“The war on drugs has not failed: it has never existed. There has been no war on drugs in the United States.”
– Joseph D Douglass, Jr.
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The extent of money spent by the United States Federal Government on drug enforcement and interdiction nationally and internationally would make the above quote from Joseph D Douglass, Jr.’s book Red Cocaine: The Drugging of America seem intuitively false. And yet in this highly documented tome the author shows how it is that numerous government agencies have prioritized working relations with Communist governments such as China, Russia and Cuba over open conflict with them over facilitation of drug trafficking as a form of irregular warfare. Given the gravity of the claims made within the text I found myself constantly looking up references, and sure enough a geopolitical world-view that I was not at all familiar with started to emerge.
I don’t normally provide background on the authors I read, but given the topic it seems important to do so here…
Dr. Joseph Douglass is a national security analyst and author with expertise in defence policy, threat assessment, deception, intelligence and political warfare, nuclear strategy, terrorism, advanced chemical and biological warfare agents and applications, and international narcotics trafficking. Since the mid-1980s, his primary focus has been research into various dimensions of cultural warfare and notably into the illegal drugs plague, with emphasis on its origins, support structures, and marketing.
Narcotics Trafficking as Irregular Warfare
The case that is laid out in Red Cocaine is that China and the Soviet Union were involved at the state level in the faciltation of trafficking narcotics to the United States. Citing a variety of data points, including several high-ranking Communist Party members, Douglass shows how destroying American youth through drugs and corruption was covert Communist policy. Potential traffickers were identified for training and marketing of drugs and then various government agents – from those monitoring inports/exports to those involved with policing – were encouraged to support their comrades by turning a blind eye or, if they were sufficiently compromised, by themselves actively facilitating such activities.
The case study stemming from the Vietnamese war and Chinese heroin being distributed to the American military was particularly insightful in demonstrating the manner in which the claim that large scale drug-production is just done by individuals is particularly compelling. The war became a sort of social science experiment – with the military being the subjects. Far-below market-value drugs were offered in order to test how this would affect military readiness and morale.
Cuba and Bulgaria are singled out specifically as entrepots for these activities, the former for cocaine and the latter for opium. Fidel Castro’s role in helping the Andean region industrialize cocaine-producers operations is shown to be extensive.
The book also examines issues of strategy. For instance the reason why it is that so many radical leftist groups within Colombia and Venezuela were formed with the encouragement of Fidel. Their development – to whit – created multiple service suppliers should there ever be political periods akin to those of the FARC-EP peace accords. While one snakes head, the FARC, avows not to continue such activity another, the ELN, can take their place.
Narcotics and Corruption as a Vector for Societal Disruption
This By Any Means Necessary approach to political change allowed for foreign intelligence operatives to track and manage Americans that could be used, wittingly or not, to disrupt the country’s economy and political system. Furthermore, it became a means by which to raise funds in order to support these and other military intelligence operations. While the Chinese, Soviets and the Cubans sought to avoid their role in such activities from becoming overtly known, the Americans had an incentive not to look too deeply lest the relationships between the country’s denegrate further.
Black and Hispanic people are specifically targeted by Fidel Castro to be the manner by which drugs are disseminated in the United States. By focusing the building of connections with drug distributors of such demographics, it helped allow the Drug War to be cast as racist and thus facilitate the increase of political polarization. Given that some members of the black community laud Fidel Castro and demonize Ronald Regean, this is an example of a rich Orwellian Irony.
There’s a lot of other detailed accounts that are worth going into in detail, but I’ll close instead by saying if drugs, communism, or geopolitics interests you – definitely give this book a read.
Snow Storm in the Jungle
Quotes from Red Cocaine
Brief Excerpt about Drug Revenue’s Impact
‘In 1996, annual revenues derived from global criminalist activities were estimated by the World Bank’s experts at $1.2 trillion, of which $500 billion were thought to represent profits. These were and remain highly conservative estimates. The narcotics trade alone is in the $500 billion or more range. A more realistic estimate today would probably be of the order of $2 trillion per year – with $1 trillion, more or less, by way of straight profit; and some experts would raise these estimates further, towards $3.0 trillion annually in turnover. That is to say, governments, banks and the global criminalists are arranging the transfer of at least $1.0 trillion every year of national and private wealth into the bank accounts of the global criminal fraternity – a massive transfer of wealth for which there has been no historical parallel. This scandalous state of affairs has been continuing for several decades on an ever expanding scale, and the power conferred as a consequence threatens to destroy governments, democracy and the international banking system itself. Drug money also weakens and corrodes competition by favouring some economic agents at the expense of others’.
‘Two trillion+ dollars a year (a conservative figure, as noted) over the past two decades, excluding interest, would imply that more than $40 trillion will have been added to the wealth of the global criminal classes, including the managers and representatives of Lenin’s continuing world socialist revolution. Most of this money has been invested in property, bonds and stocks, and each year a further trillion or more dollars is added to the pool. Given that these data are believed by some experts to understate the position, the probable value of accrued drug money lodged in the international financial system now exceeds this $40 trillion estimate by a considerable margin. The associated corruption among financial institutions, investment advisory services (including stock brokerage houses and mutual funds), prestigious law firms, and among the political classes, has by now long since reached epidemic proportions. And this transformation has been accompanied by minimal publicity, with the exception of extensively publicised, but intermittent, ‘drug busts’…’.
‘It is critical for the survival of Western civilisation, and in order to slow down its rapid descent into pervasive, corrosive globalised criminality and corruption, which is the grim outlook for the 21st century, that Western countries begin, even at this late hour, to understand the true nature of the illegal drug crisis – which means correctly analysing its sources, especially its political origins, its enabling mechanisms, and its related criminal dimensions. Unless the nature and provenance of the challenge is finally understood, the appropriate strategy and tactics to address it will never be formulated. The drugs scourge continues to escalate because the measures so far developed to counter it do not take account of the geopolitical dimension – that is to say, of the malevolent, revolutionary intent which drives it’.
‘As a consequence, the measures taken, in the United States, Britain and elsewhere, to address the scourge, have remained essentially irrelevant and ineffective…. The plague continues to spread because the West is the victim of a deliberate, sustained and relentless offensive planned and directed by enemy intelligence which Western policymakers appear not to begin, or care, to understand. Some Western leaders even share the ideological objectives of the perpetrators of the drugs offensive. To make matters much worse, the values of many policymakers have been fatally eroded; and if one has no real values, one is not emboldened to defend anything at all, let alone with conviction and vigour. Policymakers too often stand for nothing and fall for everything – for every false assessment, for every piece of fashionable disinformation and for every diversionary tactic which is intended to add to the confusion and which clouds the truth: namely, that the West has been targeted as an act of war, and is the victim of a sustained offensive’.
‘Obviously, the longer this perversity and blindness continue, the more powerful and insuperable will the forces which help to perpetuate this blanket offensive, become. Soon, they will wield almost total power in some Western countries. The European Union’s collectivist structures, with their pork-barrel traditions and inclinations, are conspicuously vulnerable to drug-related corruption…’.