Turinbaar
22nd May 2010, 21:06
Today there exists a global system of economic and political exploitation, borne out of the relationship between military industrial empire and the illegal drug trade. Across America, prisons are overflowing with petty drug offenders, and in the narcotics producer countries of the third world there are millions of laborers who are owned and treated as slaves to a heavily armed and ruthless cartel elite. Despite decades of anti-drug crusade by the US, drug production rates have been relatively unaffected, and an inspection of the crimes of the recent past will detail a covert alliance between elements of the government and the mafia cartels of the world during the Cold War. In the post-9/11 world, the war on drugs has become a positive hindrance to the war in Afghanistan against the Taliban, who fund their jihad with the sale of opium and heroin, while corruption in the Afghan and American governments impedes solutions. The International War on Drugs should end immediately, beginning in the United States. The Afghan opium should be bought and made into medicine and integrated into a Single-Payer medical system. Most importantly, the abolition of the International Drug War is integral and essential to the realization of a new socialist consciousness with a vision for an emancipated world, and the salvation of the world from the ghost of Fascism summoned by Capital and our modern Prohibition.
In order to understand current conditions, one must be familiar with the historical relationship between drugs and empire, and the central ideological role of prohibition in these things. Karl Marx noted in his essays for the New York Tribune covering the opium wars in China, “It was the assumption of the opium monopoly in India by the British Government which led to the proscription of the opium trade in China.” The East India Company was willing to sacrifice its legitimate trade dealings with China in order to maintain profits in its opium monopoly, and the Emperor, in turn, was willing to sacrifice his kingdom in order to pursue a war on drugs that ultimately destroyed it, and reduced China to the Sick Man of Asia. Marx noted that had the Emperor legalized the trade and localized its production, he could have not only made back the money he had lost to the East India Company, but he could also have dealt a crippling blow to British Imperialism in India, which by then was heavily dependent on opium production as an economy and on China as an outlet for the surplus of that production. Instead the Emperor declared trade and consumption of the drug a heresy, and enacted severe reprisals towards offenders. There are many things of moral and practical significance that are to be learned from this disastrous course of folly, but history repeats itself largely as a result of humanity’s lack of consciousness, and it’s attachment to illusions.
Global prohibition of narcotics began with the International Opium convention of 1912, when representatives from China, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Persia, Portugal, Russia, Siam, and the British Empire met in The Hague to sign the treaty into law. Universal enforcement of the policy followed the capitulation of the Central Powers to the Entente after the First World War. Prohibition saw its first major crusade in the United States, first when the Harrison Act of 1913 attempted to tax drugs out of existence, and culminating in the Eighteenth Amendment which was ratified into the constitution in 1919, outlawing the production and sale of alcohol. The decade following would bear the face of such infamous characters as Al Capone, and the various other rumrunners and bootleggers who were the natural participants in especially the illegal drink economy. The industry was as intimately linked with war as were the forces summoned into existence to destroy them.
The mafia armed themselves with weapons such as the iconic “Tommy” gun, first created for the soldiers of the Great War. In return, the prohibitionists symbolized their crusade as an extension of that war, and identified alcohol drinkers with the German enemy. Their counterparts in the Federal Bureau of Narcotics were the first office of American government to be trained, authorized and implemented for covert operations, and this office, run by virulent anti-communists, would later train the leadership of military intelligence. The arrest and/or death of Capone and others like him did nothing to stop the prevalence of the trade, (not to mention the rampant violence resulting from its underworld tradesmen) and the reality of this slowly began to take over various states that enacted the legalization of medicinal whiskey. This hypocritical system, hemorrhaging state funds during a time of Great Depression, finally collapsed under the Twenty First Amendment, which legalized the sale of alcohol. With their monopoly abolished, the still heavily armed mafia turned its attention to alternative products. They would find new patronage, as the great struggles of empire would take an interest in their business dealings and the various potentials to be wrought.
The twentieth century was marked by the rise of a new form of economic production known as the “military industrial complex,” whereupon the state would allocate major funding for the arms industry, the military, and the intelligence establishment. It was President Dwight D. Eisenhower who originated term itself and introduced it into American vernacular in his Farewell Address to the Nation in January 1961. In the lead up to that coining of phrase he noted,
“…[W]e have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions. Added to this, three and a half million men and women are directly engaged in the defense establishment. We annually spend on military security more than the net income of all United States corporations. (Eisenhower)”
The arms industry would hire massive labor armies, who would turn out war material for the US military, and the CIA would coordinate strategic intelligence and conduct espionage. This provided for the US both the might to defeat fascism and the solution to its major unemployment problems. By the end of WWII, millions of Americans had high paying jobs in the military, the defense industry, or corporations like Ford and Boeing that had been augmented for the war, and the products of their labor had been consumed in the fires of Dresden and Hiroshima. The advent of nuclear weaponry made it clear to any rational person that such wide scale conflict could not be repeated, lest the planet be vaporized, and yet the production of weapons continued by the rivaling superpowers, thereby ushering in an era of seemingly unending “Cold War.” Though he thought that the new system was necessary in the face of a nuclear enemy, the former WWII general gave a foreboding message to his successors that read, “In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex.”
During this simmering ideological conflict, the US conducted much of its foreign policy through covert action by the CIA (though it engaged its own military in direct conflict once in a while in Korea or Vietnam), which sponsored the military coups of dictators across Latin America and beyond, thereby solidifying America’s imperial interests. Eisenhower was right in suspecting the shadowy figures at the head of intelligence, as they included none other than Reinhard Gehlen, the Nazi intelligence chief in charge of the Lebensraum, whose friends across the world soon became the friends of America. The declassified documents accounting for the CIA’s involvement with coups show that the Agency aided and propped up fascist regimes such as General Pinoche of Chile (CIA 1), Saddam Hussein of Iraq, and many others around the world. Covert imperial rule through proxy dictatorship is an effective way of securing all of the resources of the country in question for the US alone, and because the governments that the CIA propped up were constantly at war with their neighbors or “communist” dissidents within, they were also the perfect clients for the vast and expanding American arms industry. By funneling military capital into these regimes, as well as into various paramilitary forces, the US could theoretically dispose of the products of the war economy at a steady rate without actually sending its own forces into battle. In order to counter the general flow of wealth out of their countries due to military expenditures among other things, the client states and actors exported back to the US their own native products, one of which was narcotics.
An area of particular interest to American Imperialism during the Cold War was the Indochina region. From Burma, president Truman sought to strike a blow to China in response to their intervention in Korea, with the aid of local Chinese Nationalist refugees, who paid for their weapons with drug money. Also the decaying French Empire was heavily reliant on local paramilitary forces, directed by French intelligence and funded by the opium trade, in order to put down local rebellions, such as Ho Chi Minh’s independence movement in Vietnam. The relationship between patron and client was intimate, extending into control of bank accountings, product transportation and profit sharing. This relationship coincided with the pressuring by the UN of Southeast Asian governments to adopt anti-drug laws, and was ultimately taken in acquisition along with the rest of the European imperial carapace by the CIA.
The People’s Republic of China sought to take advantage of the trade and in its state capitalist manner it integrated the industry into its centralized system. Its policy towards prohibition within its boarders had remained relatively unchanged since the failure of the emperor not long before. The Soviet Union soon responded in kind and in their typical paranoid and duplicitous manner, American cold warriors attempted to paint an image of a global communist conspiracy seeking to undermine free society with drugs, all while justifying the facilitation of the same trade under a policy of known as “radical pragmatism,” which regarded the Red Menace as an enemy to be defeated by any means necessary.
When President Richard Nixon declared his war on drugs and signed the Comprehensive Drug Abuse Prevention and Control Act of 1970, he created the conditions similar to that of the prohibition era, where harsh punishments and prison sentences were dolled out to even the smallest offenders, leaving a minority of secretive and dangerous gangsters to control the monopoly over an illegal and popular commodity. He also created a new internalized outlet for the war economy in the form of the Drug Enforcement Agency whose enemy ranges from the average American pothead to the most organized international drug kingpins. Since then the war on drugs has escalated over these past few decades with no significant impact on the rate of narcotics production and propagation.
In fact, documents uncovered by a congressional committee chaired by Senator John Kerry during the scandal known as the “Iran-Contra Affairs,” including the private journal of Oliver North of President Reagan’s national security council, show a direct collusion between elements of the administration and men like Mario Calero (brother of a contra-rebel leader), who had been hired by the NSC (National Security Council) through North to fly weapons to paramilitaries in Central America (North 1). The same plane used by Calero and his associates to carry weapons south was used to traffic drugs north, with the full knowledge and approval of their patron.
Covert facilitation of trade like this not only made up for the contra’s deficit on weapons, it also contributed greatly to the overflow of drugs in American streets experienced in the 1980’s. The report by the Kerry Committee titled “Bueso Rosa, Latchinian and Narco-Terrorism” cites a Wall Street Journal article published November 8th 1984 that says “On October 28 1984, the FBI seized a shipment of 345 kilos of cocaine worth an estimated $40 million on a rural airstrip in South Florida. The proceeds from the sale of cocaine were to have been used to finance a plot to assassinate Honduran President Roberto Suazo Cordoba (76).” According to the same source, the conspirators included General Jose Bueso Rosa, who had been aiding the rebel groups, and Geoard Latchinian, a Miami based Honduran arms dealer. Gen. Rosa’s case was interceded upon by the Reagan Administration through Oliver North, who urged leniency and said in a now declassified note to an accomplice: “Objective is to keep Bueso from…spilling the beans (North 1).” The Iran-Contra Affairs would be the defining scandal of that era, and serves to this day as an example of the futility and hypocrisy, of the prohibitionist policy, in addition to exposing its true imperialist motives.
The Drug War appears again in Afghanistan, where the American and NATO forces are engaged both against the reactionary Islamic jihadists of the Taliban, but also against the local cash crop, opium (both having emerged out of earlier CIA interventions). The sap of the opium poppy contains the chemical basis for both pain medications, like oxycodone, and for the illegal substances, like heroine. According to a report by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime titled The Opium Economy in Afghanistan “During the period 1994-2000, UNDCP estimates that a cumulative total of 34,000 metric tons of illicit opium were produced in the world. Of that total, Afghanistan’s share represented almost two-thirds (28).” This sharply dropped, according to the report after Mullah Omar, leader of the Taliban banned opium production in 2000. This was in response to a hefty financial inducement from George W. Bush, who in his infinite wisdom believed that the one eyed zealot could be a useful ally in the war on drugs.
After 9/11 and the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 production of opium resumed and NATO and the newly established Karzai government chose to continue the eradication of the poppies, which the Taliban took advantage of by monopolizing the production and trade. In a July 9th 2007 New Yorker article titled Letters from Afghanistan: The Taliban’s Opium War, Jon Lee Anderson quotes Lieutenant General Mohammad Daud-Daud, Afghanistan’s deputy minister of the interior for counter-narcotics, who said: “there has been a coalition between the Taliban and the opium smugglers. This year, they have set up a commission to tax the harvest.” Despite increased efforts to eradicate the crop, a report by the UN titled the Afghanistan Opium Survey finds that in 2007 “it was estimated that 509,000 families (confidence interval: 437,000-653,000) were involved in opium poppy cultivation, compared to 448,000 families in 2006, i.e., an increase of 14 per cent (93).” According to the same report, attempts to dissuade the continued production of opium were met with staunch resistance from the farmers, resulting in incidents in which “Fifteen policemen and four farmers died as a result (90).”
Furthermore not all of the farmers work voluntarily. According to The Head of IOM's Counter Trafficking Department, Richard Danziguer, "When there is criminal activity, especially drug trafficking, weapon trafficking, often we will find … some people actually are forced into …working as practically slave labor in the fields cultivating the poppy (Schlien).” As long as the West continues to deny the Afghans a road to prosperity and liberation with its hopeless crusade to eradicate opium from its primary producer in the world, the revenues of that crop will continue to prop up the slave drivers who fund the Taliban in Afghanistan, and the products of those crops will continue to find their way into American streets.
The solution to the problems of corruption and waste that have marked drug prohibition for decades, and are now a positive hindrance to the US in its efforts against Islamic extremism, is now entirely self-evident. The International War on Drugs must end, first and foremost in the United States. This demand was raised by Senator Bernie Sanders as a candidate in the 2016 Democratic primaries and was widely echoed by the public (this, along with many other of his democratic socialist reform policies). The benefits of abolition are numerous, and they encompass various economic and moral crises that face modern society. A December 2008 Harvard University Department of Economics report by Jeffery a Miron on the implications of drug legalization finds that: “legalizing drugs would save roughly $44.1 billion per year in government expenditure on enforcement of prohibition (1).” This would significantly reduce the wasteful spending that is so often complained about by so-called “fiscal conservatives,” in combination with the reduction of the over mighty police-state.
The prisons overflowing with petty drug offenders, fueling an industry commonly understood to be in itself a new form of slavery, should be emptied and reserved only for criminals who have committed real crimes. This will substantially reduce the prison population, which was reported in 2008 to be hovering around 2,424,279 inmates for drug offenses (Sabol 8). These privately run industries have expanded greatly since then and show every sign of pushing harder in the era of President Trump. In addition to being sweatshops they are notorious gang recruitment centers where many otherwise normal men and women are forced by the state to live among real criminals and forced by necessity to adopt their practices, including drug trafficking. When they are released, they are hardly rehabilitated and reformed; rather they are, by their familiarity with the underworld, even more hardened and experienced criminals with prison careers as a future. As observed with Alcohol Prohibition, authoritarianism simply facilitates the violent growth of the industry and the gangs that control it, and favors the filling of prisons rather than universities.
The inducements by the US to the governments of Afghanistan, Latin America, and others to continue the drug war must end, and the Afghan opium should be bought instead and made into the same pain medication that is seriously lacking in the pharmaceutical industry. According to an article by David Templeton in the Pittsburgh Post Gazzette: “A nationwide shortage of oxycodone, a widely prescribed opium-based pain medication, is causing some patients to panic, pharmacists to scramble, and doctors to spend additional time altering medication regimens for desperate patients.” The shortage has escalated the price per unit for pain medicine so greatly that pills have become a lucrative underground market that is threatening to compound the drug problems of the United States (KOMO). A sudden surplus of product from Afghanistan, administered by a US system of socialized medicine would drive the prices low enough to abolish the underground market. Such an act could provide affordable and potent medication not only to Americans, but to millions of suffering people around the world who cannot afford anything beyond aspirin for the pain that accompanies illnesses like terminal cancer. The aid of the US to the opium farmers in Afghanistan would undermine the economic hold of the Taliban over the country.
The way is clear to anyone who sees America’s policy in Afghanistan, as compared to its legal trade agreements with republic of Turkey, where the opium farmers are paid to grow the dreaded substance for the US pharmaceutical industry (Hitchens). The US military has already begun tentative steps towards this realization in the formerly Taliban controlled town of Marja, under the orders of General Stanely McChrystal, whose position on the poppies, according to a New York Times article by Rod Nordland, was, “U.S. forces no longer eradicate.” The next logical step in order to win the hearts and minds of the Afghan people, and by extension the war itself, is for the US to become the new main patron of the opium trade in the region. Until then it remains in a corrupt state of compromise, which dooms the war to inevitable failure.
Along with abolishing the drug war, America must invest in cannabis prodution, which has proven to be an economic boon in states where it is already legalized and taxed. According to a March 2009 Time article by Alison Stateman: “Pot is, after all, California's biggest cash crop, responsible for $14 billion a year in sales.” The 2016 legalization of marijuana in California opens up possibilities for business growth, as well as for the labor movement, which will naturally organize and act in its own interest.
By ending federal prohibition, and abolishing the wasteful DEA, the government could reverse its long standing marijuana policies in order help facilitate with loans and land the spread of farming and dispensary co-operatives throughout the US, which has the potential to do for the unemployed of today’s economic crisis what the military-industrial complex did for the generation of Eisenhower. Weapons take industry skill and state sponsoring in order to serve for a large and expanding war economy, as compared to cannabis production, so this new industry possesses great potential for wealth. Even archconservatives like William F. Buckley Jr. (Free Weeds 1), and those who have occupied public offices in the state of California like retired Orange County Superior Court Judge Jim Gray support marijuana legalization (Hoeffel). Indeed Milton Friedman himself criticized the enterprise in a 1992 article on the basis that Nixon’s grand scheme was an actually socialism. It is hard not to see, especially in these times of crisis, the potential economic qualities of legalization, not to mention the popular outcry over the moral question posed by the victimless criminals who are clogging the prisons and court systems. This reality has caused many states, to seriously reconsider the wasteful insanity that so much of their resources are committed to, and this trend will continue to spread.
One need not take too long to notice that even if the International War on Drugs were to officially end, and if all of the state participants were to stop immediately, there would still exist a massive infrastructure of cartel trafficking and production networks. These operations have been notorious for their indiscriminant violence against rivals and the exploitation of their own workers. According to a Fort Worth Weekly article by Peter Gorman, “The forced-labor movement is well known in Mexico but has not received much coverage in this country (1)” The issue was made known by the leader of the Mexican indigenous army known as the Zapatistas, Sub-commander Marcos, who pointed out the "inhuman conditions" and "virtual slavery" experienced in the “concentration camps for the indigenous (Bellinghausen).” As demonstrated by the precedents of history, the politicians can only be relied on for so long, and because of government corruption, violence and neglect, community guards have emerge to protect the people, but an international effort is required for a real solution.
There exist already various organizations in Latin America that may be charactarized as forms of Narco-Socialism, such as the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), who began taxing coca production in the territories under their control in order to finance their struggles against a corrupt government which itself utilizes drug dealing mercenaries. The FARC must be recognized as a reactionary force because of their dependence on the drug war itself. There engagement in the industry was expanded in order to include direct control of production in proportion to the level of profit yielded from the practice as well as to the tempo of international prohibition, and necessarily when they inevitably came into competition over land, labor, and resources against the cartels and their allies, the state supported paramilitaries.
This was ironically coupled with a harsh policy of prohibition within the territories under their control. Profits yielded from consumption by the American patrons of their enemy (i.e. the very imperialism they claimed to be fighting) were strictly controlled in this way in order to acquire weaponry from the bounties of China’s military industrialism, thus fueling both of the worlds’ great empires at once. Both actions are justified in the name of “anti-imperialism” by the FARC, which is essentially to claim ideological permission to become a symptom of rather than a solution to military industrial empire and the international drug war, just as it is to follow in suite with so many others who felt that an oligarchy of technocrats and cultists were necessary to set apart from the masses, with full control over the means of production and the appropriation of the surplus, in order to administrate the cultural perfection of the masses.
The contradictions in their policy necessarily extend the prohibitionist’s global war against the people into the supposedly liberated zones where drug production is tolerated, just as they facilitate and participate in the system of exploitation that keeps in bondage untold numbers of laborers. They fail to see that the overthrow of the system that they have made themselves a part of necessarily entails the liberation of the laborers subject to this system, and have instead chosen to alienate them as objects in the engines of their own capital production. In this respect they are no more revolutionary than the Taliban, and will serve as nothing more than but one of many forces that will bring about the common ruin of Colombia.
The great failure of the 20th century revolutionary movements was the abandonment of internationalism and the principle of workers’ emancipation. Compromises were made and the Left found itself continually defending or making euphemistic excuses for dictatorship, from Joseph Stalin to Saddam Hussein. The socialist movement of today has no world vision, and had no answer to the various world events of the last few decades other than a form of isolationism, and the Left is crumbling in the face of a resurgent Fascism. The right wing and its relation to the drug war finds embodiment in Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines, who boasts of personally murdering suspected addicts and dealers. Such a man is the new face of Prohibition across the world.
The liberation of the slaves of the cartels and the prison industry and the emancipation of the proletarian as a whole, will depend, not merely on policy reform, but rather on the development of a real global class-consciousness, the stirrings of which we began to see (in a crude and inexperienced form) in the Arab Spring and growth of left populism in the western world. However there is no assurance of victory and so long as Socialist mass organizations are failing to form true internationalism and instead are committed to a Hitler-Stalin pact with the forces of reaction and guised in the rhetoric of “anti-globalization,” and “anti-imperialism,” the Drug War will continue, as will the march of Fascism, and the question of real human liberation from the exploits of cartels, capitalists, and dictators will never be allowed to arise. The changing world will pass them by as they consume one another in fratricide, and the fate of the peoples of the globe will be left to the contradictions of empire.
In the past it was proclaimed, “Workers of the world, unite!” for they had only their chains to loose, but today the workers know that the world itself is in danger of being lost forever and only their revolutionary struggle can save it.
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In order to understand current conditions, one must be familiar with the historical relationship between drugs and empire, and the central ideological role of prohibition in these things. Karl Marx noted in his essays for the New York Tribune covering the opium wars in China, “It was the assumption of the opium monopoly in India by the British Government which led to the proscription of the opium trade in China.” The East India Company was willing to sacrifice its legitimate trade dealings with China in order to maintain profits in its opium monopoly, and the Emperor, in turn, was willing to sacrifice his kingdom in order to pursue a war on drugs that ultimately destroyed it, and reduced China to the Sick Man of Asia. Marx noted that had the Emperor legalized the trade and localized its production, he could have not only made back the money he had lost to the East India Company, but he could also have dealt a crippling blow to British Imperialism in India, which by then was heavily dependent on opium production as an economy and on China as an outlet for the surplus of that production. Instead the Emperor declared trade and consumption of the drug a heresy, and enacted severe reprisals towards offenders. There are many things of moral and practical significance that are to be learned from this disastrous course of folly, but history repeats itself largely as a result of humanity’s lack of consciousness, and it’s attachment to illusions.
Global prohibition of narcotics began with the International Opium convention of 1912, when representatives from China, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Persia, Portugal, Russia, Siam, and the British Empire met in The Hague to sign the treaty into law. Universal enforcement of the policy followed the capitulation of the Central Powers to the Entente after the First World War. Prohibition saw its first major crusade in the United States, first when the Harrison Act of 1913 attempted to tax drugs out of existence, and culminating in the Eighteenth Amendment which was ratified into the constitution in 1919, outlawing the production and sale of alcohol. The decade following would bear the face of such infamous characters as Al Capone, and the various other rumrunners and bootleggers who were the natural participants in especially the illegal drink economy. The industry was as intimately linked with war as were the forces summoned into existence to destroy them.
The mafia armed themselves with weapons such as the iconic “Tommy” gun, first created for the soldiers of the Great War. In return, the prohibitionists symbolized their crusade as an extension of that war, and identified alcohol drinkers with the German enemy. Their counterparts in the Federal Bureau of Narcotics were the first office of American government to be trained, authorized and implemented for covert operations, and this office, run by virulent anti-communists, would later train the leadership of military intelligence. The arrest and/or death of Capone and others like him did nothing to stop the prevalence of the trade, (not to mention the rampant violence resulting from its underworld tradesmen) and the reality of this slowly began to take over various states that enacted the legalization of medicinal whiskey. This hypocritical system, hemorrhaging state funds during a time of Great Depression, finally collapsed under the Twenty First Amendment, which legalized the sale of alcohol. With their monopoly abolished, the still heavily armed mafia turned its attention to alternative products. They would find new patronage, as the great struggles of empire would take an interest in their business dealings and the various potentials to be wrought.
The twentieth century was marked by the rise of a new form of economic production known as the “military industrial complex,” whereupon the state would allocate major funding for the arms industry, the military, and the intelligence establishment. It was President Dwight D. Eisenhower who originated term itself and introduced it into American vernacular in his Farewell Address to the Nation in January 1961. In the lead up to that coining of phrase he noted,
“…[W]e have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions. Added to this, three and a half million men and women are directly engaged in the defense establishment. We annually spend on military security more than the net income of all United States corporations. (Eisenhower)”
The arms industry would hire massive labor armies, who would turn out war material for the US military, and the CIA would coordinate strategic intelligence and conduct espionage. This provided for the US both the might to defeat fascism and the solution to its major unemployment problems. By the end of WWII, millions of Americans had high paying jobs in the military, the defense industry, or corporations like Ford and Boeing that had been augmented for the war, and the products of their labor had been consumed in the fires of Dresden and Hiroshima. The advent of nuclear weaponry made it clear to any rational person that such wide scale conflict could not be repeated, lest the planet be vaporized, and yet the production of weapons continued by the rivaling superpowers, thereby ushering in an era of seemingly unending “Cold War.” Though he thought that the new system was necessary in the face of a nuclear enemy, the former WWII general gave a foreboding message to his successors that read, “In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex.”
During this simmering ideological conflict, the US conducted much of its foreign policy through covert action by the CIA (though it engaged its own military in direct conflict once in a while in Korea or Vietnam), which sponsored the military coups of dictators across Latin America and beyond, thereby solidifying America’s imperial interests. Eisenhower was right in suspecting the shadowy figures at the head of intelligence, as they included none other than Reinhard Gehlen, the Nazi intelligence chief in charge of the Lebensraum, whose friends across the world soon became the friends of America. The declassified documents accounting for the CIA’s involvement with coups show that the Agency aided and propped up fascist regimes such as General Pinoche of Chile (CIA 1), Saddam Hussein of Iraq, and many others around the world. Covert imperial rule through proxy dictatorship is an effective way of securing all of the resources of the country in question for the US alone, and because the governments that the CIA propped up were constantly at war with their neighbors or “communist” dissidents within, they were also the perfect clients for the vast and expanding American arms industry. By funneling military capital into these regimes, as well as into various paramilitary forces, the US could theoretically dispose of the products of the war economy at a steady rate without actually sending its own forces into battle. In order to counter the general flow of wealth out of their countries due to military expenditures among other things, the client states and actors exported back to the US their own native products, one of which was narcotics.
An area of particular interest to American Imperialism during the Cold War was the Indochina region. From Burma, president Truman sought to strike a blow to China in response to their intervention in Korea, with the aid of local Chinese Nationalist refugees, who paid for their weapons with drug money. Also the decaying French Empire was heavily reliant on local paramilitary forces, directed by French intelligence and funded by the opium trade, in order to put down local rebellions, such as Ho Chi Minh’s independence movement in Vietnam. The relationship between patron and client was intimate, extending into control of bank accountings, product transportation and profit sharing. This relationship coincided with the pressuring by the UN of Southeast Asian governments to adopt anti-drug laws, and was ultimately taken in acquisition along with the rest of the European imperial carapace by the CIA.
The People’s Republic of China sought to take advantage of the trade and in its state capitalist manner it integrated the industry into its centralized system. Its policy towards prohibition within its boarders had remained relatively unchanged since the failure of the emperor not long before. The Soviet Union soon responded in kind and in their typical paranoid and duplicitous manner, American cold warriors attempted to paint an image of a global communist conspiracy seeking to undermine free society with drugs, all while justifying the facilitation of the same trade under a policy of known as “radical pragmatism,” which regarded the Red Menace as an enemy to be defeated by any means necessary.
When President Richard Nixon declared his war on drugs and signed the Comprehensive Drug Abuse Prevention and Control Act of 1970, he created the conditions similar to that of the prohibition era, where harsh punishments and prison sentences were dolled out to even the smallest offenders, leaving a minority of secretive and dangerous gangsters to control the monopoly over an illegal and popular commodity. He also created a new internalized outlet for the war economy in the form of the Drug Enforcement Agency whose enemy ranges from the average American pothead to the most organized international drug kingpins. Since then the war on drugs has escalated over these past few decades with no significant impact on the rate of narcotics production and propagation.
In fact, documents uncovered by a congressional committee chaired by Senator John Kerry during the scandal known as the “Iran-Contra Affairs,” including the private journal of Oliver North of President Reagan’s national security council, show a direct collusion between elements of the administration and men like Mario Calero (brother of a contra-rebel leader), who had been hired by the NSC (National Security Council) through North to fly weapons to paramilitaries in Central America (North 1). The same plane used by Calero and his associates to carry weapons south was used to traffic drugs north, with the full knowledge and approval of their patron.
Covert facilitation of trade like this not only made up for the contra’s deficit on weapons, it also contributed greatly to the overflow of drugs in American streets experienced in the 1980’s. The report by the Kerry Committee titled “Bueso Rosa, Latchinian and Narco-Terrorism” cites a Wall Street Journal article published November 8th 1984 that says “On October 28 1984, the FBI seized a shipment of 345 kilos of cocaine worth an estimated $40 million on a rural airstrip in South Florida. The proceeds from the sale of cocaine were to have been used to finance a plot to assassinate Honduran President Roberto Suazo Cordoba (76).” According to the same source, the conspirators included General Jose Bueso Rosa, who had been aiding the rebel groups, and Geoard Latchinian, a Miami based Honduran arms dealer. Gen. Rosa’s case was interceded upon by the Reagan Administration through Oliver North, who urged leniency and said in a now declassified note to an accomplice: “Objective is to keep Bueso from…spilling the beans (North 1).” The Iran-Contra Affairs would be the defining scandal of that era, and serves to this day as an example of the futility and hypocrisy, of the prohibitionist policy, in addition to exposing its true imperialist motives.
The Drug War appears again in Afghanistan, where the American and NATO forces are engaged both against the reactionary Islamic jihadists of the Taliban, but also against the local cash crop, opium (both having emerged out of earlier CIA interventions). The sap of the opium poppy contains the chemical basis for both pain medications, like oxycodone, and for the illegal substances, like heroine. According to a report by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime titled The Opium Economy in Afghanistan “During the period 1994-2000, UNDCP estimates that a cumulative total of 34,000 metric tons of illicit opium were produced in the world. Of that total, Afghanistan’s share represented almost two-thirds (28).” This sharply dropped, according to the report after Mullah Omar, leader of the Taliban banned opium production in 2000. This was in response to a hefty financial inducement from George W. Bush, who in his infinite wisdom believed that the one eyed zealot could be a useful ally in the war on drugs.
After 9/11 and the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 production of opium resumed and NATO and the newly established Karzai government chose to continue the eradication of the poppies, which the Taliban took advantage of by monopolizing the production and trade. In a July 9th 2007 New Yorker article titled Letters from Afghanistan: The Taliban’s Opium War, Jon Lee Anderson quotes Lieutenant General Mohammad Daud-Daud, Afghanistan’s deputy minister of the interior for counter-narcotics, who said: “there has been a coalition between the Taliban and the opium smugglers. This year, they have set up a commission to tax the harvest.” Despite increased efforts to eradicate the crop, a report by the UN titled the Afghanistan Opium Survey finds that in 2007 “it was estimated that 509,000 families (confidence interval: 437,000-653,000) were involved in opium poppy cultivation, compared to 448,000 families in 2006, i.e., an increase of 14 per cent (93).” According to the same report, attempts to dissuade the continued production of opium were met with staunch resistance from the farmers, resulting in incidents in which “Fifteen policemen and four farmers died as a result (90).”
Furthermore not all of the farmers work voluntarily. According to The Head of IOM's Counter Trafficking Department, Richard Danziguer, "When there is criminal activity, especially drug trafficking, weapon trafficking, often we will find … some people actually are forced into …working as practically slave labor in the fields cultivating the poppy (Schlien).” As long as the West continues to deny the Afghans a road to prosperity and liberation with its hopeless crusade to eradicate opium from its primary producer in the world, the revenues of that crop will continue to prop up the slave drivers who fund the Taliban in Afghanistan, and the products of those crops will continue to find their way into American streets.
The solution to the problems of corruption and waste that have marked drug prohibition for decades, and are now a positive hindrance to the US in its efforts against Islamic extremism, is now entirely self-evident. The International War on Drugs must end, first and foremost in the United States. This demand was raised by Senator Bernie Sanders as a candidate in the 2016 Democratic primaries and was widely echoed by the public (this, along with many other of his democratic socialist reform policies). The benefits of abolition are numerous, and they encompass various economic and moral crises that face modern society. A December 2008 Harvard University Department of Economics report by Jeffery a Miron on the implications of drug legalization finds that: “legalizing drugs would save roughly $44.1 billion per year in government expenditure on enforcement of prohibition (1).” This would significantly reduce the wasteful spending that is so often complained about by so-called “fiscal conservatives,” in combination with the reduction of the over mighty police-state.
The prisons overflowing with petty drug offenders, fueling an industry commonly understood to be in itself a new form of slavery, should be emptied and reserved only for criminals who have committed real crimes. This will substantially reduce the prison population, which was reported in 2008 to be hovering around 2,424,279 inmates for drug offenses (Sabol 8). These privately run industries have expanded greatly since then and show every sign of pushing harder in the era of President Trump. In addition to being sweatshops they are notorious gang recruitment centers where many otherwise normal men and women are forced by the state to live among real criminals and forced by necessity to adopt their practices, including drug trafficking. When they are released, they are hardly rehabilitated and reformed; rather they are, by their familiarity with the underworld, even more hardened and experienced criminals with prison careers as a future. As observed with Alcohol Prohibition, authoritarianism simply facilitates the violent growth of the industry and the gangs that control it, and favors the filling of prisons rather than universities.
The inducements by the US to the governments of Afghanistan, Latin America, and others to continue the drug war must end, and the Afghan opium should be bought instead and made into the same pain medication that is seriously lacking in the pharmaceutical industry. According to an article by David Templeton in the Pittsburgh Post Gazzette: “A nationwide shortage of oxycodone, a widely prescribed opium-based pain medication, is causing some patients to panic, pharmacists to scramble, and doctors to spend additional time altering medication regimens for desperate patients.” The shortage has escalated the price per unit for pain medicine so greatly that pills have become a lucrative underground market that is threatening to compound the drug problems of the United States (KOMO). A sudden surplus of product from Afghanistan, administered by a US system of socialized medicine would drive the prices low enough to abolish the underground market. Such an act could provide affordable and potent medication not only to Americans, but to millions of suffering people around the world who cannot afford anything beyond aspirin for the pain that accompanies illnesses like terminal cancer. The aid of the US to the opium farmers in Afghanistan would undermine the economic hold of the Taliban over the country.
The way is clear to anyone who sees America’s policy in Afghanistan, as compared to its legal trade agreements with republic of Turkey, where the opium farmers are paid to grow the dreaded substance for the US pharmaceutical industry (Hitchens). The US military has already begun tentative steps towards this realization in the formerly Taliban controlled town of Marja, under the orders of General Stanely McChrystal, whose position on the poppies, according to a New York Times article by Rod Nordland, was, “U.S. forces no longer eradicate.” The next logical step in order to win the hearts and minds of the Afghan people, and by extension the war itself, is for the US to become the new main patron of the opium trade in the region. Until then it remains in a corrupt state of compromise, which dooms the war to inevitable failure.
Along with abolishing the drug war, America must invest in cannabis prodution, which has proven to be an economic boon in states where it is already legalized and taxed. According to a March 2009 Time article by Alison Stateman: “Pot is, after all, California's biggest cash crop, responsible for $14 billion a year in sales.” The 2016 legalization of marijuana in California opens up possibilities for business growth, as well as for the labor movement, which will naturally organize and act in its own interest.
By ending federal prohibition, and abolishing the wasteful DEA, the government could reverse its long standing marijuana policies in order help facilitate with loans and land the spread of farming and dispensary co-operatives throughout the US, which has the potential to do for the unemployed of today’s economic crisis what the military-industrial complex did for the generation of Eisenhower. Weapons take industry skill and state sponsoring in order to serve for a large and expanding war economy, as compared to cannabis production, so this new industry possesses great potential for wealth. Even archconservatives like William F. Buckley Jr. (Free Weeds 1), and those who have occupied public offices in the state of California like retired Orange County Superior Court Judge Jim Gray support marijuana legalization (Hoeffel). Indeed Milton Friedman himself criticized the enterprise in a 1992 article on the basis that Nixon’s grand scheme was an actually socialism. It is hard not to see, especially in these times of crisis, the potential economic qualities of legalization, not to mention the popular outcry over the moral question posed by the victimless criminals who are clogging the prisons and court systems. This reality has caused many states, to seriously reconsider the wasteful insanity that so much of their resources are committed to, and this trend will continue to spread.
One need not take too long to notice that even if the International War on Drugs were to officially end, and if all of the state participants were to stop immediately, there would still exist a massive infrastructure of cartel trafficking and production networks. These operations have been notorious for their indiscriminant violence against rivals and the exploitation of their own workers. According to a Fort Worth Weekly article by Peter Gorman, “The forced-labor movement is well known in Mexico but has not received much coverage in this country (1)” The issue was made known by the leader of the Mexican indigenous army known as the Zapatistas, Sub-commander Marcos, who pointed out the "inhuman conditions" and "virtual slavery" experienced in the “concentration camps for the indigenous (Bellinghausen).” As demonstrated by the precedents of history, the politicians can only be relied on for so long, and because of government corruption, violence and neglect, community guards have emerge to protect the people, but an international effort is required for a real solution.
There exist already various organizations in Latin America that may be charactarized as forms of Narco-Socialism, such as the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), who began taxing coca production in the territories under their control in order to finance their struggles against a corrupt government which itself utilizes drug dealing mercenaries. The FARC must be recognized as a reactionary force because of their dependence on the drug war itself. There engagement in the industry was expanded in order to include direct control of production in proportion to the level of profit yielded from the practice as well as to the tempo of international prohibition, and necessarily when they inevitably came into competition over land, labor, and resources against the cartels and their allies, the state supported paramilitaries.
This was ironically coupled with a harsh policy of prohibition within the territories under their control. Profits yielded from consumption by the American patrons of their enemy (i.e. the very imperialism they claimed to be fighting) were strictly controlled in this way in order to acquire weaponry from the bounties of China’s military industrialism, thus fueling both of the worlds’ great empires at once. Both actions are justified in the name of “anti-imperialism” by the FARC, which is essentially to claim ideological permission to become a symptom of rather than a solution to military industrial empire and the international drug war, just as it is to follow in suite with so many others who felt that an oligarchy of technocrats and cultists were necessary to set apart from the masses, with full control over the means of production and the appropriation of the surplus, in order to administrate the cultural perfection of the masses.
The contradictions in their policy necessarily extend the prohibitionist’s global war against the people into the supposedly liberated zones where drug production is tolerated, just as they facilitate and participate in the system of exploitation that keeps in bondage untold numbers of laborers. They fail to see that the overthrow of the system that they have made themselves a part of necessarily entails the liberation of the laborers subject to this system, and have instead chosen to alienate them as objects in the engines of their own capital production. In this respect they are no more revolutionary than the Taliban, and will serve as nothing more than but one of many forces that will bring about the common ruin of Colombia.
The great failure of the 20th century revolutionary movements was the abandonment of internationalism and the principle of workers’ emancipation. Compromises were made and the Left found itself continually defending or making euphemistic excuses for dictatorship, from Joseph Stalin to Saddam Hussein. The socialist movement of today has no world vision, and had no answer to the various world events of the last few decades other than a form of isolationism, and the Left is crumbling in the face of a resurgent Fascism. The right wing and its relation to the drug war finds embodiment in Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines, who boasts of personally murdering suspected addicts and dealers. Such a man is the new face of Prohibition across the world.
The liberation of the slaves of the cartels and the prison industry and the emancipation of the proletarian as a whole, will depend, not merely on policy reform, but rather on the development of a real global class-consciousness, the stirrings of which we began to see (in a crude and inexperienced form) in the Arab Spring and growth of left populism in the western world. However there is no assurance of victory and so long as Socialist mass organizations are failing to form true internationalism and instead are committed to a Hitler-Stalin pact with the forces of reaction and guised in the rhetoric of “anti-globalization,” and “anti-imperialism,” the Drug War will continue, as will the march of Fascism, and the question of real human liberation from the exploits of cartels, capitalists, and dictators will never be allowed to arise. The changing world will pass them by as they consume one another in fratricide, and the fate of the peoples of the globe will be left to the contradictions of empire.
In the past it was proclaimed, “Workers of the world, unite!” for they had only their chains to loose, but today the workers know that the world itself is in danger of being lost forever and only their revolutionary struggle can save it.
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