Drugs

In Vietnam, heroin is not grown locally but its imported from the Golden Triangle. The Vietnamese politicians, army, navy, and air force are the main people who smuggle in heroin making it complex or rather too lucrative to eliminate the drug use and trafficking in the country. Hence heroin drug was readily available. The presence of the military personnel in Vietnam during the war increased the availability of heroin as well since they were the main consumers. At some point, the French military assisted the Vietnamese to transport the heroin from Lao since they had good association with the Laotian military irregulars. The demand of heroin in Vietnam increased so much and led to the Golden Triangle adopting more sophisticated process of refining opium which produced 80 to 99 of pure heroin. The teenagers sold the drug to military personnel along the streets and the maids who were cleaning theirs residences also sold them the heroin (Goldberg, 2009).

There was increased arrest for hard drugs and in 1971 the U.S army personnel of the lower ranking were approximated that 15 to 20 of them used heroin as reported by their medical officers. This was a heroin plague that was really wiping the military forces at war in Vietnam. The high use of the heroin by the military personnel was due to the fact that heroin was readily available and they wanted to avoid idleness, overcome danger, boredom, and worthlessness of their lives. The continued use, production and trafficking of the drugs have lead to very devastating effects such as the poor performance of the economy, increase in the number of people infected with AIDS, social instability throughout the country, corruption within the government officials and the increasing cases of organized gangs.

The U.S cold war was highly linked to the illegal drug trade in the Afghanistan. This is despite the fact that the United States of America had been against legal trade of opium and cocaine products. Many anti-communist operations played a significant role in growing and trafficking of the illegal drugs since the U.S partnered with the drug lords in order to assist them attained their objective. This meant that the CIA would protect them in their drug trafficking even to the United States without being arrested or even subjected to investigations. The U.S CIA was at the centre of this kind of operation even to the countries where use of such illicit drugs was not condoned. They supported the countries which used the illegal drugs and those which did not condoned it also found them with the illegal drug. The CIA funded the guerillas and provided them with fire arms (Goldberg, 2009).

In Afghanistan, the CIA supported the Mujahideen guerilla when fighting against the Soviet Union who had occupied part of their country. The Mujahideen were provided with arms and funds by the CIA with the help of Pakistans intelligence service by using their military National Logistics Cell (NLC) to transport the arms to the warlords in Afghan border. When the trucks were returning, they were heavily loaded with opium and heroin. When Soviet withdrew from Afghanistan, the U.S stopped their assistance to Mujahideen guerillas. The warlords and the armies had to be maintained hence they increased the production of opium making Afghanistan the worlds leading producer of opium. This is because they had no other source if income that could maintain them since the opium trade was the panoply of power and their economy depended on it. With all this happenings there is no evidence at all that links the CIA services with the illegal drug related trade. The U.S government being the powerful nation against the communist through the CIA had to depend on drug traffickers and indeed they did prove that they were important in the fight against communist.

0 comments:

Post a Comment