Drugs have been used by Europeans and Americans for centuries to subdue and ruin populations
China with the opium wars. When the Americans/Europeans sailed up the Yangtze to invade China and open the Market to ensure it was Free for opium to be sold and the Chinese people to be reduced to wrack and ruin.
Before the communists came to power special crews of street cleaners would come in the morning to pick up the dead who had died of overdose or exposure during the night.The average life expectancy was 39
Entire cities were built off the back of opium money in the USA (the very few that weren’t built off the blood of slaves) and many popular American names made their riches off the blood Chinese people (Roosevelt, Delano, Forbes). Yale university was built with opium blood money.
When the Communists pushed out the imperialist dogs out of China the US then began it’s drug production in what would be called the “Golden Triangle” (Myanmar/Thailand and Laos).
Creating drug lords and turning those countries into narco states had the effect of “creating a pro business pro capitalist and anti communist and anti PRC social fabric” ( Peter Dale Scott, American War Machine : Deep Politics, the CIA Global Drug Connection, and the Road to Afghanistan p.78 ).
Not to mention using drugs against their own internal populations to suppress them.
“The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people,” former Nixon domestic policy chief John Ehrlichman told Harper’s writer Dan Baum for the April cover story published Tuesday.
“You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin. And then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities,” Ehrlichman said. “We could arrest their leaders. raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.” https://edition.cnn.com/2016/03/23/politics/john-ehrlichman-richard-nixon-drug-war-blacks-hippie/index.html
The US and KMT also utilied literal ex-nazis .
It is no surprise then that under US occupation of Afghanistan opium production is the highest it has ever been.
The dip in opium production in 2001 was due to Taliban outlawing it before the US invaded.
So when Col Lawrence Wilkinson says “we are not in Afghanistan to state build” he is being candid and honest. The CIA is there to make money off the opium trade (as they did in the Golden Triangle) to A) Finance reactionary lumpen proletarians into Mafia style organisations using the money from opium production and B) to prevent a coherent Afghan State arising to defend it’s peoples interest which would expel the foreign invaders and C) the primary reason, to be able to attack China
Thamks, I’ll save that stuff on my phone for now until there’s somewhere to put it. I’m doing some writing on the opiate crisis and that’s what gave me the idea for the zine thing actually!
Actually on that note @JoeySteel , I’m trying to archive good posts so people can add art, make it look good and printable so users have an easy resource to put together pamphlets or zines or whatever here’s the thread about it: https://hexbear.net/post/95737
Not to mention using drugs against their own internal populations to suppress them.
The quote you cited literally says it was the criminalization of the drugs, not the drugs, which was used to suppress people.
the fact that bad people sell drugs, doesn’t mean that drugs are inherently, or even contextually, bad. the narrative of your essay equates drug use with social decline quite explicitly, which is a reactionary take.
