Poppies, Politics, and Power by Bradford James Tharin;

Author:Bradford, James Tharin;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lightning Source Inc. (Tier 3)

Chapter 5

THE AFGHAN CONNECTION

Smuggling, Heroin, and Nixon’s War on Drugs in Afghanistan

America’s public enemy number one in the United States is drug abuse. In order to fight and defeat this enemy, it is necessary to wage a new, all out offensive.

—RICHARD M. NIXON

To wage an effective war against heroin addiction, we must have international cooperation. In order to secure such cooperation, I am initiating a worldwide escalation in our existing programs for the control of narcotics traffic.

—RICHARD M. NIXON

By the late 1960s, drug use in the United States escalated to seemingly epic proportions. Use of marijuana, heroin, and other hallucinogenic drugs became a mainstay of a youth culture that rejected the social and political constructs of the previous generation. When President Richard Nixon signed the Controlled Substances Act in 1970 and formalized the War on Drugs, he struck at the heart of the “silent majority’s” fear that rampant and often romanticized drug use was a prime indicator of America’s rapid social and moral decline. Throughout the 1960s, millions of baby boomers came of age in an era when youth culture romanticized drug use and made them increasingly susceptible to the visibly destructive use of drugs. Heroin addiction, in particular, became the primary gauge of social decay. Although heroin addiction was nothing new to the United States, the increased use among white suburbanites and soldiers in the Vietnam War transformed controlling drug addiction into prime public policy. Heroin became such an issue that by 1971, Americans listed heroin addiction behind Vietnam and the economy as one of the nation’s most pressing problems.1 Nixon cited drug policy as a fundamental barometer of the political, social, and cultural morass of the 1960s. As historian Daniel Weimer notes: “Nixon deliberately linked drugs with the challenges to the Cold War consensus, patriotism, patriarchy, and race relations. The anti-war movement, counterculture, feminism, Black Power, and the other ethnic and identity power/pride movements indicated that cultural modernity in the United States had become unstable and too permissive.”2 As a result, the once small group of zealous antidrug crusaders had evolved into a primary player in American domestic and foreign policy, demanding the attention of all departments and branches of the US government.

Although thousands of miles away, Afghanistan would be drawn into the globalizing war on drugs. As detailed in the previous chapter, in the 1960s Afghanistan emerged as a haven for drug users, sojourners, and amateur drug traffickers. Despite its popularity as a paradise for unregulated drug use and trade, it still remained a relatively small part of the global market, mostly fulfilling the demand for opium in Iran and feeding hashish to the West. Nonetheless, the demand for Afghan hash and raw opium was indeed growing. Smuggling across the border with Iran increased yearly, and more and more entrepreneurs were traveling to Kabul to purchase large quantities of narcotics to ship back to Europe and the United States. By the mid-1970s, opium from Afghanistan was trickling its way into markets beyond Iran and Pakistan; Afghan opium was emerging as a global commodity.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.