A Brief History of Drug Trafficking
How the Narcotics Trade has served Imperialism
“All things are poison, and nothing is without poison, the dosage alone makes it so a thing is not a poison.” - Paracelsus
The conventional, or surface political understanding of the relationship between governments and drug traffickers is an antagonistic one: law enforcement and gangsters trying to outwit and outmuscle each other, with corruption being an exception rather than the rule, or at most a severe deviation from the intended purpose of the state. However, an examination of the facts points us towards the opposite conclusion: the modern trafficking of narcotics around the world, even through so-called black markets, has historically been facilitated by the British and American governments for their own benefit. As late as the 19th century the drug trade was being conducted openly by these imperial powers before becoming one of the primary elements of the game of “deep politics” in the 20th century, not immediately visible in a typical examination of state functions unless one looked closely at the relations between various state and non-state actors. Condensed into as short of a narrative as could be managed, this is an abbreviated history of how the drug trade has served imperialism.
From the beginning, one of the primary engines of the development and expansion of capitalism has historically been the drug trade. In Capital, Marx identifies, with his usual sarcasm, the “rosy dawn” of capitalism in the colonization of the Americas and the beginning of the Triangle Trade which transformed the bourgeoisie from middling urban traders into the rulers of the world. Among the most important cash crops in the lucrative transatlantic trade would be tobacco, which was initially advertised as possessing fabulous medicinal properties before becoming primarily recreational, and sugarcane, which was processed into molasses in order to make rum. Further, many common staple crops grown by colonists such as barley, corn, rye, and wheat were used to produce other distilled spirits supplementing the rum trade. The addictive nature of these commodities was a godsend for the settler plantation owners and trading company stockholders, who could be certain of continued demand for their products. In turn, this roaring market encouraged the growth of other trades, most especially that of West African slaves who were brought overseas and forced to work on such plantations in order to secure a constant supply of these crops. With the runaway success of the mass production and trade of alcohol and tobacco, it only makes sense that these early mercantile capitalists would begin moving on to stronger stuff in the pursuit of profit. Thus, in 1683 the British East India Company would issue instructions to begin investing in the trade of opium.
By the start of the 1700s, opium had become a major commodity for Europeans to trade, especially with Eastern markets such as China, with the Portuguese and Dutch trading in the drug to take advantage of the market for its medicinal and recreational use. The British would soon attempt to break into the market, and in 1715 the British East India Company opened its first office in the city of Canton. When discussing the opium trade in China, it is important to note that opium had been known and used in China since at least the early 7th century, almost a millennium before edicts against its use began to be issued. Prior to the beginning of large scale British imports, this usage had been predominantly medicinal. The general self-sufficiency of the Chinese economy also meant that the government had no qualms about issuing total bans on the importation of narcotics by European merchants - in 1640, for example, the Ming dynasty had issued a ban on the import of tobacco, and later in 1729 the Qing dynasty would ban the sale of “madak,” a mixture of tobacco and opium popular for recreational use, the first restriction placed on the opium trade. However, at this point in the early 18th century the opium trade had yet to pose a major problem for China, who were prospering thanks to an export-heavy economy feeding the voracious European demand for tea and silk.
Meanwhile, the British were faced with a huge trade deficit due to the high demand for these aforementioned goods, soon finding their reserves of silver rapidly depleting in order to accommodate the need for Chinese commodities. Soon enough however, the British East India Company would find a solution through their colonial activities in India, where they intended to expand their share of opium production and sell the drug by the ton to the Qing. A pair of major victories against the Mughal Empire at the Battle of Plassey in 1757 and the Battle of Buxar in 1764 would give the British East India Company control of the region of Bengal, where they would manage to secure an effective monopoly on the opium supply. The agricultural policies enforced under company rule would allow it to double its profits by 1777, but also would lead to the Bengal Famine of 1770, which killed millions of Bengalis and created massive deindustrialization in an area which once, under Mughal rule, had been on the verge of its own Industrial Revolution. Prior to British colonization, Bengal had been the wealthiest part of the world’s largest economy, the Mughal Empire having accounted for a quarter of the world’s gross domestic product at the time, and enjoyed an average standard of living far superior to anywhere in Western Europe. After colonization, it was rendered a backwards agrarian province ravaged by periodic famine and plague devoted to supplying the East India Company’s opium exports.
From the mid-18th century onwards, opium imports into China increased rapidly, prompting the Qing to outlaw the opium trade entirely in 1799 in response to skyrocketing rates of addiction, rapidly deteriorating public health, and widespread crime driven by the drug trade. This prohibition did little to slow down the flow of opium from Western ships into China, as the British East India Company and other merchants simply embraced smuggling. Many of the major wealthy families in early American history would make their fortunes through involvement in this illegal opium trade. The Cabots would become one of the most powerful families in the late 18th century and early 19th century United States thanks to their start in opium smuggling, supplemented by trading rum and slaves, and many of the other “Boston Brahmin'' families had similar ties to opium trafficking, including the Cushing, Perkins, Forbes, Lyman, and Peabody families. Meanwhile the vast amounts of wealth John Jacob Astor would acquire from his involvement in the opium trade would allow him to buy up massive amounts of Manhattan real estate and become the first multi-millionaire in American history.
When in 1839, the Chinese attempted to crack down on British opium smuggling and refused to allow tea shipments to leave port until the merchants turned over their contraband, Britain declared war on China in what would be known as the First Opium War. After a series of decisive naval victories, in 1842 Britain would force China to open itself up to Western exports and cede Hong Kong Island, beginning the Heavenly Kingdom’s “century of humiliation.” Later in 1856, in the middle of the Taiping Rebellion, the Chinese government seized a British vessel suspected of piracy, and in turn Britain took the opportunity to initiate the Second Opium War, with France and the United States quickly joining in hopes of getting in on the plunder. After four years of bombardment, invasion and the destruction of the Summer Palaces, Britain forced China to legalize the opium trade, cede more land to Hong Kong, and give Western nations the right to buy Chinese property. After these humiliating defeats China would experience decades of decline before the Qing dynasty would collapse and the entire country would fall into warlordism and civil war, exacerbated by the public health crisis the opium epidemic had created.
With the total collapse of social order in China at the turn of the 20th century, the various ambitious warlords who set themselves up as the future leaders of the once mighty empire quickly turned to opium production in order to finance their armies. The competition among the various warlord factions in the drug trafficking meant that by the 1930s, the overwhelming majority of the global narcotics trade flowed out of China. Even the ostensibly principled nationalist revolutionaries in the Kuomintang were not above using drugs to fund their organization: at the same time that they worked to stamp out opium use and the drug trade in some areas, in others they established regional monopolies on opium production in order to fund their struggles against the other warlord cliques as well as the communist revolutionaries led by Mao Zedong. These circumstances would set into motion a transformation in the nature of global drug trafficking which would rhyme with the 18th and 19th century use of opium by the British as a tool of imperial domination.
During World War II, the Kuomintang and the United States found themselves closely cooperating in the war effort against the Japanese empire, with the US deploying agents from the newly formed Office of Strategic Services to provide assistance. The head of operations in China, one Colonel Paul Helliwell, observed the Kuomintang’s fundraising methods through opium sales and concluded that the agency could strengthen this key ally in their inevitable future conflict with the Chinese communists by providing assistance in the trafficking of opiates. This would provide the impetus for the establishment of the Civil Air Transport company in 1946, to traffic arms and opium on behalf of the nationalists under Chiang Kai-Shek. One year later the newly established CIA, including Helliwell and a number of other OSS officers in its ranks, would seize the reins of the company. The eventual victory of Mao Zedong and the Communist Party in 1949 forced the Kuomintang to flee to the island of Taiwan where they would set up a military dictatorship. While the Communists ended large scale opium production on the mainland and put countless addicts through rehabilitative therapy, Chiang Kai-Shek’s clique in Taiwan continued their involvement with the drug trade, receiving support from the CIA and Civil Air Transport in this endeavor and moving their opium production facilities to the “Golden Triangle” region of Southeast Asia encompassed by Burma, Thailand, and French Indochina.
At the same time in the late 1940’s, Helliwell and the CIA were expanding their initial drug trafficking scheme beyond just East Asia, collaborating with gangsters Lucky Luciano and Meyer Lansky to smuggle heroin into Harlem and sell it to the black community through jazz clubs under police protection. Through these means, the CIA would fund anti-communist sabotage campaigns and the training of neo-fascist secret armies in Europe - the beginnings of Operation Gladio. Here’s an example of how the anti-communist efforts of Gladio tied into drug trafficking and organized crime. In the late 1940’s at the Old Port of Marseille in France, the Communist organized dockworkers were refused to unload any cargo coming in from French Indochina in solidarity with the anti-colonial Vietnamese revolutionaries. This strike led to a disruption of the flow of the so-called “French Connection” heroin trade carried out by the Unione Corse gang in collaboration with Lucky Luciano and his associates. Considering the threat this posed to both of their interests, the CIA and their French counterpart the SDECE were more than happy to provide funding to the Corsican gangsters in their violent strikebreaking efforts against the dockworkers. Between the targeted distribution of heroin into black communities like Harlem, a hotbed of communist activity, and the way that this heroin trafficking poured funds into the coffers of the CIA that allowed them to maintain the Gladio network in Europe and anti-communist allies in Asia, the 20th century heroin trade would form a cornerstone of the American Empire in the same way that the 19th century opium trade had helped form the foundation of the British Empire’s global hegemony.
Throughout the 1950’s, far from Marseille and Harlem over in Southeast Asia, the Kuomintang and the Civil Air Transport were hard at work harvesting and transporting the opium that fueled the Gladio-run heroin trade. With the defeat of the French in the First Indochina War, the Americans had taken over the efforts against the communist Viet Minh in North Vietnam, operating through their South Vietnamese puppet and with the Civil Air Transport moving supplies and running guns for anti-communist insurgencies in Indonesia, Burma, and Tibet. In 1959, the Civil Air Transport changed its name to “Air America,” just in time for the initiation of the CIA’s “Secret War” in Laos, supporting the Royal Lao Army against the communist, Viet Minh allied Pathet Lao. The increased American presence in the Golden Triangle in relation to the Secret War in Laos meant an increase in the supply of heroin coming out of the Golden Triangle, which would skyrocket with the formal entry of the United States into the Vietnam War in 1964. Heroin smuggling out of the Golden Triangle during this time was overseen by CIA officer Theodore Shackley, who also organized the murderous “Phoenix Program” in Vietnam, in which commandos were sent in to slaughter civilians suspected of communist sympathies - an approach which was paralleled by the US-backed anti-communist mass murders in Indonesia initiated around the same time. Seeing the gruesome “success” of these death squad programs, the CIA would bring them over to the Western Hemisphere where they would go hand-in-hand with the expansion of drug trafficking networks.
In Latin America, where the United States had already established a long history of coup plotting, the lessons of the Golden Triangle would be implemented much closer to home. With the backing of the CIA, the Dirección Federal de Seguridad (DFS) in Mexico would carry out a “Dirty War” through the 1960s and 1970s, kidnapping, torturing, murdering and “disappearing” dissidents, in a pattern similar to the techniques implemented by the CIA in Operation Gladio and the Phoenix Program. In turn, these tried-and-true methods would be used throughout much of Latin America in the 1970s and 1980s during Operation Condor, manifesting in instances such as the mass killings and “disappearances” of suspected left-wing sympathizers in Pinochet’s Chile and another “Dirty War” carried out in Argentina. At the same time of these operations, the DFS was working closely with certain drug traffickers, allowing them to rise to prominence. For example, during the early 1980s, the Guadalajara Cartel collaborated with and received protection from the DFS to smuggle drugs for the CIA. Later when the DFS was eventually dissolved and replaced with a new intelligence agency in 1985, several former DFS agents would go on to become major Mexican drug lords, such as Rafael Aquilar Guajardo, one of the founders of the Juarez Cartel, and Juan Jose Esparragoza Moreno, one of the founders of the Sinaloa Cartel. One last detail of note about the DFS would be that at the direction of the CIA, they also provided training for the Nicaraguan Contras, tying them into one of the most publicized instances of US facilitated drug trafficking.
To summarize the facts as covered by journalist Gary Webb, who was found in his home in 2004 “suicided” with two gunshots to the head, the CIA allied with Nicaraguan cocaine traffickers to smuggle crack cocaine into black communities during the 1980’s in order to fund the anti-communist guerilla activities of the Contras in their insurgency against the socialist government of Nicaragua. Just as in the 1940’s the CIA smuggled heroin into black communities such as Harlem, where communist activism had become especially prevalent, in order to provide funding for the anti-communist efforts of Operation Gladio in Europe, the agency did the same with crack cocaine in the 1980’s to deal a killing blow to the black militancy that the American government had worked hard to undermine throuhgout the 1960’s and 1970’s through operations such as COINTELPRO, as well as to fund the anti-communist efforts of far right death squads and drug traffickers in Latin America. Nicaragua wasn’t the only part of the Western Hemisphere where the CIA was facilitating the cocaine trade through the use of anti-communist paramilitaries, of course. In Colombia, the agency would endorse the organization of the Texaco and Colombian government-backed paramilitary Muerte a Secuestradores, who were lead by none other than the infamous drug lord Pablo Escobar, in their struggle against the communist Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, with indirect American support to Escobar’s private army being justified with the claim that FARC were drug traffickers.
While cocaine was brought in from Latin America, disengagement in Vietnam and Laos created a need for another source of opiates in the late 1970’s. An alternative was quickly found in the form of the Golden Crescent region which stretches from Iran through Pakistan. Specifically this new source was found in Afghanistan, where the CIA saw natural allies in the anti-communist muhajadeen fighting against the Soviet Union. As a result, with the backing of the CIA these anti-Soviet guerillas would quickly turn their country into the new largest national exporter of opium by the mid-1980’s. This flow of opiates out of Afghanistan was only disrupted in 2000 when the Taliban began engaging in a UN-backed program to eliminate the country’s poppyfields, but a certain incident in the autumn of 2001 would suddenly give the United States reason enough to bring their military into the country and allow the trafficking of opiates to continue unimpeded. Since 2001, Afghanistan has been the world’s leading drug exporter, supplying 90% of global heroin during the two decades of American occupation in which the military “failed” to suppress its cultivation and export.
As we can see from this historical overview, the interests of imperial power have been tied to narcotics trafficking for centuries, from the British East India Company to the Central Intelligence Agency. Surface level political policies such as prohibition of narcotics are ineffective, and while full legalization is a viable path to weaken the monopoly of parapolitical traffickers, if it is not properly managed and implemented in conjunction with other policies it would not be enough to combat the underlying parapolitical problems, which involve the daunting task of taking on forces at the core of the empire itself. A successful program to combat these networks would have to reject the criminalization of drug users themselves in favor of an emphasis on addiction treatment therapy, create social programs to address the economic issues which exacerbate and are exacerbated by addiction, place a severe restriction on the ability of the federal government to conduct military operations or wage any war not for immediate defense, and ultimately institute the total dissolution of the CIA itself: however, the belief that such policies would be adopted through the pursuit of conventional reformist politics appears hopelessly naive, especially the prospects of restricting the ability of the US to wage war and destroying the crown jewel of the “deep state.” For what it’s worth, let us simply conclude with two points: that an understanding of how global drug trafficking networks function can provide us with a better context to understand the real motivations behind many American foreign policy decisions, and that what ended the opium epidemic in China was the victory of the communist revolutionaries.