While the Contra-LA ghetto connection might be controversial, one thing everyone agrees with is that the American invasion of Afghanistan has turned it into the largest producer of heroin in the world. Creating an explosion of heroin addictions in many countries such as in Russia, southern Europe and the middle-east (Vice also did a great documentary on Iran):
> Since NATO began its ‘War on Terror’ in 2001, heroin production in Afghanistan has increased 40-fold, according to the head of Russia’s Federal Drug Control Service. “Afghan heroin has killed more than 1 million people worldwide since ‘Operation Enduring Freedom’ began, and over $1 trillion has been invested in transnational organized crime from drug sales,” Viktor Ivanov said earlier at a conference on the Afghan drug problem in 2013.
> Such has been the failure to combat the problem that more than 90 per cent of the heroin sold on Britain’s streets is still made using opium from Afghanistan. The United Nations yesterday warned that the situation was out of control.
With some familiarity of Gary Webb's work on crack cocaine, it does make me wonder whether the CIA is also allowing exports of opium to fund additional covert ops in Afghanistan.
The NYT had reported back in 2001 - just prior to 9/11 - that the Taliban ban on opium production was a big success:
Think about it - our now sworn enemy, the Taliban, was the only effective government to shut down drug production inside its borders. Sure, among other things, but it does make you think. Karzai's family members are major opium traffickers.
And, apparently in partnership with the CIA. So perhaps I'm not so crazy after all.
Heroin has won new converts among American youth who used to take oxycontin - effectively a gateway opiod. Oxy was reformulated to reduce its ability to produce a high, and heroin is now cheap and everywhere.
Just another wonderful side effect of our misguided overseas adventures.
OxyContin wasn't changed to reduce high, it was just made harder to crush, to make it harder to IV. It's still just oxycodone. This was purely in response to pressure in the US from misguided or malicious people.
The change to OC to make it hard to crush only applies in the US (which doesn't seem to stop "abuse" of OC, just makes it far dangerous/expensive). Similarly a liver toxin, acetaminophen (Tylenol) is added to many opiates, purely to damage users that take "too much". Doctors often prescribe as little opiate with as much poison as possible, and slowly move patients over to more pure forms once they've proven themselves (by suffering needlessly).
Heroin is just cheaper and easier to get than OxyContin. This seems mostly caused by the massive increase in difficulty for doctors to prescribe medicine and do their jobs. Addiction to opioids is seen as bad, patients get labelled drug-seekers, and doctors that do help patients end up getting severe penalties.
As you point out, in reality, clamping down on pharmaceutical opiates simply leads to people buying products with low quality control or consistency, and that directly contributes to death. (Though note that opiates by themselves aren't that dangerous, and around 2/3rd of overdoses (according to one Australian study) are due to mixing opiates with other drugs.)
If you search Wikipedia for "rendition aircraft" you will find a plane that crashed in Mexico in 2007 while carrying multiple tons of cocaine. Do a Google search on the tail number of the aircraft and you'll find a couple sites who did extensive investigation of the aircraft's previous owners (an empty business office) and interesting flight history (Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.)
Why not? The CIA is a highly compartmentalized organization staffed by people with extremely pragmatic (albeit often relentlessly anti-Bayesian) attitude. As such, they will--and historically have--ally themselves with pretty much anyone if it seems like a plausible way to further their immediate, narrowly-defined mission.
As such, supplying arms to Iran was no big deal for them in the 80's, and helping FARC today is likewise no big deal. You have to understand that the typical CIA operative (or at least the ones who get caught doing something egregiously illegal) has absolutely no moral compass. They are purely interested in the narrowest possible operational goals, and this unfortunate reality is extremely well-documented.
There are many compartments within the Central Intelligence Agency, and within the Intelligence Community (IC) [1]. This contributes to the difficulty of applying oversight to the IC.
Its kind of a fun read and mostly irrelevant but contains a few lines about how one manufacturer was encourged by the government to go to Afganistan to open up a supply of heroin.
Aaand the Afghanis are making next to nothing off of it. We could do more for stability and democracy by dropping bags of money. We could pay good money for any other crop and it would instantly displace opium.
The side-effects of instability due to war are massive and severely under-appreciated.
Only by the idiots that glibly invaded Iraq and Afghanistan. Many people thought either or both of those where terrible ideas, and it sure wasn't because we loved Saddam or the Taliban. Saddam turns out to have been the grenade pin of the middle east...
> Since NATO began its ‘War on Terror’ in 2001, heroin production in Afghanistan has increased 40-fold, according to the head of Russia’s Federal Drug Control Service. “Afghan heroin has killed more than 1 million people worldwide since ‘Operation Enduring Freedom’ began, and over $1 trillion has been invested in transnational organized crime from drug sales,” Viktor Ivanov said earlier at a conference on the Afghan drug problem in 2013.
http://rt.com/news/156128-afghanistan-drugs-usa-heroin/ http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-24919056
> Such has been the failure to combat the problem that more than 90 per cent of the heroin sold on Britain’s streets is still made using opium from Afghanistan. The United Nations yesterday warned that the situation was out of control.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2102158/Heroin-produ...
The side-effects of instability due to war are massive and severely under-appreciated.