Seeing Drugs by Daniel Weimer

Author:Daniel Weimer [Weimer, Daniel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, United States, 20th Century, Asia, Southeast Asia, Political Science, International Relations, General
ISBN: 9781606350591
Google: iSNLYgEACAAJ
Publisher: Kent State University Press
Published: 2011-01-15T03:24:25+00:00

Coda: Shan Proposal, 1977

By the end of the Ford administration, the American drug war launched in invigorated form by Richard Nixon had taken shape. Traditional control methods, such as interdiction, crop eradication, efforts to break up trafficking rings, and foreign narcotics assistance remained central to U.S. source-control policy, supplemented by U.S. support for crop replacement, notably the UN-Thai program in northern Thailand. Herbicides, initially employed in Mexico (see chapter 6), would find widespread use in Bolivia, Colombia, and Peru in the 1980s. Domestically, the federal government still supported methadone maintenance and treatment programs, but such demand-side actions would soon be on the wane.95 Seemingly left out of the equation was preemptive buying of illicit narcotics, but in July 1977 Representative Wolff again held hearings and urged the White House to review the merits of such action.

The occasion for Wolff’s new hearings was an offer by the Shan United Army, led by the opium warlord Khun Sa, to sell a large portion of the Shan State opium harvest to the United States. Wolff and Joseph Nellis, chief counsel of the Select Committee on Narcotics Abuse and Control, had traveled to Thailand in April 1977. There, Nellis met directly with Khun Sa, who controlled territory along the Thai-Burma border where opium refineries operated. Criminal syndicates, which found the Golden Triangle a safe base of operations, paid Khun Sa for protection while they refined Burmese opium into heroin and then set about distributing the drug. Khun Sa offered to close down the refineries and to sell to a local government or “international consortium under the auspices” of the UN the opium that normally would have flowed into illicit channels. Nellis found Khun Sa sincere and regarded present American drug control in Thailand and Burma deeply problematic, if not irrelevant. Since the Thai government was riddled with corrupt elements, he reasoned, no amount of U.S. antinarcotics aid would halt the flow of drugs through Thailand. Moreover, because the Thais were surrounded by insurgencies and Communist revolution, they aligned themselves with trafficking and rebel groups along the Burma border. For these reasons, Nellis argued, the U.S. government “must find a way to destroy this pestilence at the source,” and Khun Sa was the closest the United States could hope to get to illicit production.96

Debate during the hearings reprised that of 1975. Wolff stridently maintained that interdiction had proved woefully inadequate at controlling opium in Burma. Alternatives were needed, he maintained, and striking at the source of supply before the harvest was sold to traffickers seemed a valid course of action. Wolff therefore proposed that Washington pay the SUA $6 million over a six-year period in order to get the drug trade in Burma under control. He also provided evidence that the Burmese government had used American-supplied helicopters in counterinsurgency operations. For the New York congressman, it was clear that the U.S. antinarcotics aid to Burma did little more than provide backing for a dictatorial government that brutally repressed its ethnic minorities and blatantly disregarded their human rights.

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