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Alfred W. McCoy

The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade Paperback – April, 1991

by Alfred W. McCoy (Author)

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The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade
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The first book to prove CIA and U.S. government complicity in global drug trafficking, The Politics of Heroin includes meticulous documentation of dishonesty and dirty dealings at the highest levels from the Cold War until today. Maintaining a global perspective, this groundbreaking study details the mechanics of drug trafficking in Asia, Europe, the Middle East, and South and Central America. New chapters detail U.S. involvement in the narcotics trade in Afghanistan and Pakistan before and after the fall of the Taliban, and how U.S. drug policy in Central America and Colombia has increased the global supply of illicit drugs.

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Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Nearly 20 years ago, McCoy wrote The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia , which stirred up considerable controversy, alleging that the CIA was intimately involved in the Vietnamese opium trade. In the current volume, a substantially updated and longer work, he argues that pk the situation basically hasn't changed over the past two decades; however the numbers have gotten bigger. McCoy writes, "Although the drug pandemic of the 1980s had complex causes, the growth in global heroin supply could be traced in large part to two key aspects of U.S. policy: the failure of the DEA's interdiction efforts and the CIA's covert operations." He readily admits that the CIA's role in the heroin trade was an "inadvertent" byproduct of "its cold war tactics," but he limns convincingly the path by which the agency and its forebears helped Corsican and Sicilian mobsters reestablish the heroin trade after WW II and, most recently, "transformed southern Asia from a self-contained opium zone into a major supplier of heroin." Scrupulously documented, almost numbingly so at times, this is a valuable corrective to the misinformation being peddled by anti-drug zealots on both sides of the aisle. First serial to the Progressive.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

It seems that the American government has learned nothing from its war on drugs. In 1972, the CIA attempted to suppress McCoy's classic work, The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia ( LJ 11/15/72 ) , which charged CIA complicity in the narcotics trade as part of its cold war tactics. Now, this revised and expanded edition, incorporating 20 years of research, discusses in almost overwhelming detail how U.S. drug policies and actions in the Third World has created "America's heroin plague." McCoy notes that every attempt at interdiction has only resulted in the expansion of both the production and consumption of drugs. He also charges that 40 years of CIA protection of Asian drug traffickers and active participation in the transport of opium and heroin has undermined U.S. anti-drug efforts. A massive work that raises serious questions. For larger public and academic libraries.
- Wilda Williams, "Library Journal"
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product details

Paperback: 634 pages
Publisher: Lawrence Hill Books; Revised edition (April 1991)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1556521251
ISBN-13: 978-1556521256
Product Dimensions: 9 x 6.1 x 1.7 inches
Shipping Weight: 2 pounds
Average Customer Review: 11 customer reviews
Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #331,202 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #632 in Asian Politics
- #39694 in History (Books)
- #3907 in Political Science (Books)

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Mark S.

Five Stars

August 2, 2016

Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase

Excellent read and very informative.

3 people found this helpful

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g. edward coey

Vital Reading

June 3, 2014

Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase

This book is vital historical reading. It should be required reading in every college in America. The author should be recognized for his work, but he won't be.

3 people found this helpful

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Rich 222

Great read

January 14, 2019

Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase

Very informative

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Susan Hickey

CIA still doing it after all these years. Factual. A sad commentary on the state of the world.

June 11, 2015

Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase

I have personal knowledge of these activities occurring during my war- Vietnam. Wanted to hear about the new era. Times have not changed.

4 people found this helpful

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Philip J. Passero III

Four Stars

July 13, 2014

Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase

Met expectations.

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JOHN NORTON

Five Stars

November 5, 2014

Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase

very informative

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TLR

Important early work on the international drug trade

January 28, 2016

Format: Paperback

McCoy was a PhD from Yale, a scholar in Asian history teaching at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia. The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia was widely ignored by mainstream reviewers of the time because it linked drug lords to US military-intelligence men. Much of the information in the book came from interviews with eyewitnesses.

US support of anti-communists in Asia, who often financed their activities through poppy, opium and heroin growing and manufacturing, led to this situation. It really began in WWII, when mobsters like Lucky Luciano and Vito Genovese were let out of jail to help the US invasion of Sicily, and then to keep the unions in southern France out of the hands of the Communists in the post-war years. The latter focused on the port city of Marseille, which soon became a center of heroin refining and exporting (the "French Connection). In the '50s, the Shah of Iran put a stop to the massive poppy industry in that country. Some of the remnants of Chiang Kai-shek's troops fled into the jungles of Burma after their defeat by the Communists; the US pressured Burma into allowing those troops to stay there, and the CIA began supplying them with Company airlines (Civil Air Transport and Sea Supply Corporation, which soon became Air America).

The KMT troops in Burma grew opium to finance themselves, while they used US arms and sometimes CIA planes to fly the opium out to Thailand or Taiwan. The drug center of the region was the town of Chiang Mai in northwest Thailand. The commander of the Thai police, Gen. Phao, was in on the racket and was the CIA's man in that country. In the '50s, heroin became a major problem in the US. The French also cooperated with the heroin trade in Indochina, and most of the leaders of South Vietnam (including Diem and Nhu) were involved as well. The Montagnard (or Hmong, also Meo) tribesmen in the hills were both fierce fighters and poppy farmers. Air America flew opium out of the Montagnard villages. DEA Far East regional director John J. O'Neill: "The kind of people they were dealing with up there, the whole economy was opium. The were dealing with the KMT and the KMT was involved in heroin. I have no doubt that Air America was used to transport opium." The Army's Criminal Investigation Division accidentally discovered a mammoth scheme where GI corpses were split open and stuffed with heroin before being flown to the US. Conspiring officers at the other end took the heroin out - up to 50 pounds of heroin per dead GI.

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Douglas Doepke

Scholarly, but limited

October 12, 2000

Format: Paperback

By all accounts, this is the standard reference on the explosive topic of drugs and politics; the reputation is well deserved despite several shortcomings. The volume is lengthy, the style impersonal, the language carefully measured, the conclusions temperate in the extreme. All in all, qualities befitting a scholarly navigation through minefields that customarily produce heavy-handed hyperbole. Distinguishing Mc Coy's work is the inclusive historical background each topic receives as it evolves over the pages into the familiar news stories of the day. Thus, the roots of heroin addiction among GI's in Vietnam is traced back in time to Kuomintang exiles of northern Burma and to the politics of intrigue among the many power-brokers of southeast Asia. The reader emerges from this hundred page excursion knowing a great deal more about the Golden Triangle than he perhaps wanted, but nonetheless is thoroughly informed about that murky but crucial region.
Oddly missing from the book is a similar historical account of Turkey's role as a major supplier of First World markets. Though mentioned sporadically, Turkey remains largely outside the text's focus, despite its traditional connection to Mediterranean traffickers. Also eclipsed is Mc Coy's all-too-brief discussion of Latin America's part in the developing world of drug trade, about which so much new material has surfaced since the book's 1991 publishing date. Unfortunately, readers looking for material on these critical areas should look elsewhere.
No book on the drug trade is complete without a discussion of the role the CIA has played in boosting the industry's world-wide network. Here Mc Coy's cautious approach is paticularly damning in its findings. In a brief but telling conclusion, CIA policy is indicted for protecting drug lords in the name of national security, and for directly contradicting Drug Enforcement Agency's efforts to interdict major traffickers. Worse, he sees a growing tolerance for narcotics as an informal weapon of covert warfare whose trajectory now extends beyond Cold War confines. Considering the evidence amassed of at least indirect CIA complicity in a variety of hot spots, such conclusions are hardly overblown. However, his hope for both a reformed CIA and domestic War on Drugs are, it would seem, tenuous at best, given the global size of wealth and power that is at stake. As his book has shown, Cold War or no, the political economy of illegal narcotics, with its often useful underworld connections and expanded instruments of repression, is simply too powerful a tool for empire builders of any stripe to surrender.

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