Drug WarRant

Rumors that the CIA orchestrated the meth and heroin trade in Southeast Asia during the Viet Nam War have been examined in Patrick Winn’s excellent new book, Narcotopia: In Search of the Asian Drug Cartel that Survived the CIA.

During the Viet Nam War the CIA was faced with a critical choice. The agency could undermine the drug trade of a Burmese tribal people called the Wa who occupied land next to the Chinese border, or they could leave the Wa alone to block Communist China’s expansion into the mountainous Golden Triangle area of Burma and beyond. Being the CIA, they threw their full support behind the Wa and their illicit drug activities.

The Wa were a simple, primitive people. They wore loin cloths and practiced head hunting, decapitating unwelcome intruders entering into their territory and proudly displaying the severed trophies nailed to skull posts. Wa occupation of the mountains of the Golden Triangle discouraged the inward migration of people from China and thus any Chinese national expansion. China in turn supplied the Wa with chemicals and the instructions needed to produce crystal meth, as well as materials to produce heroin from the opium harvested in the Wa’s local poppy fields. As a result, wartime US military personnel serving in Thailand and Viet Nam had easy access to nearly-pure heroin for a mere seven dollars per generously filled vial container. One-in-six American military service members were estimated to have used China White heroin and many became addicted.

When the DEA entered the scene the agency sought to capture and formally execute the leader of the Wa drug empire, Wei Xuegang. However, the Wa drug kingpin was considered an important ally by the CIA in the US battle against Asian Communists. In a spy versus spy series of events, the slick culprit always managed to elude captivity with a little help from his friends in Langley, Virginia.

By the end of the Viet Nam conflict the DEA had proven no match for the CIA and its version of a drug war. The Wa retained a drug empire that generates $60 billion in worldwide meth sales. It’s defended by 30,000 well-equipped Wa fighters. Winn attributes the DEA/CIA performance mismatch to differences in the recruitment tactics between the two agencies. The CIA prefers Ivy League types or members of top universities, while the DEA typically hires former law enforcement officers and

the sons (and sometimes daughters) of working class stock. Straight shooters by nature, they never smoked pot in high school. Their worldview skews monochrome: we’re the good guys, drug dealers are “scumbags”….

The US Department of Justice wants us all to know that internet swindlers are impersonating DEA agents and scamming money from people online. Unfortunately, the warning doesn’t include a similar public concern about the DEA’s own scams.

Actual DEA agents in plain-clothes are mugging airline passengers at Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport by tricking disembarking passengers into being searched for cash when the passengers don’t know they are legally free to reject the search and simply walk away. Any cash seized by the agents disappears into a quagmire of red tape while returning the money to the traveler is made complicated. Passengers with a darker skin color make up 68-percent of the targeted travelers.

Recently the DEA repeated an unsuccessful attempt to prohibit certain psychedelic drugs by failing again to get them placed on Schedule I before researchers can discover any new medicinal information about the drugs. Allowing the DEA to arbitrarily choose what it prohibits or regulates can result in major conflicts of interest that benefit only the DEA. A Schedule I drug ranking can always be expected to extend the bureaucratic tenure of the DEA by encumbering new research for a drug and by arresting people who need it as a medicine.

For all this and more the DEA’s operations cost the American taxpayer more than $2.4 billion each year. Any progress toward winning the drug war should result in defunding the DEA and the socioeconomic complex it created. In some cases it might be possible to minimize the DEA’s impact by transferring the agency’s present duties to the Food and Drug Administration – like the scheduling of drugs – but these changes and any others designed to diminish the drug war won’t be encouraged by law enforcement agencies or the federal government. It would mean giving up their authority to mug airline passengers.

Candace Owens (aka Candace O) conflates trans Native Americans with cannibalism and drugs:

…I don’t know what you’re talking about with Two-Spirit people. Is this like a Native American tribe, like high smoking and talking about your spirit? I’m asking you seriously, because when I think of Native American tribes talking about their spirits, I know that they used to smoke a lot, they used to do drugs, they also were cannibals who used to eat people, so I don’t know if we should be taking our cues from cannibals…I don’t think that there were trans Native Americans….

Criminalizing drugs weaponizes them. Since drug crimes typically lack victims who voluntarily act as plaintiffs against themselves, a law enforcement apparatus was created that can target just about anyone with planted evidence or accusations originating from personal enemies or a corrupt government. Famous drug suspects include Joan of Arc who was questioned by the Inquisition about her drug use prior to being burned at the stake in 1431 for wearing men’s clothes.

Smart Approaches to Marijuana (SAM) President Kevin Sabet, a former three-time White House drug policy advisor, eulogizes the late-Senator Dianne Feinstein for her opposition to medicinal marijuana in the 1990s:

…“For a Californian like me working on drug policy, Senator Feinstein was a role model throughout my career in public service. She stood steadfast against legalization until the very end because she knew it was the right thing to do to protect public health and safety.

“Throughout her illustrious career, the Senator was a leader on drug policy even when the lobbyists and special interests came knocking. I was honored to work alongside her on numerous occasions. She opposed medical marijuana in the 90’s and later the state’s move to allow full-scale commercialization of THC drugs. Especially noteworthy was the late-Senator’s work on the “Protecting Kids from Candy-Flavored Drugs Act,” which she introduced as to help crack down on Big Marijuana’s predatory practices to hook new, younger users.

“Senator Feinstein will be missed by all who stand for a responsible, science-based approach to drug policy.” […]

Science-based? Really? Neither Dianne Feinstein nor Kevin Sabet were trained in the sciences or specifically in pharmacology. And when did it supposedly become the goal of science to thwart improved public health by prohibiting cannabis use as a medicine?

Tony Perkins and Jennifer Bauwens of the Family Research Council (FRC)–a think tank and organization of churches accused of wanting to end democracy in the U.S. and replace it with a theocracy–are warning Americans that psychedelics open people up to demonic activities:

…when you’re reading the Bible and you see the word “witchcraft”… for example … Moses’ encounter with magicians in Egypt … those magicians weren’t just partaking in witchcraft to access the evil realm … they were also doing it with drugs … that now we would know as psychedelic or hallucinogenic drugs….

Ritualized medical applications gave Egypt’s witches and magicians a professional edge over the many competing religious practitioners who rejected drugs and particularly psilocybin mushrooms for use in treating serious disorders like major depression and PTSD. The devil is in the details. One detail includes a threat to the Family Research Council of a happy, healthy, well-adjusted and highly informed public engaging in critical thinking and exposure of demonic FRC schemes that perpetuate fallacies, anti-intellectualism and human misery in ways that obstruct medical science.

Public consumption of marijuana terrifies prohibitionists. In practice they appear to view cannabis users in groups as the moral equivalent of demonic rituals. Maybe it’s because for thousands of years heaps of smoldering marijuana and psychedelic herbs have been publicly consumed during mystic ceremonies, usually attended by all types of pagans, witches, heretics and ancient Romans participating in orgies. Whatever the reasons, the Las Vegas hotel industry is progressively challenging Nevada’s laws prohibiting public use of weed. According to Nevada attorney David Edelblute:

…the distinguishing legal factor of the … approach to cannabis consumption is that [a hotel] does not intend to sell cannabis products, or allow consumption in public areas. […]

Solutions lie in who considers what to be public. Pushing the legal boundaries, rooms on some hotel floors offer special air filtration systems where people can smoke their weed in private without offending others. Other types of spaces not deemed totally public make up the flexible boundary attracting the industry’s focus. As one hotel owner noted:

You don’t come to our hotel just to get stoned — it’s not the goal, Rizk said … You come for the experience, the events, the parties, the pool parties … and the fact that we allow (cannabis) consumption in certain areas, where permissible by law, is just an additional perk.

If failure can be defined as something that creates the very crisis it’s intended to prevent, then a recent Brown University study of close-proximity opioid overdoses in Indianapolis confirms suspicions that little else fails like the drug war when it comes to saving lives.

The [researchers] found that within seven, 14 and 21 days, opioid-related seizures of drugs by police were significantly associated with increased overdoses within 100, 250 and 500 meters of the seizure location. Most notably, the number of fatal overdoses was two-fold higher than expected within seven days and 500 meters following an opioid-related incident in which police seized drugs.

The researchers hypothesized that the increase in overdose events was because people who use opioids will generally seek out a new supply after losing access to their previous drug supply, and that new supply will have unknown potency. In addition, in the time period between losing the familiar supply and finding a new one, people using opioids can experience diminished tolerance to drugs. Accidentally ingesting a dose beyond one’s tolerance can be fatal. […]

Congratulations are due the Brown University research team for making ‘drug war’ another definition of failure and enabling it to appear next to synonyms like breakdown, malfunction, cataclysm, crash, defeat, ruin, collapse, catastrophe, miscarriage, tragedy, frustration, and disappointment.