies only to join the real fray when a German defeat looks inevitable, while the Soviets have fought and died by the million confronting Nazi Germany head-on.

The US government’s immediate tasks in the climax and resolution of World War II then are to discipline labour at home and prevent an anti-capitalist takeover in Europe. The Italian Mafia answer their prayers twice over.

During the war at the New York dockyards, the problem of industrial unrest is compounded by another urgent issue of national security: the passing of shipping information to the German naval high command by Italian seamen and dock-workers leading to increased loss of allied tonnage at sea. There is even rumoured to be secret offshore fuelling of German U-boats.¹¹

Meanwhile on the Island of Sicily, political, geographical and military factors combine to create the perfect circumstances for a softer US invasion of, as they see it, communist-threatened Europe.

Enter the much-maligned Lt Commander Haffenden of the US Navy, whose family dispute the meaning of the well-documented facts to this day.

Despite the pre-war FBI crackdown, small-time New York Mafiosi have managed to keep a foothold in illegal racketeering at the New York docks. Alerted to this, Lt Commander Haffenden initiates secret contact with Boss of Bosses Lucky Luciano in Sing Sing through a dockland mobster named Socks Lanza.12

A series of intricate negotiations take place in which Luciano agrees to use his dockland influence to crush strikes and oppose pro-German activity on the waterfront. More significantly, Luciano also agrees to aid a US invasion of Sicily where anti-Mussolini feeling can easily be harnessed to give US armed forces a helping hand. In exchange, the US government agrees to commute the remainder of Lucky Luciano’s sentence at end of the war.¹³

Another legend has it that the US army has in its possession, during the successful 1943 invasion of Sicily, a yellow silk scarf embroidered with the letter ‘L’, given to them by the Boss of Bosses as a token of his blessing for the venture. Whatever the truth of the detail, as a result of a very real Luciano deal, the US military get Mafia spies, Mafia guides and a Mafia-inspired uprising to help them on their way to Berlin, via a softly yielding Italy, from a secure base in Sicily.¹⁴

In return, at the end of World War II, the US installs Mafia mayors in every town in Sicily,¹⁵ from where the mobsters lead the charge in the whole of southern Italy against the organisations of the working class that have fought Mussolini and are now demanding a voice in government – and in many cases calling for the overthrow of capitalism.

Back in the US, the government keeps its promises to their man in Sing Sing. The newly emboldened Mafia take over the running of selected labour unions, especially those ‘on the waterfront’: cue Marlon Brando. Meanwhile, Lucky Luciano is released but deported to Sicily, from which hallowed ground the returning hero goes on during the late 1940s and 1950s to lay the foundations of the modern international heroin trade.16

The French Connection

Such perverse synergy between gangsters and state – a necessary prerequisite for drug-dealing on any internationally significant scale – is evident in other parts of Europe at the climax and resolution of World War II.

In Germany not so much. Here gangsters help run the concentration camps but only as privileged and ruthless prisoner/overseers, and many eventually perish there themselves as their organisations have done before them at the hands of the Nazis.¹⁷ Popular German resistance to Nazism is largely destroyed before the outbreak of war.

Here the US military is struggling against an outside force: the Soviets in the east of the country. This they manage reasonably well without gangsterism, in part by keeping the ex-Nazi state’s chief of military intelligence in the east in post to conduct anti-Soviet activity¹⁸ – whilst also, lest we forget, helping ex-Gestapo officers escape to South America where they will become stalwarts of US-backed fascist regimes for decades to come.¹⁹

In France, post-war state/gangster collusion is the twin of that in Italy, but here the US military intelligence pact is with the Corsican Mafia. The Corsican Mafia is to France what the Sicilian Mafia is to Italy, with similar Mediterranean-island clan origins and ruthlessly violent traditions. But whereas the Sicilian Mafia have a rigid vertical structure, the Corsicans have traditionally worked in close-knit but separate cells capable of working in concert but operationally independent, much like the units of a modern guerrilla army. Plus, neither Marlon Brando, Al Pacino, nor any other Hollywood A-list celebrity has ever portrayed a Corsican Mafiosi, and outside of Southern Europe and the French colonial world their fame has burned dimly.

In France, the post-war power struggle between revolutionary forces and the old order is a close-run thing, especially in Marseilles. The old southern sea port is the national capital of the French Resistance, where many of its best fighters are drawn from the city’s radical dock-workers. During the war itself the Resistance gets much-needed assistance in the form of arms and people-smuggling from the anti-Nazi Corsican Mafia, who are good at that stuff.20

At the end of the war, with the collaborationist southern French (Vichy) government discredited, communist-led Resistance forces even manage to secure control of several departments of the Marseilles police force, including the CID. Meanwhile, the Corsican Mafia are approached by US military intelligence and offered protection (and weapons and cash) in return for a campaign of intimidation against their former Resistance comrades, particularly any communists.²¹ The Mafiosi oblige and several striking workers are brutally murdered. In a countermove, staunch comrades of the Marseilles CID launch a highly effective police campaign against the criminal activities of the Corsican Mafia, namely gambling, prostitution and narcotics.²²

But capitalist-friendly police units, especially the crack riot police previously used by the collaborationist Vichy regime to carry out orders from Nazi Germany – including deportations to the concentration camps – are mobilised to swing the balance of power in favour of the old order. Soon the radical remnants of the heroic French Resistance are smashed, the police force is purged of communists and the Marseilles CID goes back to its time-honoured incompetence and blind-eye-turning to the Corsican underworld.²³

Politically, the matter is settled by the newly elected, larger-than-life millionaire socialist mayor of Marseilles, Gaston Defferre. A hero of the wartime underground, respected by all for his wartime association with the Resistance, Defferre decisively sides with the old order. By the time the communists are ousted from the police and working-class activists are dead, dispersed or disheartened, Defferre has the two most notorious Corsican gangsters – the brothers Guerini – for his personal bodyguards.²⁴

From here, the Corsican Mafia use the post-war political protection granted them to establish a network of laboratories in the city of Marseilles to refine imported raw opium into heroin. The famous French Connection is, in fact, the crime-child of US military intelligence, anti-communist French authorities and the Corsican Mafia.25

Enter Gene Hackman, ace detective in his pork-pie hat, to not discover any of this.

In the early 1950s raw opium is sourced internationally by Lucky Luciano’s Italian Mafia and transported to France, where it is refined by Corsican Mafiosi. From here it is transported to the USA, mostly by the Italians. It is met at the New York docks by criminal networks re-established in the US during the wartime struggle against dockside labour militancy.²⁶

The resolution of World War II thus sees a spectacular return for Lucky Luciano and the US Mafia, and a political coup for their neighbours in Corsica – who are soon sourcing raw opium themselves directly from the French military in Vietnam where, as we will see, Lucky Luciano’s Mafia will eventually play their part too.

The Road to ’Nam

The harrowing picture anti-capitalist Europe presents to capitalist HQ in 1945 is nothing compared to the vision of hell it faces in the soon-to-be-ex-colonies of Asia, where millions are up in arms and making rapid headway towards self-government.

Gangsterism to the rescue once again.

First up: the French in Vietnam. Or as it is known at the time, ‘French Indochina’.

In 1946, inspired by the revolutionary leadership of Ho Chi Minh and enraged by 100 years of plunder and cruelty by occupying foreign powers, the people of what will become Vietnam rise up against French colonial rule. Meanwhile, incompetent (or arrogant) French generals who have made their names during World War II simply don’t understand the form of revolutionary warfare they now face. These generals see the country as a series of empty spaces in which to conduct flaking movements or great sweeps, as they might against an army like that of the recently defeated Japanese. But the Asian revolutionaries of the 1940s and 1950s by now understand that the best way to beat the militarily superior forces of an occupying power is to merge as far as possible with the people themselves and take advantage of their massively superior numbers.

The decisive revolutionary strategy of the day therefore is to unite the population in what Fidel Castro will later call a ‘total war of all the people’.

By 1950, after four years of bitter counter-revolutionary fighting, during which the French war effort has become ever more unpopular back home in France, younger, more forward-thinking French generals realise the old tactics are losing the war. These innovative military thinkers concoct a wonderfully depraved scheme – soon to be mirrored by the CIA in the mountains of Burma and shortly after by the British in Kenya – that will by the 1980s become the new normal for the international counter-revolution.27

Instead of designing grand classical manoeuvres, the younger French generals realise a political strategy is required to accompany the military action. Led by General Roger Trinquier, enterprising and independent French intelligence units embark on a strategy to divide the population against itself so that a ‘total war of all the people’ will be difficult to organise. These units correctly conceive the country as an intricate network of interconnected villages containing complex, often archaic social structures in which there may be tribal, religious, or other primitive authorities, such as a local warlord, that might fear or resent the prospect of the socialist future promised the poor masses by Ho Chi Minh’s revolutionaries.²⁸

Soon there is a network of forty thousand warlords, medieval-hangovers, misfits, bandits, crackpots, religious fanatics and assorted malcontents, armed and organised into despotic militia and spy networks friendly to French colonial rule. Many of these fiefdoms do indeed become difficult or impossible for the revolutionaries to penetrate but – and here’s the rub – they cost big dollar. To set up a band of 150 men in the 1950s with basic training, weapons and bonuses, the cost in today’s terms would be $130,000. For forty thousand souls therefore you’re looking at $35 million in today’s money just to get them off the ground. Bands must then be granted annual stipends of up to the equivalent of $750,000 in today’s money and continually armed and maintained as viable units, provided with cash for bribes, etc. And realistically forty thousand men is just a start.29

In early 1950s Vietnam this strategy does begin to show promise for the French, but how to pay the bill? Because of the unpopularity of the war at home, the French National Assembly has reduced its outlay to regular military units to an absolute minimum. And anyway these units are under the control of the gallant-pose-striking gentlemen generals of the old guard who see Trinquier and his comrades as rude and reckless upstarts. In the end hardly a franc or a dollar is forthcoming for the young generals’ promising counter-revolutionary scheme.

The solution is the poetically named Operation X. Otherwise known as drug-dealing on an industrial scale.

From the days of Queen Victoria’s Opium Wars through to as recently as the 1950s, many of the monarchies and republics of South and Southeast Asia have operated one form or another of official monopoly in the opium trade. This highly lucrative system of supply to and taxation of the millions of opium-smokers from Hong Kong to Saigon is usually conducted by some combination of official authority in the particular country. For instance, for many decades of the early 1900s, the Thai Royal family derive a significant portion of their fortune from the business.³⁰ Seen as everything from a free lunch to a necessary evil in the region itself, the trade is the epitome of moral degradation to respectable governments in the imperial centres who see themselves as the civilising element of world history. The projection of this high-minded moral appearance is all the more important in Asia in the wake of World War II, with communist bastards everywhere promising free universal health care, shelter and education to the wretched of the Earth.

So when, in the early 1950s, wholesome western diplomats begin persuading the majority of Asian authorities to declare the opium trade illegal, our swashbuckling French pioneer generals in Vietnam see a golden opportunity. In practice, the region-wide decrees outlawing narcotics make little difference to Asian opium eaters and smokers themselves, nor to the scale of the overall trade, but they do gift one of the world’s great sources of profit to gangsters. The biggest and baddest of these gangsters in Vietnam soon turn out to be secret units of the intelligence department of the French Expeditionary Corps.31

By 1951, French army general Roger Trinquier, mastermind of Operation X, has become godfather to the greatest illegal narcotics smuggling network the modern world has so far seen.

Under the watchful eye of dynamic young generals, French military aircraft fly tons of raw opium from the poppy fields of Laos to be sold in Saigon to gangsters protected by corrupt Vietnamese police and customs officers, themselves protected by secret elements of the French and Vietnamese military. The profits then pay handsomely for the Trinquier-inspired counter-revolutionary gangs. Some of this opium also finds its way to heroin refineries in Marseilles, courtesy of Corsican Mafiosi, where it strengthens the hand of the anti-radical alliance in the south of France. At the same time, and also in Marseilles, radical dock-workers are striking in support of the Vietnamese independence struggle, while themselves under attack from ex-Vichy riot police and murderous heroin-smuggling Corsican gangsters.³²

Thus heroin creates a truly international counter-revolutionary symbiosis.

Though victorious against the working class of Marseilles, the counter-revolution in Vietnam is ultimately thwarted. The Vietnamese people’s fighting spirit is too strong. The power of the generals of the French military old guard is too entrenched and the old generals themselves are too arrogant to adapt to the new circumstances. And, anyway, the brutality and corruption of the misfit militias funded by Operation X eventually begins to alienate the populations of the disputed areas. It all comes to a head in 1954 with the massive destruction of French forces at the Battle of Dien Bien Phu, which brings to a close one hundred years of French colonial rule in Indochina.

In the wake of this great victory – or defeat, depending on how you view it – the north of Vietnam is taken over by a revolutionary government determined to spread their revolution to the whole country. In the south, the French reluctantly hand over power to the USA. Over the next few years the US military establish a puppet government and pretend newly created South Vietnam is an independent country.33 Meanwhile, US Mafiosi move in alongside the US authorities to assist in the drug-dealing.³⁴

By the late 1950s/early 1960s, control of the Saigon-centred opium/heroin network of warlords, gangsters and armed religious fanatics established under the French has become the political and military key to holding the whole of South Vietnam.³⁵ By this time too, a tropical cyclone of drug money has swept into the furthest corners of the Southern Vietnamese civil and political system and set it to rot. Propping up such a corrupt political entity proves an impossible feat that 57,000 US soldiers will nonetheless die trying to achieve, in what becomes famous as the Vietnam War, or ’Nam to its friends.

INTERESTING LINK: French godfather-general Roger Trinquier is today considered a leading light of western counter-revolutionary warfare theory. Trinquier’s military writings are admired and quoted at length and used as a template by the best-known British army counter-revolutionary theorist General Sir Frank Kitson.³⁶ Kitson is the man appointed by the Thatcher government to direct UK mainland forces in the wake of the 1981 inner-city uprisings depicted in this play.

The Golden Triangle

In the late 1940s and early 1950s, while the French are getting their pounding in Vietnam, the US has its own headache next door in the form of the Chinese revolution, for which it prescribes the same painkiller.

In 1949, to quote the great chronicler of the event, Edgar Snow, ‘The Chinese revolution breaks onto the international stage with all the force of a nuclear explosion.’³⁷ As a result of the revolution, the collapsed Chinese regime of butchers and buriers-of-people-alive, quasi-medieval warlords and their henchmen and hangers-on, plus the ragged remains of the defeated and hated, western-backed Kuomintang army, drag their sorry remains out of the country to colonise the rugged, poppy-growing mountains of neighbouring Burma. Here they dream of bloody revenge and plot the re-conquest of China.

From the US perspective, the situation facing world capitalism now surely appears critical. Soviet forces are ensconced in Eastern Europe, the Chinese revolution has mobilised a fifth of the world’s population, revolutionary war has erupted in Vietnam and is spilling into the neighbouring mountains of Burma, Laos and Cambodia. Building counter-revolutionary forces in the region is top priority. However, sending US troops to fight inside China will only fan the flames of revolution, as the French are already finding in Vietnam. So the urgent tasks of stopping the spread of revolution and taking back China fall to the clandestine intelligence organisations (through this very process becoming the CIA we know today),38 who have to conduct these operations in secret using covert forces, otherwise known as mercenaries.

The dynamics of this process are best explained by the rugged warrior-scholar of the world heroin trade, Alfred McCoy. In the early 1960s, McCoy pulls up his bootstraps and climbs the Burmese mountains to discover the truth of what is going on from the warlords and poppy-growing tribespeople themselves. Later McCoy interviews most of the big players in the French military and the Vietnamese and Laotian narcotic smuggling gangs – including French godfather-general Roger Trinquier himself – most of whom are perfectly frank about their activities. Today McCoy is considered the world’s leading authority on the subject.

McCoy:

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 budget limits… In a region of weak microstates and fragmented tribes, such strongmen usually combined traditional authority with control over the local economy. In the Golden Triangle, the only commodity was opium and the most powerful local leaders were the opium warlords.39

As one such CIA-backed warlord, General Tuan Shi-wen, himself tells McCoy: ‘To fight you must have an army, and an army must have guns, and to buy guns you must have money. In these mountains the only money is opium.’

McCoy again:

This interplay among opium, money, and political power drew the CIA into a complicitous relationship with the Golden Triangle drug trade. In its covert warfare, the CIA’s strength was no more or less than that of its local clients. To maintain the power that mobilised tribal armies and marched them into battle, these warlords used the CIA’s resources – arms, ammunition, and, above all, air transport – to increase their control over the opium crop.⁴⁰

By the time the CIA fully take over French operations in Vietnam in 1954–6, after the French defeat at Dien Bien Phu, the whole narcotic trade of Burma, Laos, Vietnam and Thailand has become one hugely profitable international counter-revolutionary effort. But with illegal narcotics, of course, come violence and corruption, which in turn create political chaos, not to mention scandal. The details of each internationally embarrassing bust or public outrage differ, and many an official head rolls – to be quickly replaced by another – but essentially the narcotic trade of the late 1950s and 1960s (and the first half of the 1970s) remains the same. The main beneficiaries remain the same also: whoever is helping the CIA against the revolutions in China and Vietnam.

Eventually, the re-invasion of China, using such ill-disciplined and corrupt warlords in tandem with the discredited old regime, fails, as does the covert effort to stop the Vietnamese revolution crossing the mountain borders of the surrounding nations. After this – from about 1965 – the US military sends its own troops to die in their tens of thousands in Vietnam while their B-52s famously carpet-bomb the region, using more explosive power than is used during the whole of World War II by all sides.⁴¹

At its height, the military situation in ’Nam is absurdly macabre. For example, as the largest contingents of US troops begin to arrive on the ground from 1965 onwards, Vietnamese generals (aided by US Mafiosi) peddle enormous quantities of the purest heroin to tens of thousands of the very GIs who have come to save them.42 By the famous Fall of Saigon in 1975, the military situation is so chaotic and the political situation so utterly corrupt that neither the CIA nor the US military high command can properly discover what is happening on the ground to their own forces. The fog of war is by then as impenetrable as the mind of a heroin addict who’s just had a hit. (See Robert McNamara interviewed in the film The Fog of War.)

This brief characterisation of French and US state-sponsored drug-dealing from the 1950s to the 1970s is, of course, vastly oversimplified and the realities are far more complex and nuanced – and often more interesting and even more depraved. But it is accurate. Obviously not everyone in the US military is aware of what the CIA or the secret units of the French military are doing in the Golden Triangle in terms of drug-dealing, and very few in the US and French governments back home in the West have a clue. But it is clear from the records that anyone who does discover the truth either keeps shtum for the sake of the war effort, or is silenced by those they report to. But for anyone who wants to see it, the evidence is clear.

Over the period of their involvement in Vietnam, the US military and even the South Vietnamese government itself do make attempts to curtail the heroin trade, especially when it threatens to completely derail the war effort. Many of these anti-drug drives are half-hearted and nominal, but some of them are serious, full-blooded and use every device from the judiciary to targeted assassination. Some of the measures even temporarily succeed.⁴³ Ultimately, though, they all fail as spectacularly as US political and military strategy itself. The vast American forces and their supporters are eventually defeated in the greatest military humiliation in history, inflicted by the poor but determined people of a small country.

By 1975, two million Vietnamese people have died fighting and 57,000 American soldiers have died defending a hopelessly corrupt narco-state.

From Vietnam to Moss Side

Especially from a Western perspective, everything so far described is small beans compared to the CIA-sponsored narcotic trade of the 1980s, which is centred on the counter-revolutionary gangs of the Afghan mujahideen and the Nicaraguan contras (who link directly to the Colombian cartels made famous by Pablo Escobar).44

In the 1950s, 1960s and early 1970s, despite the best efforts of New York, Sicilian and Corsican Mafiosi, the vast majority of the opium and heroin from the Golden Triangle is consumed in Asia itself. There are some significant outbreaks of heroin addiction in the USA, particularly in Chicago and New York – traditional Mafia strongholds – mostly around the time of the civil rights movement. But compared to the US and European drug epidemics of the 1980s, the numbers are insignificant. From the Western point of view, the Reagan/Thatcher foreign-policy era is like the Golden Triangle on crack.

But although, again from the Western point of view, the scale of the drug-dealing associated with the counter-revolutionary efforts of the 1980s is different, the patterns are almost identical. The morals, motives and methods seem to have been transplanted directly from the past to the present.

To pluck out a few grubby details of the story for those who can still bear to look:

Over the decade of US covert military involvement in Afghanistan, the CIA funnels approximately half of its covert military aid – worth approximately a billion dollars⁴⁵ – to the figure of one Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. Lift the veil on this Islamic fundamentalist terrorist and his brutal gang of murderous guerrillas, and they turn out to be little more than an unofficial branch of the Pakistani secret services (ISI), senior partner to the CIA in the war against the Afghan revolution.⁴⁶ During the 1980s, Hekmatyar is a prolific and proven producer and international distributer of heroin, personally owning at least six large heroin refineries in the tribal regions bordering Afghanistan, and controlling though corruption, terror and intimidation a significant percentage of the region’s opium production.⁴⁷ If that doesn’t make him repugnant enough as a defender of freedom, according to The New York Times, as a young Islamic extremist, Hekmatyar ‘despatched his followers to throw vials of acid into the faces of women students who refused to wear veils’.48

In case this revelation by that guardian of freedom, The New York Times, gives the wrong impression of the paper, it’s worth noting that this article – and others finally exposing the real nature of the beast – doesn’t appear until the end of a decade-long US-sponsored rampage of destruction, terrorism and drug-dealing, by which time the Soviet army have withdrawn from Afghanistan, leaving the country in the hands of some of the most backward despots and terrorists the world has ever seen; the most disciplined and well organised of these bands, by a mountain mile, being the Taliban. Before the Soviet withdrawal, the mainstream US press publishes only positive reports about Hekmatyar and his equally corrupt comrades in the loose alliance that is the mujahideen. By 1989, with the help of his supporters in the West, Hekmatyar has attained the lofty title of Foreign Minister of the Afghan Interim Government, by which time he is referred to as a criminal and a terrorist even by his own president.⁴⁹

During the Afghan War, there are seventeen DEA agents posted at the US Embassy in Kabul. These diligent individuals duly compile detailed reports into the region’s forty biggest heroin syndicates and distribute them among their superiors. Yet not one of these organisations is investigated over the whole decade-long period of war.⁵⁰ As early as 1982, Interpol is receiving reports that Pakistan’s military leader, General Huq, is implicated in the heroin trade.⁵¹ Pakistani and European police forces complain too that investigations into the heroin trade have ‘been aborted at the highest level’.⁵² By the end of the decade, the heroin trade is worth 8–10 billion dollars, more than the Pakistani government’s annual budget, the equivalent of 25% of Pakistani GDP.⁵³

As for crack, the story in Latin America is the twin of the Afghan tale, but without the bogeyman of Soviet communism to justify it.⁵⁴ Here, the US military and the CIA sponsor a savage and unpopular counter-revolutionary struggle against the widely respected Sandinista government in Nicaragua.⁵⁵

In this bitter and bloody struggle, hundreds of schools and hospitals are destroyed, villages are burned, and civilians are raped and murdered by contra forces that US president Ronald Reagan ironically likens to the heroic French Resistance.56 But despite Reagan’s efforts to popularise these fascistic gangs, the respectable wing of US government is not fooled, and releases relatively little in the way of official military and financial aid. Predictably the financial pressures of this situation spawn the same demons as those already described in post-war France and Italy, Vietnam and China, but with cocaine – the raw material used to make crack – taking the place of heroin in the desperate cash-generation schemes.⁵⁷ While President Reagan gets busy blaming the Sandinistas and their allies for the international drug-dealing, his wife Nancy sponsors the famous ‘Just Say No’ campaign at home in the USA.

There is a shelf of books and papers on the origins of the western hemisphere’s crack epidemic with titles such as: Cocaine Politics: Drugs, Armies and the CIA in Central America, and: Dark Alliance: The CIA, the Contras and the Crack Cocaine Explosion. Much of the material for this work has been explored and corroborated by US congressional hearings but still, somehow, the popular wisdom is that the US crack epidemic is caused mainly by poor black men in US ghettoes.⁵⁸

Of course, there are a thousand ways to make the political history of smack and crack seem so complex and its meaning so nuanced as to be incomprehensible. After all, secrecy and plausible deniability are a crucial part of the political MO. But with an open mind, a dash of honesty and the right library, the truth is now fairly easy to discern. A significant part of this truth has to be that, although the CIA is undoubtedly the organisation with the single most direct overall responsibility for the worldwide growth in the use of hard drugs over the past several decades, not all the blame can be placed at the door of this venerable agency. It must be obvious even from this short history that the CIA in all its theatres is only doing what it has to do under the objective circumstances of fighting popular anti-capitalist movements of one kind or another when these fights are either illegal, unethical, or unpopular at home. Some proof of this is surely that the French and the American militaries both separately arrive at the same MO at the same time in the late 1940s and early 1950s, in Vietnam and Burma respectively. There are subtle differences between the two operations, for instance the French being more directly hands on and the CIA’s more at one remove,59 but the end result is the same: ruthless and determined counter-insurgency movements built on a foundation of drug-dealing.

Alas this bitter medicine can work wonders.

In the 1980s, the twin tsunamis of smack and crack produced by the CIA-sponsored and British-backed counter-revolutionary gangs in Asia and Latin America crash onto the dollar-rich shores of Europe and the USA. The profits dwarf those of the Golden Triangle era and grossly inflate the newly liberated global financial markets, especially its offshore branches. The accompanying deluge of hard drugs creates a living hell for millions in the ex-working class of the developed nations, drowning so many of the newly unemployed in the deadly milk of paradise, dazzling a lucky few with the shining but ephemeral trinkets of gangsterism.

And all the while our new world order inexorably takes shape.

INTERESTING EXCEPTION: While the newly unemployed, poor and working-class youth of Western Europe and the USA are drowning in a sea of smack and crack from the early 1980s to the late 1990s, there is one place that completely bucks the trend for developed nations: the occupied six counties of the north of Ireland. During the period in question, responsibility for the policing of the poorest areas of the towns and cities of the region is directly in the hands of the poorest people themselves. On the streets of these areas, British government forces effectively have no writ.

During this period, Northern Ireland, as it is generally known, drug-using patterns for recreational drugs such as cannabis, amphetamines, LSD and ecstasy track pretty much exactly drug-using trends in the rest of the developed world. But according to the best evidence, the use of smack and crack is more or less zero.⁶⁰

And Finally

To end on a personal note. The duty of a playwright is to provoke and entertain, but also to say things more respectable writers can’t or won’t say. So here’s my own two-penneth:

Even our most stuffy, pro-capitalist historians would struggle to deny that, throughout the 1980s, at the international level, important and highly influential elements of the British state provide support and political cover for the drug-dealing, counter-revolutionary gangs in Afghanistan and Latin America.61 But am I really suggesting these ruthless elements somehow conspire to start a hard-drug epidemic on the streets of Britain in the wake of the 1981 inner-city uprisings depicted in my play? I mean, they’re not on the corner selling a bag, are they, these people from Eaton and Harrow and Cambridge and Sandhurst?

So, no. I’m not suggesting someone in the British government somewhere, even in the darkest corridor of power says aloud, ‘Wouldn’t it be marvellous if these damned inner-city youths, who are fighting us in their tens of thousands, burning our vehicles and creating a situation like the one we face in Northern Ireland, but on a far, far greater scale…⁶² wouldn’t it be marvellous if instead of fighting us and creating no-go areas, or even starting to govern themselves like they do in Catholic West Belfast, these youths sell and take drugs and, if they fight, they fight among themselves…’ Of course not.

But in the context of the decades-long collusion summarised here between Western governments and drug-dealers and gangsters of all kinds – including myriad armed religious fanatics of varying faiths – almost always in the face of popular rebellion – and with this tendency reaching a historic peak in the early 1980s – there is an obvious question. And with rebellions and revolutions overrunning Africa, Asia and Latin America, when in 1981 fierce fighting suddenly breaks out in every major English city, personally I can’t help but ask:

In that moment of grave crisis for the British ruling classes, when tens of thousands of people with nothing to lose – the likes of Neil and Mandy in my play, and the youths who ‘took Liverpool that night’ – stick a needle in their arm and melt away to nothing; when an entire generation turn from rebellion to petty crime, or gangsterism; when a couple of years later the defeated mining communities go the same way; and after that black and white inner-city youths start shooting and stabbing one another instead of fighting the power…

Do Margaret Thatcher and her cronies with their corporate backers and experienced military advisers give a flying fuck? Or are they secretly relieved?

Personally, I think they can’t believe their luck.

Ed Edwards
July 2018