KUSMAROV - From Counter-Insurgency To Narco-Insurgency

From Counter-Insurgency to Narco-Insurgency: Vietnam and the International War on Drugs
Jeremy Kuzmarov
Journal of Policy History, Volume 20, Number 3, 2008, pp. 344-378 (Article)
Published by Penn State University Press
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jeremy kuzmarov
From Counter-Insurgency to Narco-Insurgency: Vietnam and the International War on Drugs

If we have found we cannot be the worlds policeman, can we hope to become the worlds narc? H. D. S. Greenway, Life Magazine, October 19721
In the January 1968 issue of the Washingtonian magazine, the son of the great American novelist John Steinbeck made his professional journalistic debut with the publication of a controversial article, The Importance of Being Stoned in Vietnam. John Steinbeck IV, who served as a roving correspondent for the Pacic Stars and Stripes, wrote that marijuana of a potent quality was grown naturally in Vietnam, sold by farmers at a fraction of the cost than in the United States, and could be obtained more easily than a package of Lucky Strikes cigarettes. He estimated that up to 75 percent of soldiers in Vietnam got high regularly. The average soldier sees that for all intents and purposes, the entire country is stoned, Steinbeck observed. To enforce a prohibition against smoking the plant [in Vietnam] would be like trying to prohibit the inhalation of smog in Los Angeles.2 Although his words were evocative, Steinbeck exaggerated the scope of drug abuse in Vietnam for political purposes. He had been arrested on marijuana charges upon return to his native California and wanted to point out the hypocrisy of government policies targeting those who had fought for their country in Vietnam.3 Military psychiatrists working closest to the situation later determined that between 30 percent and 35 percent of American
The author wishes to thank David C. Engerman, William O. Walker III, Michael Willrich, Clark Dougan, and the two additional anonymous reviewers for their excellent suggestions and insights in shaping this article, as well as Dr. Roger Roman, Dr. Jerome H. Jae, and other veterans of the war who took time to speak with me.
the journal of policy history, Vol. 20, No. 3, 2008. Copyright 2008 The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA.
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gis likely used marijuanalargely on an experimental basis and to escape the harrowing social conditions of the war.4 The media nevertheless largely bought into Steinbecks inated gures and became ooded with articles pointing to the ravaging eects of drug use in combat, even though predominantly this was rare.5 They often used sensationalistic rhetoric, including reference to epidemics and plagues, as well as Orientalist stereotypes depicting drugs as a foreign corrupting agent, resulting in a rise in public support for an escalation of federal drug-control measuresparticularly in the international realm.6 In May 1971, Newsweek columnist Stewart Alsop went so far as to proclaim that drug use during the war was worse than the My-Lai massacre, which Senator Thomas J. Dodd (D-Conn.) had previously tried to blame on marijuana.7 Public hysteria over drug abuse in Vietnamand its pronounced political consequencehas generally been ignored in the academic literature on the War on Drugs, which has focused more on domestic political developments and the pathologies of the Nixon White House.8 Writing from a predominantly liberal disposition, many analysts reason that the drug war emerged as a product of the Conservative backlash toward the hippie counterculture and the sociocultural tensions of the 1960s.9 Others contend that conservatives manipulated public opinion on the drug issue through inated statistics in order to push forward a social agenda focused on expanding law enforcement at the expense of social welfare programs.10 These arguments are compelling and demonstrate how the War on Drugs has been adopted to serve important political ends while ushering in what deputy drug czar, John Walters (198993), characterized as a conservative cultural revolution.11 They nevertheless neglect the broader global context and impact of the crisis in Vietnam in exacerbating popular anxieties over drugs and in shaping a shift in governmental priorities. On June 17, 1971, in the face of mounting domestic protest and the release of a congressional report claimingexaggeratingly as it turned outthat 10 percent to 15 percent of gis were addicted to high-grade heroin supplied by cia allies, Nixon ocially declared a War on Drugs. He called drug abuse public enemy number one in America.12 Escalating the budget for domestic treatment and enforcement, Nixon stepped up eorts to train foreign police in the so-called Golden Triangle (encompassing northern Thailand, Laos, and South Vietnam) and implemented aerial spraying and crop substitution campaigns more extensive in scope than in Mexico. Nixon further enacted a highly controversial urinalysis program in the military accompanied by a rehabilitation regiment for those caught with positive samples. These initiatives were all designed to curb the spread of addiction in the Armed Forces,
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assuage public fears about the return of addicted gis to the United States, and silence charges of governmental complicity in the international drug trac, which had become the source of pronounced political embarrassment.13 Nixons policies also had broader implications in providing the groundwork for his Vietnamization program, which sought to shift the burden of ghting to the U.S.-dependent South Vietnamese allies. Although neglected by historians, the Southeast Asian drug war of the early 1970s, intricately connected to Americas involvement in Vietnam, served in retrospect as a watershed in U.S. foreign narcotics policy in terms of the breadth of federal commitment and the scope of its programs.14 It further exposed the limits of American international policing and the nations universal approach to foreign policy more broadly by arousing popular animosity and resistance and failing to curb supply rates.
the addicted army and escalation of the southeast asian drug war
Since the beginning of the twentieth century, the United States had been at the vanguard among Western nations in promoting global drug-control eorts through diplomatic means as well as the United Nations, largely as an extension of its domestic policing program. From 1930 until 1962, Harry J. Anslinger was particularly inuential as head of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics (fbn) in making drug control an important aspect of American national security policy and in increasing the presence of U.S narcotic agents overseas.15 In 1962, in a deal that would set a precedent for the future, the Kennedy administration provided Mexico with $500,000 worth of helicopters, light planes, jeeps, and ries through the Agency of International Development (aid) for a special narcotic destruction campaign targeting marijuana and opium growers.16 During the mid-1950s, the Federal Bureau of Narcotics (fbn) rst established bureau posts in Southeast Asia because of an interest in curbing the source of supply from the region. Following the French defeat at Dien Bien Phu in 1954, fbn agents began to investigate the alleged involvement of the Communist Viet Minh in tracking opium from Laos, which actually paled before the deeper participation of American allies in Thailand.17 The inux of American troops in South Vietnam during the early 1960s reinforced administrative concerns about the availability of illicit narcotics. The most widely used intoxicant in Vietnam was marijuana of a high potency, which grew wild in the countryside.18 Many farmers sold the drug through local
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retailing merchants, often in packs of Parker Lane and Kent cigarettes. They could be purchased for 400 Vietnamese piasters or $1.50an unheard of price by American standards. Marijuana in Vietnam is cheap, easy to nd and potent, remarked one medical psychiatrist, as quoted in U.S. News & World Report. The drug is everywhere. All a person has to do to get it is say the word Khan Sa.19 Despite the easy availability, soldiers predominantly used drugs on a casual basis and away from the theater of combat. One study found that less than 10 percent of men admitted to the use of marijuana on duty at some time. Within the Air Force, the gure was only 2.6 percent.20 Having interviewed more than ve hundred military personnel, psychiatrist W. B. Postel found that the usual habit was to smoke the drug after a battle to calm down. Only one person indicated that he smoked while ghting.21 Frank Bartimo, assistant general counsel for the Department of Defense, similarly concluded, We have very little, about no drug abuse among troops going into the eld. Guys who use it say they never do it when theyre going into combat.22 Marvin Matthiak, an infantryman stationed with the Alpha First Battalion Cavalry Division added, The press has done a tremendous disservice to this country in portraying grunts as being out there doing drugs. As far as I know and as far as everyone else I ever talk to about it, there was essentially no drug use whatsoever in the bush. Everybody knew what the dangers were and nobody was stupid enough to incapacitate themselves.23 In 1967, as a result of a growing wave of media attention, the Department of Defense formed a special task force on narcotics and commissioned psychiatrist Roger A. Roman to conduct a study at the Long Binh Jail, where drugs were prevalent despite tightening security. He found that 63 percent of prisoners tried marijuana.24 In a follow-up survey, Roman and Ely Sapol determined that 28.9 percent of gis stationed in the Southern Corps experimented with marijuana at least once during their tour of duty in South Vietnam, comparable to the rate for young adults between the ages of eighteen and twenty-one in the United States.25 Both Roman and Sapol later testied before Congress about the methodological limits of their study in that subjects might have been reluctant to admit partaking in an illegal activity, though they stressed that they took pains to ensure strict condentiality. Both were deeply dismayed by the medias coverage, which inated their data and issued bombastic statements that 60, 70, 80 or even 90 percent of American troops were on drugs. The average soldier in Vietnam, Sapol stated, is not a drug addict.26 Subsequent military studies found that approximately 35 percent of soldiers tried marijuana, with only a small percentage recording heavy or

daily use.27 Hard narcotics were used much less, though many gis began smoking a form of heroin known as scag in January 1970 after the opening of transportation routes through Cambodia. Government urinalysis tests recorded a user rate of 5.5 percent.28 Media portrayals made the rate of abuse seem to be far worse and made no distinction between heroin use and abuse.29 They also warned exaggeratingly about addicted soldiers returning to the United States to exacerbate domestic unrest and crime, feeding into a conservative social agenda.30 In June 1971, Time editorialized, The specter of weapons-trained, addicted combat veterans joining the deadly struggle for drugs in the streets of America is ominous. Quoting Iowa Senator Howard E. Hughes, the article continued, Within a matter of months in our large cities, the Capone era of the 1920s may look like a Sunday school picnic by comparison!31 In reality, while the fbis crime index was on the increase, less than one-half of one percent of all veterans committed any criminal oenses after returning to the United States and generally achieved higher education and income levels than their peers.32 Many engaged, further, in principled dissent against the war, which received scant media coverage, as Jerry Lee Lembcke documents in The Spitting Image: Myth, Memory, and the Legacy of Vietnam and was often depicted as a product of their supposed psychopathology.33 In 1973, psychiatrist Lee N. Robins of Washington University conducted a series of interviews with Vietnam veterans who had tested positive for heroin and concluded that less than 10 percent used any drugs at all back in the United Statesan extraordinarily high remission rate, which she attributed to shifting social circumstances and their removal from the death-tainted social environment of Vietnam. Only 1.3 percent of those sampled were drug dependent and less than one percent addicted to opiates.34 Ensconced in a culture of fear, the public was falsely imbued with the impression that Americas social fabric was being torn apart at the seams by half-crazed and doped-up soldiers from whom nobody was safe.35 From the militarys perspective, any amount of drug use was intolerable. Born of a generation that came of age drinking whiskey, rum, and hard alcohol, most career ocers believed that drug use was a sign of individual character weakness and that gis who partook in this activity were unt for duty and should be thrown out of the service.36 Lewis Walt, commander of the 3rd Amphibious Marine Division and later assistant commandant of the Marine Corps, referred to drugs in Vietnam as a contagious disease nearly as deadly as the bubonic plague. . . . The only explanation is that our enemy wants to hook as many gis as possible.37 In June 1966, General Walt,
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or Uncle Lew as he was aectionately known to his troops, wrote a letter to aid representatives stating that opium and marijuana were being sold in Danang and Hoa Phat village near American military bases.38 James E. McMahon, an aid public safety adviser in Danang responsible for law-enforcement training, responded by setting up a meeting with the district chief of police, who assured him of his personal interest in taking action on this matter.39 Secretary of State Robert S. McNamara subsequently called for a monthly report on all drug-abuse cases under investigation in the Republic of Vietnam.40 In 1967, as rumors of drug abuse grew stronger, aids Oce of Public Safety (ops) expanded advisory assistance to the South Vietnamese police, which established a special Narcotics Bureau to coordinate intelligence gathering as well as a pioneering buy program designed to stop the ow of marijuana into U.S. troop areas.41 The cia sometimes staed the bureau with counterterror specialists, who used the guise of narcotics control to initiate covert programs like Operation Phoenix, where hunter-killer squads worked to decimate the political infrastructure of the National Liberation Front (nlf) through targeted assassination.42 Despite this ulterior function, which t a long-standing pattern of collaboration between American counterintelligence and narcotics enforcement ocers, in 1967, one hundred national policemen were brought to Saigon and given their rst formalized narcotics training. Between 1967 and 1971, 1,254 members of the national police received specialized eighty-hour courses of instruction in the investigation and enforcement of narcotic and drug laws.43 In 1968, in the aftermath of the Tet Oensive, the Armys Criminal Investigation Division (cid) developed a special antinarcotics brigade, which received training in undercover work and intelligence gathering from fbn agents stationed in Thailand.44 The Department of Defense simultaneously instructed all unit commanders to conduct an aggressive program to combat the threat of drug abuse.45 In select instances, unit commanders allowed Vietnamese prostitutes, or local national guests, as they were sometimes referred to as, into military barracks in order to dissuade soldiers from using drugs. Hannah Browning, the outraged wife of a Marine, wrote to her congressional representative, I dont want my husband living in a brothel, nor to think of the commanding general as a pimphorrible but logical.46 In 1969, as a result of the medias increasing focus on the problem of drug abuse in the Armed Forces, the ops launched a marijuana destruction campaign in collaboration with the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs (bndd) and the Vietnamese national police. While serving in some instances as a pretext to unleash chemical weapons on suspected guerrilla

infested areas and to force villagers into strategic government controlled hamlets by ravaging their food crops, the aim of the program was generally to eradicate the growth of marijuana at the source.47 American helicopters began to conduct y-over missions predominantly in the Mekong Delta region, with pilots assigning kill-ratios to the number of crops destroyed.48 According to aid records, they wiped out more than 504,795 marijuana plants (or 27,770 pounds). In most cases, aid ocials paid farmers one piaster (less than one U.S. cent) for each plant targeted.49 Journalist Richard Boyle aptly commented, The United States is now waging two wars in Vietnam; one against the Vietcong and the other against Mary Jane [slang for marijuana].50 The United States eventually realized that it could not successfully sustain a two-front war. American pilots encountered resistance among farmers who proted from the black market economy and sought to protect their water bualo and crops from errant sprayings. As with the broader crop-destruction program, they reported having to abort several missions after being shot at. Besides facing open popular deance, the aerial interdiction campaign faced constraints from the military high command.51 In May 1971, Director of Pacication John Paul Vann sent a memo to senior ops advisers warning them not to spray marijuana growing elds in the Chau Doc, An Giang, and Se Dec provinces controlled by the Hoa-Hao sect. He feared alienating them and driving them into the hands of the nlf. Vann viewed the marijuana program as a bane to broader pacication eorts designed to win over the hearts and minds of the South Vietnamese people.52 Although considering the smoking of marijuana to be a major command problem, he advocated a more restrained crop-substitution program, which was eventually abandoned because of what John Ingersoll, head of the Bureau of Dangerous Drugs and Narcotics (bndd successor to the fb) termed higher combat priorities.53 Coinciding with the collapse of the marijuana destruction campaign, the Department of Defense began to enforce more stringent custom-inspections guidelines and initiated a program to train specialized dogs in detecting the scent of marijuana and later opium.54 The vigorous policing tactics, and growth of the cids antinarcotics brigade, ultimately led to a near tenfold surge in arrest rates, with approximately 6,500 soldiers being court marshaled for drug-related oenses in 1971 (compared to fewer than 1,000 in 1968, for example).55 The military court system became so jammed with drug cases that Henry Aronson, a lawyer who provided counsel for accused soldiers, commented, Drug cases have become to the judicial system here [in Vietnam] what automobile accidents have become to the civil courts at home.56
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Faced with court overcrowding and an overburdened criminal justice apparatus, the Department of Defense in January 1970 adopted a novel amnesty program, which granted prosecutorial immunity and the promise of rehabilitation to soldiers who admitted to using drugs. During the rst three months of its implementation, 3,600 Marines took advantage of this policythough many distrusted the militarys pledge that their permanent records would be unaected.57 In winter of 1970, Military Assistance Command (macv) established a special telephone line where gis could get help for drug-related problems and report any drug tips to the police.58 They also developed their own drug library, which included antidrug tracts like Donald Lourias evocatively titled Nightmare Drugs and Gabriel Nahass Marihuana: Deceptive Weed.59 As another preventive measure, the military command upgraded several state-of-the-art recreational facilities, including one at Vung Tau o the South China Sea, where gis could go to the beach and enjoy a luxurious whirlpool and sauna.60 They also invited Hollywood entertainers to South Vietnam, including Sammy Davis Jr., who was urged to mix a distinctive antidrug theme with his music.61
smashing an epidemic? operation golden-flow and the military heroin war

More than its predecessors, the Nixon administration played a key role in promoting the international War on Drugs as part of its broader law-and-order campaign. Nixon came to oce as part of a Middle American backlash toward the hippie counterculture, which challenged the dominant consumerist culture of the 1950s and took drugs as a cultural detoxicant and form of rebellion.62 Nixon exploited divisions in American society by blaming liberal permissiveness for the social upheavals gripping the country, including the national agony of Vietnam.63 Because of their symbolic status, drug eradication assumed special signicance in Nixons attempt to restore traditional moral values and the pre-war status quo. During the 1968 election campaign, he branded drugs as the modern curse of American youth akin to the plagues and epidemics of former years threatening to decimate a generation of Americans.64 In July 1969, after winning the presidency, he made a special plea before Congress to expand federal funding for antidrug programs, and in September initiated a sustained interdiction drive on the Mexican border called Operation Intercept.65 He later launched Operation Cooperation, in which the United States helped to train more than ve hundred Mexican police in narcotics enforcement and supplied special military helicopters and aerial

surveillance equipment. These were crucial in the destruction of more than twenty thousand opium cultivation sites and eighteen thousand marijuana elds through the spraying of herbicidal defoliants. An internal State Department study later determined that nearly sixty thousand hectares of nontarget vegetation was also aected, causing pronounced health and environmental damages, including skin corrosions among poor farmers, the contamination of grazing cattle and natural drinking water, and a devastation of the natural habitat of various endangered animal and sh species.66 Domestically, Nixon developed a nationally coordinated drug rehabilitation system, as well as the rst federal antidrug police force, which was also used to bolster the internal state security apparatus and target radical and subversive organizations under the pretext that they used drugs.67 The urgency of Nixons antidrug agenda was hastened by the drug crisis emanating out of Vietnam. As Dr. Jerome H. Jae, a pharmacologist at the University of Chicago, appointed by Nixon as the rst national director of drug control, put it in a recent interview, The media had helped to create panic on the streets and the government was forced to respond. While programs were in place before . . . the Vietnam War was a determining factor [in shaping the growth of federal drug control policies] and helped to ensure major presidential support.68 In August 1970, National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger sent Cabinet member Egil Bud Krogh on a four-day investigative trip to South Vietnam along with Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird.69 The duo visited thirteen rebases from the demilitarized zone along the 17th parallel to Bac Lu in the southern tip of the country and witnessed soldiers smoking marijuana and other illegal drugs almost everywhere they went. Upon return to the United States, Krogh told Nixon, Mr. President, you dont have a drug problem in Vietnam, you have a condition.70 He urged Nixon to more conspicuously associate himself with the War on Drugs and also ordered military commanders to conceal the gravity of the crisis from visiting congressional representatives bent on exploiting it for political benet.71 In a secret memo to John Ehrlichman, which reected in part the growing hostility of high-ranking White House ocials to domestic political opposition, he commented, My Lai, Con Son and drug abuse are the type of issues which radical liberals will publicize in their eorts to undermine the war. I think the U.S. command in South Vietnam is well aware of these problems created by unlimited disclosure of sensitive, embarrassing information to hostile Congressional types.72 In May 1971, the public relations fallout surrounding the crisis of the addicted army reached a high point following the release of a sensational
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congressional report claiming that between 10 percent and 15 percent of American soldiers were addicted to heroin. Authors Morgan F. Murphy (D-Ill.) and Robert H. Steele (R-Conn.) traced the roots of this epidemic to the corruption of American allies in the Golden Triangle and to a sharp decline in military morale. Steele later recanted on the original gures, claiming that 5 percent was more realistic.73 The report nevertheless ignited a potent political controversy, which was intensied following the publication of Alfred W. McCoys well-researched expose The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia, which conrmed allegations of cia complicity in the global drug trade.74 Both studies gave strength to public demands for the withdrawal of American troops from Vietnambased in part on the desire to shield them from the ravages of addictionwhile also promoting support for an expansion of the international War on Drugs. In a June 1971 speech before the New Hampshire Bar Association, Senator Edmund Muskie (D-Me.) captured the prevailing mood in declaring, If it is in the interest of our national security to save the people of Vietnam from Communism, it is also in our national interest to save our own citizens from the devastation of heroin addiction. . . . The rst step must be to withdraw our troops by the end of this year.75 Senator William Proxmire (D-Wisc.) told Congress one year later that the drug problem alone was sucient reason to get us out. The war in Southeast Asia is not worth a single drug addicted American.76 Seymour Halpern (R-N.Y.) added that he had become convinced that the American people were more turned o by the war because of the drug problem than for any other reason. They have more fear of their sons becoming drug addicts than being shot. This is reected by so many parents who come to me as Congressman, who emphasize fears of their youngsters becoming addicts.77 Top Nixon presidential aides by this time were weary of the political ramications of the drug crisis in Vietnam, as popular support for the war reached a nadir. After receiving an advance copy of the Murphy-Steele report on the eve of its release, Special Counselor to the President Donald Rumsfeld phoned Steele, a former cia agent, and pleaded with him to moderate his tone before the media and withhold any damning information pertaining to Americas geopolitical alliance with trackers.78 The State Department and cia later engaged in a concerted public relations campaign to discredit McCoy, then a twenty-six-year-old Yale graduate student, as a knee-jerk opponent of U.S. foreign policy and black sheep gone astray, and even tried to convince Harper & Row to suppress publication of his book.79 This in spite of disclosure by cia operative Edgar Pop Buell that he

oversaw the cultivation of opium by American-backed Hmong tribesman in Laos and the fact that an internal government study concluded that local ocials of whom we are in contact have been or may still be involved in the drug business.80 cia Director Richard Helms publicly proclaimed, nevertheless: It is arrant nonsense that the cia is somehow involved in the drug trac. As fathers, we are as concerned about the lives of our children and grandchildren as the rest of you, while as an agency we are engaged in tracing the foreign roots of the narcotics scourge.81 Egil Krogh had previously instructed the State Department and Department of Defense to deny knowledge of the corruption of American allies and to openly declare that there was not sucient basis to believe that the allegations [of administrative support for drug trackers] were true.82 Krogh also privately urged Nixon to take more eective measures and develop a mandate for action against drugs in order to curb public criticism of his foreign policy.83 Heeding this advice, Nixon undertook a major eradication campaign in South Vietnam, in addition to expanding domestic policing eorts. On June 3, 1971, Nixon had convened a meeting in the White House with top military and civilian leaders in which he expressed concern that Vietnam veterans were popularly perceived to be ruthless killers and junkies and that this image must be changed.84 Two weeks later, he declared a national state of emergency surrounding drugs and appropriated $50 million to Dr. Jae as the new drug czar to establish a urinalysis program for all departing gis, which was dubbed Operation Golden-Flow.85 Soldiers who tested positive were medevacked to newly created rehabilitation facilities at Long Binh and Cam Ranh Bay for a ve- to seven-day period, where they were treated through group counseling and methadone, a synthetic narcotic substitute deemed capable of weaning patients o heroin.86 The House Appropriations Committee later approved $17.1 million toward the construction of twenty-eight specialized Veteran Administration (va) rehab clinics, where gis could continue their treatment upon return to the United States. The va had previously refused to assist veterans thought to be using drugs.87 In June 1972, the Department of Defense began to administer urinalysis testing to randomly selected units and extended Golden-Flow to troop displacements in Thailand, Japan, Korea, and West Germany, where senior White House ocials warned that institutional lethargy toward drug abuse was helping to create a European Vietnam.88 By the end of 1972, Dr. Jae boasted that the program was responsible for limiting the scope of heroin use to under 2 percent from just over 5 percent at its peak, and thought that he had made a contribution to science equivalent to the discovery
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of the X-Ray and a cure for tuberculosis!89 Assistant Secretary of Defense Dr. Richard S. Wilbur subsequently proclaimed that Golden-Flow had helped to smash the gravest disease epidemic in modern military history virtually overnight!90 Not everyone shared in Wilburs enthusiasm. Dr. Carl A. Segal resigned his ocers commission because he thought that the tests were unethical and a violation of personal liberty.91 Sociologist Paul Starr chronicled a culture of resistance by gis placed in rehabilitation centers against their will. Many saw them as ineective, badly run, based on a simplistic view of drug use and designed to save political face.92 They often refused to participate in therapy sessions run by the same authorities responsible for prosecuting the war, and attempted to defy the system through acts of insubordination and violence. The culprits were often placed in solitary connement and eventually forced into handcus on the plane ride back to the United States in a vivid reection of the deep internal divisions plaguing the Armed Forces at this time and the climate of rebellion among lower-ranking grunts.93 From the perspective of those it was designed to assist, the rehabilitation system was hence not nearly as successful or enlightened as Jae and his backers claimed. They lacked the foresight to recognize that the only likely solution to the drug problemgiven how wedded it was to the social environment of the warwas the unilateral withdrawal of American troops. Dr. Norman Zinberg of Harvard Medical School commented, Unfortunately, the possibility that going home is more eective therapy [for the gi] than any treatment program now available is scarcely considered. Perhaps, he added, because then no agency or class of professionals could claim him as their success.94 For all its shortcomings, nevertheless, which were legion, Operation-Golden-Flow played an important political role for the Nixon administration in proving its resolve in ghting drug abuse. Nixon received positive press coverage, as well as numerous letters from citizens praising his commitment toward solving a crisis some Americans viewed as the gravest facing their generation, as one Maine woman put it in a letter to Senator Muskie.95 This was crucial coming at a time when his administration faced intense criticism for failing to abide by its 1968 campaign promise of peace with honor and furthering the devastation in large parts of Indochina (including Laos and Cambodia).96 In many ways, Nixons drug policies reect what the historian Joan Ho has found to be Nixons hidden pragmatism and uncanny ability to bounce back politically from scandal and the abuse of power, which marred his presidency, in part by tapping into popular anxieties to his benet.97 He was successful in turn in advancing

grass-roots support for the conservative movement, whose main goal was to restore public condence in the nations capacity for global power, and transcend the social crisis of the 1960s, for which drugs provided a potent symbol.98
vietnamization of the war on drugs

For Nixon, Vietnam was always a sideshow that detracted from his grander ambition of easing Cold War tensions through dtente and gaining international acclaim for promoting world peace. In the face of mounting protest against the war, including from U.S. troops, Nixon crafted the Vietnamization strategy, which called for a shift in the ghting burden to the South Vietnamese Army (arvn) and the renewal of nation-building programs. It was designed to help salvage American credibility without sacricing any of its strategic interests, while at the same time minimizing public dissent.99 Unrecognized to many historians, Nixons escalation of the international War on Drugs was a central dimension to Vietnamization. Its primary aim, besides bolstering the public reputation of the U.S. Armed Forces and easing public anxieties about the return of addicted vets, was to improve the image of the South Vietnamese government so as to allow for its political sustainability.100 Nixon was ghting an uphill battle due to revelations of widespread human rights abuses and systematic torture. This was in addition to the connection with drug tracking, which was rst exposed by the radical Ramparts magazine and eventually in the mainstream press.101 In mid-1970, Nixon had begun applying diplomatic pressure on President Nguyen Van Thieu to crack down on this problem, which congressional opponents of the war likened to an infectious cancer.102 In May 1971, after the release of the Murphy-Steele report, Congress included a provision in the Foreign Assistance Act requiring the president to cut o military and economic aid to any country determined to be uncooperative in narcotics control and to petition international development organizations, including the World Bank, to deny monetary assistance.103 In a secret meeting, American ambassador Bunker and General Creighton Abrams threatened to break ties with Thieu if he did not comply with the new regulations. Bunker told him, In all frankness, no one can assure that the American people will continue to support Vietnam or the Congress will vote the hundreds of millions required for economic assistance next year and in the following years, if this situation continues. Bunker added, You are well aware that the American press is now lled with articles about the heroin trac in Vietnam and the
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involvement of high ocials. A more concentrated eort is required by your government as a whole to penetrate the upper level of the narcotic tracking organizations.104 After being issued the ultimatum, Thieu launched a sustained antidrug oensive under the leadership of Admiral Chung Tan Cang, a former classmate at Saigons merchant marine academy, who replaced twenty-ve police chiefs throughout the countryside and ten out of eleven precinct commanders in Saigon.105 Admiral Chung also issued an order to have more than three hundred corrupt ocers dismissed from Tansonhut airport and to re several prominent ocials linked to the drug trac, which critics viewed as a public relations ploy to protect Thieus inner ruling circle from exposure.106 Tran Van Tuyen, a deputy in Thieus cabinet who led an anticorruption drive, commented cynically, Eradication was done with reluctance [by Thieu] in order to gag the press so that he and a group of protgs could continue to exploit the anti-Communist struggle to get rich upon the toil and blood of the people.107 Irrespective of the true motives, following the purges, Admiral Chung helped to create a special Joint Narcotics Investigation Division (jnid) to coordinate all police interdiction in conjunction with former cia operative Byron Engle, head of the ops.108 In the fall of 1971, sixty-seven jnid ocers were sent to the United States for intensive counter-narcotics training. New members were outtted with modernized law enforcement equipment, including oshore patrolling boats capable of intercepting Thai shing trawlers, which regularly smuggled heroin into the country, and Marquis Reagent testing kits, which held the capability of positive on the spot identication of narcotic substances.109 Receiving more than $2 million in foreign aid, jnid ocers became known for their ruthlessness and corruption.110 They nevertheless nabbed several high-prole trackers, including portly Saigon nancier Tap Vinh, and, according to U.S. data, seized 14,269 marijuana cigarettes as well as 23,656 vials of heroin and contributed to an estimated 70 percent increase in arrest rates. The street price of heroin subsequently rose from $1.50 to $9 per gram.111 On June 17, 1971, Thieu initiated a Vi-Dan campaign to eradicate social evils, which included a major focus on narcotics.112 In Phu-Bon, located in II Corps, provincial chiefs organized a massive parade to celebrate the commemoration of a special anti-narcotics day in which banners, posters, and placards were raised depicting the evils of drugs and speeches were made denouncing them as the rst enemy of the South Vietnamese nation. In a symbolic act, local residents burned a dummy labeled heroin in egy in the town center.113 On August 12, 1972, Thieu issued a decree mandating a life

sentence for the importation of opium, morphine, or heroin and the death penalty for members of organized tracking syndicates.114 The new laws were promoted in a public relations campaign funded by the ops. One emblematic poster pictured a sad man sitting in a tiny and decrepit jail cell under the headline, One day in jail equals 1000 days in freedom. Dont sell Heroin to American gis.115 Thieu sought to portray himself through these ads as a champion of drug prohibitionready to dole out swift justice to anyone caught selling heroin. Reliant on U.S. military support and foreign aid for survival, as his vice president openly admitted in a 1977 interview, Thieu faced few alternatives.116 The State Department had come under intense public pressure to clean up the image of American allies and curb the spread of drug abuse in the military as a precondition for implementing their Vietnamization strategy and preserving the war eort. They were also desperate to smooth over the scandal surrounding the cia, which the South Vietnamese drug war was in part designed to counteract.
internationalization of american criminal justice: the war on drugs in thailand

For political and security reasons, the State Department extended its narcoinsurgency into the notorious Golden Triangle, which was a major source base for the opium imported into South Vietnam. The United States enjoyed a particularly close relationship with the Thai ruling dictatorship, which agreed to cooperate with the War on Drugs in return for aid in crushing an incipient guerrilla insurrection.117 During the late 1960s, the ops began advisory training of the 7th subdivision of the Thai national police in narcotics enforcement and intelligence gathering in an attempt to curb the source of supply reaching American gis. They also formed a police aerial reinforcement unit, which was intended to enhance customs and border patrol, while sometimes providing a camouage for cia operations into neighboring Laos and Vietnam.118 As the drug crisis in Vietnam intensied, Nixon increased the number of federal narcotics agents in Thailand from ve to eleven. On August 4, 1971, Egil Krogh visited with Thai ocials and issued a memo to State Department ocials calling for an all out war to disrupt those supplying American troops with drugs.119 On September 28, 1971, American ambassador Leonard Ungar helped broker a pact, in which the United States agreed to send Black Hawk helicopters to bolster the drug enforcement capacities of the Royal Thai police, which had received previous U.S. monetary assistance under ops programs for what it termed domestic security purposes.120 A congressional
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investigation later uncovered that much of the American drug war aid continued to fulll these ends and was funneled toward nancing the repressive policing apparatus of the Thai government, which frequently carried out spot executions and torture.121 In October 1971, Prime Minister Thanom Kittikachorn red the deputy commander of the national Police, Colonel Pramuel Vanigbhandu, and Paesert Ruchirawongse, director general of the national police. Both had been publicly linked to drug tracking networks in a series of articles appearing in the Bangkok Daily Post. Colonel Pramuel later turned up at Water Reed Hospital in Washington, D.C., where he claimed to be suering from mental problems.122 In 1972, the State Department helped to develop a mobile task force to crack down on drug smuggling in loosely policed zones in the northern part of the country. Within a few months, the Thai police had a total of thirty-seven ocers on active duty and seized upward of 4,720 kilograms of opiates.123 They also landed several high-prole arrests, including William Henry Jackson, an African American veteran indicted for smuggling heroin in the cons of dead soldiers, and Burmese warlord Lo Hsing-Han, who senior U.S. narcotics adviser Nelson Gross termed an international bandit responsible for a growing proportion of Asias and Americas drug caused miseries.124 The cia proclaimed Los capture to be a major step forward in the War on Drugs, though in reality it enabled rival Khun Sa (aka Chiang Chi Foo) to take over his market share and emerge as the most powerful opium warlord in the Golden Trianglewithout any major eect on supply.125 Crop substitution was an important element of the drug war in Thailand and was tied to broader economic development programs designed to inculcate pro-American sentiments among the indigenous population and improve their living conditions. As part of the 1971 agreement, Ambassador Ungar pledged to donate $5 million to encourage the growth of maize, corn, peaches, and kidney beans as an alternative to opium.126 The Department of Agriculture later established a specialized research center at Chiang Mai and, with un backing, two fruit and nut experimental centers on opium-growing sites in the Doi Suthep Mountains.127 In July 1972, the State Department brokered a resettlement program for Chinese Guomindang (kmt) soldiers under the command of General Li Wen-Huan. The kmt had become major opium traders after losing nancial support from the cia following a failed Bay of Pigsstyle reinvasion of the Chinese mainland during the early 1960s.128 In return for land, citizenship, and 20.8 million baht (almost $1 million), they agreed to burn twenty-six tons of opium in a ceremony witnessed by two State Department envoys and a forensic chemist. It was later uncovered

that they substituted horse fodder for opium.129 This asco exemplied the ineectiveness of American drug-control eorts in Thailand, which nevertheless endured through the reinstitution of democracy in 1973 and the bloody U.S.-supported 1976 Kittikachorn counter-coup.130
poppies, pipes, and people: the war on heroin in laos

The State Department enacted its most sustained drug-control program in Laos. Throughout the 1960s, the United States had kept a hands-o policy on narcotics control according to internal government documents because American allies ghting a secret war under cia tutelage, including Hmong chief Vang Pao, were heavily involved in the opium trac. Legendary cia operative Anthony Poshepny (aka Ton Poe), best known for providing rewards for the capture of enemy ears, bluntly told journalist Roger Warner years later, You could have a war against Communism or a war against drugs, but you couldnt have both.131 Following the publication of the Murphy-Steele report, the State Department began levying greater pressure on the Royal Lao government (rlg) for reform.132 In November 1971, the rlg implemented a federal decree making illegal the importation of acetic anhydride, an essential element in the production of heroin. Under U.S. pressure, they further banned the production, sale, and consumption of opium, which was known locally as khai, or ower medicine.133 The new bills sparked vocal opposition and were highly unpopular because opium was for centuries an important cash crop in Laos and was used for medicinal, spiritual, and holistic purposes.134 In January 1972, the bndd nevertheless helped to form a special police unit capable of enforcing the governments edict.135 By August, several American-trained teams headed by the Lao chief of intelligence conducted raids of known reneries in Ban Houei Sai, Luang Prabang, and in the capital of Vientiane.136 In January 1973, the bndd stationed two full-time agents in Vientiane and provided customs ocers with jeeps, boats, and walkie-talkies for narcotic enforcement purposes. They further organized a vigorous system of cargo inspection at Wattay airport in Vientiane resulting in several major arrests.137 On the whole, the Nixon administration procured over $2.9 million toward the Laotian drug war, some of which was diverted toward pure military and counterinsurgency ends. Part of Nixons budget went toward the development of a drug rehabilitation program to treat Lao heroin addicts, including soldiers, which resulted from the growth of the renery industry.138 In 1972, usaid funded two major clinics in Wat Tham Ka Bok and Vientiane
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providing methadone treatment to addicts mixed with Buddhist spirituality and prayer.139 Dr. Jae later advocated that aid turn all opium parlors into methadone centers.140 These programs served as a latch-ditch eort at nationbuilding by American policymakers, who saw them as a means of promoting goodwill and showing the benign intent of U.S. foreign policy. They also exemplied the interplay between foreign and domestic policy and missionary-like drive of the methadone king (as Jae was nicknamed) and his contemporaries to curb the global scourge of drug abuse using the latest scientic innovation. This was notwithstanding the contradiction that heroin in Laos was a direct by-product of American foreign policy and the social ravages of the war. The public health model that Jae espoused was generally overshadowed by more widely publicized eradication eorts. In March 1972, the State Department contemplated bombing an opium renery near Ban Houei Sai, which was later destroyed in a mysterious re that embassy ocials claimed was set by the cia. One agent commented, With bombing, everyone would have known that we did it. With a re, people are not sure. It may be a business rival.141 These comments testify to the important balancing act played by American embassy ocials, who hoped to placate American public opinion by promoting prohibition while minimizing Laotian popular dissent. The State Department likely leaked the re plot to the press for public relations purposes and to help exonerate the cia of charges of complicity in the international drug trade. In 1972, the aid began to relocate indigenous families to northern Laos to promote alternative crop development. The agency opened an agricultural center in the Phu Pha Dang province headed by community development specialist Gary Alex, where it trained Lao opium producers in vegetable, livestock, and sh production.142 Most people were resentful and hesitant to move from their ancestral homeland and farms, to which they were deeply attached. American Ambassador G. McMurtrie Godley, who had been a fervent supporter of the cluster village program and the extensive bombing campaign accompanying it, himself worried about the political ramications of crop substitution. In a secret memo to Secretary of State William Rogers, he commented, [Crop substitution] will cause the loss of livelihood, which will hurt us in an attempt to redress the losses caused by the war.143 Godley nevertheless began to target opium elds as part of a vicious bombing campaign that he directed on areas controlled by the Pathet Lao. These operations caused tens of thousands of civilian casualties and a mass exodus of refugees. In 1973, after lobbying by two International Voluntary

Service workers, Fred Branfman and Walter Haney, Massachusetts senator Edward Kennedy chaired a congressional committee to expose the humanitarian crisis.144 A number of refugees testied that at least fteen people had been poisoned to death by chemical herbicides and defoliants sprayed directly on their opium crops by American military aircraft. The residue from the spraying had allegedly infested local livestock, papaya plants, and vegetables, which contributed to the spread of disease.145 Ambassador Godley vehemently denied these allegations, though the adavits appeared convincing and consistent with mounting evidence surrounding the use of toxic defoliants like Agent Orange as part of the broader counterinsurgency campaign.146 By this point in the war, the local population had endured inordinately high casualty rates and massive social displacement from political violence, bombing, and the American cluster village resettlement program, which was modeled after the Strategic Hamlet prototype in South Vietnam.147 By spoiling their crops, threatening their livelihood, and causing more senseless fatalities, the opium eradication campaign served as another source of both anxiety and periland added to the ravages of the secret war.
there is no underworld stigma: the failure of prohibition

Besides contributing to human rights abuses, the drug war ultimately failed to strike a dent in the ow of heroin. One aid ocial observed that despite our campaign in Laos being among the most aggressive in the world, there is no control of aircraft movement and the narcotics enforcement machinery cannot challenge senior generals or military politicians wishing to engage in narcotics tracking. Nothing could prevent them.148 Apart from endemic corruption, the shortcomings of the counter-narcotics campaign were predicated on similar factors shaping the general failure of U.S. foreign policy, namely, its inability to win over the hearts and minds of the indigenous population. The State Department and federal enforcement agencies faced grave diculties in adapting to local circumstance and convincing local farmers that it was in their best interest to stop growing opium in a depressed wartime economy.149 Chao La, Yao chief of the opiate growing Nam Keung Province bordering Thailand, told an American reporter that what the Protestant ethic of American society sees as corrupt, others see as fair game. . . . It is hard for my people to understand why they should stop growing opium because they are told that it aects Americans thousands of miles away in a strange country.150 Godley similarly observed that there was no underworld
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stigma attached to any of the local principals or fetch and carry men who transported drugs through Luang Prabang [in Laos]. In a memo to Washington explaining the diculty of U.S. drug-control eorts, he recounted an incident, which he termed pathetic, where Laotian municipal ocers gave opium to several men they had arrested on drug charges out of fear that they would develop painful withdrawal symptoms. The police chief subsequently told him: We had to nd opium for them to smoke, otherwise, because of a strong craving for the drug they would scream, cry or raise a hue.151 These comments epitomize the deep barriers plaguing drug-control eorts in Laos, which American policymakers could do little to alter. The same was true throughout Southeast Asia. A June 1972 cid sta report concluded that the ow of drugs was so abundant and the distribution through local nationals so pervasive, that eorts to cut o the supply, even within the military compounds, are like trying to imprison the morning mist.152 In Thailand, despite State Department pressure, a joint cia-bndd intelligence report in 1972 concluded that ocials of the Royal Thai army and Customs at checkpoints along the route to Bangkok are usually bribed and protection fees prepaid by the smuggling syndicates. The Thai government has little desire or power to stop this.153 In Vietnam, the massive social dislocation bred by the war, the rural-to-urban exodus from the bombings and high protability of the black-market economy amid inationary pressures, and the inux of U.S. capital were major factors shaping the ineectiveness of Nixons programs and the pervasiveness of rampant governmental corruption.154 Despite embassy pressures, U.S. narcotic agents continued to suspect that high-ranking military personnel and jnid ocers were skimming the prots of all drug seizures, which one ops adviser evidently concluded presents a major problem in narcotics investigations.155 When asked by a New York Times reporter about whether or not he had condence in the ability of his new sta at Tansonhut airport to curb smuggling, Colonel Cao Van Khanh tellingly replied with a prompt no.156 In 1973, Ingersoll resigned as head of the bndd because of the perceived futility of existing drug-control eorts. He told a congressional committee that a cultural problem in IndoChina was involved and entire cultures are not changed overnight.157 These comments conveyed a patronizing attitude toward Southeast Asian cultures, which lay at the root of the failure of American drug-control programs, as well as a universal belief in the utility of narcotics control that was not necessarily transcending. They also display a disregard for the social circumstances of the war, fueling the durability of the black-market economy and the spread of corruption, trends that were magnied at the end

of the war as government ocials (and no less than a few of their American advisers) stashed money in overseas bank accounts in preparation for life in exile.158 From a political standpoint, the War on Drugs was considerably more successful than it was in practice. It helped to bolster the drug- and crime-ghting image of the Nixon administration and won support from the so-called forgotten Americans, who were put o by the social upheaval of the previous decade and the nations declining global status.159 In August 1971, Krogh furnished a public list of Indochinese ocials removed or shifted as a result of investigations in drug tracking, which was intended to counter allegations of governmental complicity in the international trac.160 In October 1972, Nixon gave a campaign speech providing a point-by-point rebuttal to George S. McGoverns 1972 campaign charge that the War on Drugs had become a casualty of the Vietnam War.161 Nixon frequently boasted further about the vast resources that his government was committing to halt the drug epidemic in Vietnam, and publicly claimed that the nation had turned the corner on drug abuse, rolling up victory after victory.162 Although the reality was far dierent (the DEA admitted that it was only intercepting 15 percent of all drugs entering the country),163 the American public lacked the rsthand knowledge to contradict such statements.
conclusion
Popular fears surrounding the addicted army in Vietnam played a central role in shaping the expansion of the American international drug war during the late 1960s and early 1970s. Fearful of skyrocketing military addiction rates, American policymakers initiated a sustained campaign against drugs in South Vietnam and neighboring countries, which implemented an array of methods whose scope dwarfed previous eradication eorts. These included police training, aerial surveillance and defoliation, and rehabilitation as well as urinalysis and crop substitution. One unique aspect was the skilled use of regional allies to fulll American political aims, which testied in part to the powerful diplomatic leverage that it possessed as well as the dependent character of the regimes involved. In spite of all the expended energies and resources, the American War on Drugs in Southeast Asia ultimately fell short of its stated goals primarily due to economic and cultural factors as well as geopolitical constraints. Convinced of the moral righteousness of the campaign, as in other realms of their foreign policy, American government ocials failed to account for the localized antipathy and resistance that their policies bred, including from members of their own armed forces. They were also unable
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to recognize or address the sociopolitical factors and wartime conditions fueling the high rates of both supply and demand. From an administrative perspective, practical deciencies and the exacerbation of anti-American sentiment were ultimately less important than the political value of the drug war policy in easing public anxieties over the addiction of U.S. soldiers, paving the way for Vietnamization, and improving Nixons public image. Based on political considerations and the continued fear of drug abuse in the United States, Nixons drug-control formula was later adopted by successive administrations, which institutionalized the War on Drugs as a crucial dimension of American national security policy. This was in spite of the many shortcomings, including the link to extensive human rights violations and the ironic invocation of Vietnam analogies by critics because of a continued failure to curb supply rates.164 From one quagmire to another, one could surmise. Bucknell University
notes
1. H. D. S. Greenway, The Book the cia Couldnt Put Down: A Review of the Politics of Heroin by Alfred W. McCoy Life Magazine, 20 October 1972, cia les, RDP80, 2000/05/15 (National Archives, College Park, Md.). 2. See John Steinbeck IV, The Importance of Being Stoned in Vietnam, Washingtonian Magazine, January 1968, 3338. 3. John Steinbeck IV, In Touch (New York, 1969), 77. 4. Personal interview, Dr. Roger Roman, University of Washington, School of Social Work, November 2004 (telephone), M. D. Stanton, Drugs, Vietnam, and the Vietnam Veteran: An Overview, American Journal of Drug and Alcohol Abuse (March 1976): 55770. 5. Jack Anderson, gi Drug Report Kicks up a Storm, Washington Post, 3 February 1971, B11; Gloria Emerson, gis in Vietnam Get Heroin Easily, New York Times, 25 February 1971, 39; Jack Anderson, Combat Dangers of gi Drug Abuse Told, Washington Post, 5 June 1971, D13. 6. Among sensational media pieces, see Arturo Gonzalez Jr., The Vietcongs Secret Weapon: Marijuana, Science Digest, April 1969, 1720, B. Drummond Ayres Jr., Army Is Shaken by Crisis in Morale and Discipline, New York Times, 5 September 1971, 1. 7. Stewart Alsop, Worse than My-Lai Newsweek, 24 May 1971, 108, Robert M. Smith, Senator Says gis in Song-My Smoked Marijuana Night Before Incident, New York Times, 25 March 1970, 14, My-Lai Drug Question Raised New York Times, 16 March 1970, 24. 8. See, for example, Edward Jay Epstein, Agency of Fear: Opiates and Political Power (New York, 1977); Christian Parenti, Lockdown America: Police and Prisons in an Age of Crisis (London, 1999); Dan Baum, Smoke and Mirrors: The War on Drugs and the Politics

of Failure (Boston, 1996); Musto and Korsemeyer, The Quest for Narcotic Control (New Haven, 2002); Michael Massing, The Fix (New York, 1998). 9. See, for example, David Lenson, On Drugs (Minneapolis, 1995); James A. Inciardi, The War on Drugs: Heroin, Cocaine, Crime, and Public Policy (Palo Alto, 1984; rev. ed., 1996). 10. See, for example, Craig Reinarman and Harry G. Levine, Crack in America: Demon Drugs and Social Justice (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1997); Campbell and Reeves, Cracked Coverage: Television News, the Anti-Cocaine Crusade, and the Reagan Legacy (Durham, 1994); Noam Chomsky, Drug Policy as Social Control, in Prison Nation: The Warehousing of Americas Poor, ed. Herival and Wright (New York, 2003). 11. Baum, Smoke and Mirrors, 104. 12. Richard M. Nixon, Special Message to the Congress on Drug Abuse Prevention and Control 17 June 1971, Public Papers of the President of the United States (Washington, D.C., 1971), 744, Morgan F. Murphy and Robert H. Steele, The World Heroin Problem, Report of the Special Study Mission, 92nd Cong., 1st sess., 21 May 1971 (Washington, D.C., 1971), Drug Forum, January 1972, 98. 13. See The cias Flourishing Opium Trade Ramparts, 13 June 1968, 8; Alfred W. McCoy, The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia, with Cathleen Read and Leonard P. Adams (New York, 1972); McGovern Calls War on Drugs a Casualty of the Indo-China War, 18 September 1972, Press Release, Nixon Presidential Materials, Egil Krogh Papers (National Archives, College Park, Md.), box 32, folder 3. 14. One exception to this neglect is Daniel Weimers Seeing Drugs: The American Drug War in Thailand and Burma, 19701975 (Ph.D diss., Kent State University, 2003), which looks at these programs through the lens of modernization theory. 15. See John C. McWilliams, The Protectors: Harry J. Anslinger and the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, 19301962 (Delaware, 1990); Walker and Kinder, Stable Force in a Storm: Harry J. Anslinger and United States Foreign Narcotics Policy, 19301962 Journal of American History (March 1986): 90827. 16. Records of the Presidential Advisory Commission on Narcotics and Drug Abuse, box 1, JFK Presidential Library, Boston; Richard B. Craig, La Campana Permanente: Mexicos Anti-Drug Campaign in the 1970s, Journal of Inter-American Studies and World Aairs (May 1978): 10731. 17. The Narcotics Trac in Indo-China, American Embassy Saigon to Department of State, Washington D.C., 18 May 1954, Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs (National Archive, College Park, Md.), box 164, folder Vietnam, 195367 (hereafter bndd); Wayland Speer to Harry J. Anslinger Red China and the Narcotic Trac Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, 7 July 1954. bndd, box 164, File Vietnam, VietnamDope Smuggling Mission Contract Plane, Administrative Inquiry, International Cooperation Administration, Oce of Personal Security and Integrity, Inspectors Division, 18 October 1956. On Vietminh involvement, see Christopher E. Goscha, Thailand and the Southeast Asian Networks of the Vietnamese Revolution, 18851954 (London, 1999), 2014. 18. Steinbeck, In Touch, 132; Monthly Drug Abuse Report, Edward G. Lurie, Colonel, MPC, Deputy Provost Marshall, January 1972, Records of the U.S. Army Vietnam, Drug Programs & Plans Branch (National Archives, College Park, Md.) box 4, folder 12 (hereafter DP&P), Marijuana in Vietnam, Major Anthony Pietropinto, Chief Mental Hygiene Consultation Services, Cam Ranh Bay, Vietnam, Drug Abuse, DP&P, box 4.
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19. Fresh Disclosures on Drugs and gis U.S. News & World Report, 6 April 1970, 32; Hearings on Drug Abuse in the Armed Forces, Part 21 (Washington, D.C., 1971), 278. 20. Allan H. Fischer, Preliminary Findings from the 1971 Department of Defense Survey of Drug Use, Human Resources Research Organization, Alexandria, Virginia (March 1972), 41. 21. Wilfred B. Postel, Marijuana Use in Vietnam: A Preliminary Report, USARV Medical Bulletin (SeptemberOctober 1968): 57. 22. Washington Post, 9 August 1970, A3. 23. Interview with Pvt. Marvin Matthiak, Vietnam Archives, Douglas Pike Virtual Vietnam Archive, Texas Tech University, Oral History Project, www.vietnam.ttu.edu. 24. Roger A. Roman, Survey of Marijuana Use: Prisoners Conned in the USARV Installation Stockade as of July 1, 1967, In Pike and Goldstein, History of Drug Use in the Military, Drug Use in America: Problem in Perspective (Washington, D.C., 1973), Memo for the Assistant Secretary of Defense (Manpower), 9 November 1967; DP&P (National Archives, College Park, Md.), box 4, folder 12. 25. Roman and Sapol,Marijuana in Vietnam: A Survey of Use among Army Enlisted Men in the Two Southern Corp, International Journal of the Addictions (May 1970): 1516; Personal interview, Roger Roman, University of Washington School of Social Work, 1 November 2004 (telephone); Drug AbuseGame Without Winners: A Basic Handbook for Commanders, Armed Forces Information Services, 1968, Department of Defense, Report on Drug Abuse in the Republic of Vietnam, Records of the U.S. Army Vietnam, DP&P, box 4, folder 12. 26. Alleged Drug Abuse in the Armed Services, Hearings Before the Special Senate Subcommittee, 91st Cong., 2nd sess., 1277; Personal interview, Dr. Roger R. Roman, University of Washington School of Social Work, 1 November 2004 (telephone). 27. Casper et al., Marijuana in Vietnam, USARV Medical Bulletin, Pamphlet 40 (1968): 6072; Captain Wilfred B. Postel, Marijuana Use in Vietnam: A Preliminary Report, USARV Medical Bulletin (SeptemberOctober, 1968): 5659; Black, Owens, and Wol, Patterns of Drug Use: A Study of 5,482 Subjects, American Journal of Psychiatry (October 1970); M. Duncan Stanton, Drugs, Vietnam, and the Vietnam Veteran: An Overview, American Journal of Drug and Alcohol Abuse (March 1976): 55770; Allen H. Fischer, Analyses of Selected Drug-Related Topics: Findings from Interviews at 4 Armed Service Locations (Alexandria, Va., 1972). 28. Norman Zinberg, Heroin Use in Vietnam and the United States, Archives of General Psychiatry (April 1975): 95596; Department of Defense, Results of Urinalysis Screening, Drug Abuse in the Military, Hearings Before the Subcommittee on Drug Abuse in the Military of the Armed Services, U.S. Senate, 92nd Cong., 2nd sess. (Washington, D.C., 1972). 29. Personal interview, Dr. Jerome H. Jae, 25 February 2005 (telephone). 30. See Michael Flamm, Law and Order: Street Crime, Civil Unrest, and the Crisis of Liberalism in the 1960s (New York, 2005); Stewart Alsop, The Smell of Death, Newsweek, 1 February 1971, 76. 31. The New Public Enemy No. 1, Time, 28 June 1971, 20; see also The gis Other Enemy: Heroin, Newsweek, 24 May 1971, 26; The Heroin Plague: What Can Be Done? Newsweek, 5 July 1971, 27. 32. See Paul Starr, The Discarded Army: Veterans After Vietnam (New York, 1973), 23; Eric T. Dean, Shook Over Hell: Post-Traumatic Stress, Vietnam, and the Civil War (Cambridge, Mass., 1997), 12; Wilbur J. Scott, The Politics of Readjustment: Vietnam Veterans

Since the War (New York, 1993); Louis Harris et al., Myths and Realities: A Study of Attitudes Towards Vietnam Era Veterans (Washington, D.C., 1980); Burkett and Whitley, Stolen Valor: How the Vietnam Generation Was Robbed of Its Heroes and Its History (Dallas, 1998), 72. On rising crime patterns, see Charles E. Silberman, Criminal Violence, Criminal Justice (New York, 1978), 81; Michael Flamm,Politics and Pragmatism: The Nixon Administration, White House Studies (Spring 2007). 33. See Jerry Lee Lembcke, The Spitting Image: Myth, Memory, and the Legacy of Vietnam (New York, 1998), 114; H. Bruce Franklin, The Antiwar Movement We Are Supposed to Forget, in Vietnam and Other American Fantasies (Amherst, 2000). For an emblematic article-quoting counter-demonstrators who question their credibility at an antiwar rally, see Veterans Discard Medals in War Protest at Capital, New York Times, 24 April 1971, 1. 34. Lee N. Robins, The Vietnam Drug User Returns (SAODAP Monograph Series) A, no. 2 (Washington, D.C., 1974); Narcotic Use in Southeast Asia and Afterwards: An Interview of 898 Returnees, Archives of General Psychiatry (August 1975); Laurie Beth Michael, An Investigation of the Substance Abuse Behavior of Men of the Vietnam Generation (Ph.D diss., Columbia University, 1980); Rohrbaugh et al., Eects of the Vietnam Experience on Subsequent Drug Use Among Servicemen, International Journal of the Addictions (September 1974): 2540; William Claiborne, gi Drug Use Figure Raised, But Few Are Still Addicted, Washington Post, 24 April 1973, A1. 35. See Barry Glassner, The Culture of Fear: Why Americans are Afraid of the Wrong Things (New York, 1999). 36. See, for example, BG Ursano, USARV to Headquarters, USARV, 26 September 1970, CIB, box 1, Instructional Lesson Plan for Drug Abusers in Vietnam; Department of the Army, USAV, 1971, Drug Abuse Game Without Winners: A Basic Handbook for Commanders, Department of Defense Information Service (Washington, D.C., 1968); Why We Smoke Marijuana: An Interview with Frank Bartimo Family, 18 March 1970. 37. The World Drug Trac and Its Impact on U.S. Security, Hearings Before the Select Subcommittee, Committee of the Judiciary, U.S. Senate, 2nd sess., Part 4, South East Asia (Washington, D.C., 1972), 12526, pt. 1, 58; Daniel Weimer, Drugs as Disease: Heroin, Metaphors, and Identity in Nixons Drug War, Janus Head (June 2003): 273; Interview with Lewis W. Walt, cbs News, 14 September 1972 (transcript). 38. L.W. Walt to Marcus J. Gordon, Sr. Regional Representative, usaid, 1 July 1966, bndd, box 164, File Vietnam. See also Lewis W. Walt, Strange War, Strange Strategy: A Generals Report on Vietnam, foreword by Lyndon B. Johnson (New York, 1970). 39. Marcus J. Gordon, Regional Director, usaid Danang to Lt. General Lewis W. Walt, Commanding General III Marine Amphibious Force, Danang, RVN, 9 July 1966, ibid. 40. Narcotics in Vietnam, 15 November 1967, bndd, box 164, File Vietnam. 41. Wilbert Penberthy, District Supervisor, No. 16, to Commissioner of Narcotics, 30 November 1967, bndd, box 164, File Vietnam, 19531967; Marijuana, John D. Enright, Assistant Commissioner, Department of Customs to Mr. Lawrence Fleishman, Assistant Commissioner, Investigations, Bureau of Customs, 21 March 1967, bndd, box 164, File Vietnam. Proposed Phases of Implementation of Plan to Expand the Narcotic Law Enforcement Eort of the National Police, Major Frank W. McBee, CORDS to John F. Manopoli, 26 November 1968, Oce of Public Safety, Vietnam Division, Narcotics, box 110, folder 3 (hereafter ops).
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42. Business of Marijuana, Lt. Van Ngu, Head Police Oce, Quang Tri to National Police Service, Quang Tri, 6 October 1968, ops, Vietnam Division, box 110, folder 5; Jim Hougan, Spooks: The Haunting of AmericaThe Private Use of Secret Agents (New York, 1979), 12338; Douglas Valentine, The Phoenix Program (New York, 1991); Michael McLintock, Instruments of Statecraft: U.S. Guerrilla Warfare, Counter-Insurgency, and Counter-Terrorism, 19401990 (New York, 1992), 129. 43. Historical NarrativePSD Support of Narcotic Control, Michael G. McCann, Director ops, Bureau to John Maopoli, Chief Vietnam Division, ops, Oce of the Assistant Chief of Sta, CORDS, Records of the U.S. Army Vietnam, Personnel Policy Division, Drug Abuse Programs, box 286, folder 2 (DAP). 44. Drugs in Vietnam USAV Provost Marshall Brieng, DP&P, box 4, folder 2. 45. Captain Howard McLendon, Illegal or Improper Use of Drugs, Department of the Army, 1 June 1968, DP&P, box 9, folder 6; Major General John H. Cushman, Letter to be read to each serviceman in the Delta, 28 June 1971, USAV, Criminal Investigation Division, box 5, folder 1 (hereafter CIB); J. T. Wolkerstorfer, General, Troops Put the Rap on Drugs, Pacic Stars and Stripes, 6 August 1971, 7. 46. Letter Hanna Browning to Jerry Pettis, 27 January 1972, Records of the U.S. Army Vietnam, H.Q. USAV, Military Personnel Policy Division, Morale and Welfare Branch (National Archives, College Park, Md.), box 6, folder 1 (hereafter M&W). 47. On the centrality of chemical defoliation to American counter-insurgency strategy, see Noam Chomsky, For Reasons of State (New York, 1970), 159; Dean Rusk, Memo to the PresidentDefoliation Operations in Vietnam, 24 November 1961, Papers of President Kennedy, National Security Files, Meetings and Memoranda (John F. Kennedy Presidential Library, Boston), box 332, folderDefoliation Operations in Vietnam. 48. Narcotic Destruction Report, Public Safety Division, 6 July 1971, ops, Vietnam Division, Narcotic Control, box 112, folder Marijuana Destruction Program; Chief of Sta Memo, No. 70-104, 30 August 1970, box 110; B. Drummond Ayres, Helicopters and Television in Suppression Drive, New York Times, 21 September 1969, 1; Ayres, Marijuana Is Part of the Scene Among gis in Vietnam New York Times, 29 March 1970, 34. 49. Marijuana Suppression, macv, ops, Vietnam Division, Narcotics, box 111, folder Intelligence; Frank Walton, PSD/CORDS to H. W. Groom, PSD/CORDS, Re: Monthly Narcotic Bureau Report, August 1969, 5 September 1969. 50. Richard Boyle, U.S. Escalates War against Pot-Heads, The Overseas Weekly, Pacic Edition, Saturday 30 August 1969, 78, ops, Vietnam Division, Narcotics, box 110, folder Marijuana Suppression. 51. Cancellation of Rewards for Marijuana Plant Destruction Program, B. Harry Wynn to Leigh M. Brilliant 9 June 1971, Minutes of CORDS/PS Narcotics Meeting, 25 September 1972, ops, Vietnam Division, Narcotics Control, box 112, folderMarijuana Destruction Program. 52. On Vanns ideas about accomplishing this task, see John Paul Vann, Harnessing the Revolution in South Vietnam, 10 September 1965, Francis Fitzgerald Papers, Mugar Library, Boston University Special Archives, box 9, folderVann, and Neil Sheehans brilliant biography, A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam (New York, 1986). 53. Fact SheetMarijuana Suppression, John Paul Vann, Deputy for CORDS, May 1969, Records of the Agency for International Development, Oce of Public Safety, Vietnam Division, Narcotics Control (National Archives, College Park, Md.), box 110,

folder 7; Howard Groom to Michael McCann, Assessment of Hoa-Hao Problem, 17 July 1969, Army Drug Abuse ProgramA Future Model? Drug Abuse Council, 1973 Edward Jay Epstein Archive, Mugar Library, Boston University, box 12, folder 3 (hereafter EJE) 54. Fact Sheet for Brigadier General Timmenberg in Response to Some Sp.9 Heroin Detector Dogs July 1971, Records of the U.S. Forces in Southeast Asia, Criminal Investigations Branch (CIB), box 3; Louis Catalanotto, Customs MPs Combat Drugs, Army Reporter, 6 December 1971, 12, Dog Thwarts Drug Trac, Army Reporter, 1 June 1970. 55. Public Safety Directorate, macv, 30 June 1972, CIB, box 1. Annual Narcotic Statistical Comparison, Records of the U.S. Forces in Southeast Asia, CIB, box 2, folder 4. 56. Alvin M. Shuster, gi Heroin Addiction is Epidemic in Vietnam, New York Times, 16 May 1971, A1. 57. Amnesty Plan Saves Another, Army Reporter, 15 March 1971, 6; Samuel A. Simon, gi Addicts: The Catch in Amnesty, The Nation, 4 October 1971; Daniel Southerland, How Army Helps gis Quit Drugs, Christian Science Monitor, 18 June 1971, 7; Dr. Richard S. Wilbur, The Battle Against Drug Dependency Within the Military, Journal of Drug Issues (Winter 1974), 1131; Correspondence Col. Bill Hart and Dr. Tom Robbins, Walter Reed Medical Museum Archives, audiotape 102-5, 4 July 1971. 58. Memo for Michael McCann, attn. Howard Groom, Special Telephone Line, 9 September 1971, ops, Vietnam, Narcotics Control, box 111, folder 3. 59. SP/4, Mike St. John, Drug Booklet Distribution, U.S. Army Vietnam, 9-67-71, Information Oce, Headquarters, U.S. Army Vietnam, APO San Francisco 96375, DP&P, box 4, folder 3; Donald Louria, Nightmare Drugs (New York, 1966), 49; Gabriel Nahas, MarihuanaDeceptive Weed (New York, 1973). 60. Vung Tau Recreational Center for Troop Morale, Jack J. Wagsta, Major General USA Commanding, to Lieutenant William J. McCarey, 29 July 1971, Records of the U.S. Army Vietnam, Military Personnel, Policy Division, M&W, box 13, folder 1. 61. Sammy Davis Visit as Part of Drug Education Field Team for macv, John K. Singlaub to General William McCarey, Deputy Commanding General, 12 April 1972, U.S. Forces in Southeast Asia, DP&P, box 2, folder 11 (Personal Paper les); Memo, John Ingersoll, bndd to Jerey Donfeld, Re: Sammy Davis Jr. Vietnam Trip, 31 August 1971, EJE, box 14, folder 7. 62. See Jerry Rubin, An Emergency Letter to my Brothers and Sisters in the Movement, New York Review, 13 February 1969, 27; Terry Anderson, The CounterCulture, in The Movement and the Sixties (New York, 1995), 241. 63. See Robert Dallek, Partners in Power: Nixon and Kissinger (New York, 2007); Richard M. Nixon, What Has Happened to America? Readers Digest (October 1967), 50; Robert Mason, Richard Nixon and the Quest for a New Majority (Chapel Hill, 2004); Kevin Phillips, The Emerging Republican Majority (New York, 1970). 64. Richard M. Nixon, Republican National Committee, 17 September 1968, LEN 13-3, Sta Papers on Drug Abuse, box 12, folder 4 (National Archives, College Park, Md.). 65. See Kate Doyle, Operation Intercept: The Perils of Unilateralism, National Security Archive, http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv. 66. Department of Inter-American Aairs, telegram, 14 November 1969, Country Analysis and Strategy Paper, Department of State, National Archive, Record Group 59, NSA, Operation intercept, document 18; The Mexican Connection, Hearings Before the Subcommittee to Investigate Juvenile Delinquency, U.S. Senate, 95th Cong., 10 February 1978 (Washington, D.C., 1978); Narcotics Control in Mexico: Environmental Analysis of
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Eects, Bureau of International Narcotics Matters, April 1979 (Washington, D.C., 1979); Ricardo Vargas Meza, Democracy, Human Rights, and Militarism in the War on Drugs in Latin America (Washington, D.C., 1997). 67. John C. McWilliams, Through the Past Darkly: The Politics and Policies of Americas Drug Wars, in William O. Walker III, ed., Drug Control Policy: Essays in Historical and Comparative Perspective (University Park, Pa., 1992), 22; Epstein, Agency of Fear: Opiates and Political Power (New York, 1977). 68. Personal interview, Dr. Jerome H. Jae, 24 February 2005 (telephone). 69. The Drug Problem in the Armed Forces, Henry A. Kissinger Memo to Secretary of Defense, 1 June 1970, The White House, Nixon Presidential Materials, National Security Files (National Archives, College Park, Md.), box 807 (hereafter NSF). 70. See Egil Krogh, Heroin Politics and Policy under Nixon, in One Hundred Years of Heroin, ed. David Musto (New Haven, 1999), 39. 71. RNs Identication with the Drug War, Egil Krogh to Jeb Magruder, Nixon Presidential Materials, Egil Krogh Papers, box 3, folder 1 (hereafter EKP). 72. Vietnam, Egil Krogh to John Ehrlichman, 15 September 1970, EKP, box 3. 73. Morgan F. Murphy and Robert H. Steele, The World Heroin Problem, Report of the Special Study Mission, 92nd Cong., 1st sess., 27 May 1971 (Washington, D.C., 1971); Shrinking the Drug Specter Time, 9 August 1971, 21. 74. Alfred W. McCoy, The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia, with Nina Adams and Leonard P. Reed (New York, 1972), See also Felix Belair, House Team Asks Army to Cure Addicts, New York Times, 28 May 1971, 4; Murphy, When 30,000 gis Are Using Heroin, How Can You Fight a War? An Interview with Representative Morgan Murphy, May 21, 1971 Drug Forum, October 1971. 75. Edmund Muskie, A War Against Heroin, Speech Before the New Hampshire Bar Association, Bretton Woods, 18 June 1971, Edmund Muskie Papers, Lewiston, Me., box 1789, folder 3. Also McGovern Calls War on Drugs a Casualty of the Indo-China War, 18 September 1972, Nixon Presidential Materials, EKP, box 32, folder 3. 76. Congressional Record, 26 July 1972, cia Files (National Archives, College, Park, Md.), approved for release, 2001/03/04. 77. Statement of Hon. Seymour Halpern, in Military Drug Abuse, Hearings Before the Subcommittee on Alcoholism and Narcotics of the Committee on Labor and Public Welfare, U.S. Senate, 1st sess., 9 June 1971 (Washington, D.C., 1971), 531. 78. Memorandum for Bud Krogh to Donald Rumsfeld, The White House, 25 May 1971, Nixon Presidential Materials, EKP (National Archives), box 32, folder 6. 79. Alfred W. McCoy, The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia (New York, 1972); Narcotics: McCoys Testimony Before the Senate, G. McMurtrie Godley, American Embassy Vientiane to Secretary of State, 5 June 1972, ops, Laos, box 113, folder 3; Harpers to Show cia Proofs of New Book on Asian Drug Trac, Publishers Weekly, 31 July 1972; Lawrence R. Houston, General Counsel, cia, to Mr. B. Brooke Thomas, 5 July 1972, cia declassied documents (National Archives, College Park, Md.), RDP80-0160, 2001/03/04. 80. Don Schanche, Mister Pop (New York, 1970), 120; John Prados, Safe for Democracy: The Secret Wars of the cia (Chicago, 2006), 359; Douglas Blaufarb, The Counter-Insurgency Era: U.S. Doctrine and Performance (New York, 1977), 151. 81. The Agencys Brief and The Author Responds, Harpers, October 1972, 11619; U.S. Senate, Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with respect to Intelligence Activities, 94th Cong., 2nd sess., Foreign and Military Intelligence, Book 1:

Final Report (Washington, D.C., 1974), 57, 22931; William E. Colby, Letters to the EditorThe cia Responds, Washington Star, 5 July 1972. 82. Meeting August 3, 1971, Request for Executive Session Appearance of the Attorney General Re Alleged Involvement of South Vietnamese Ocials in Drug Trac, EKP, box 32, folder 2. 83. Drugs Egil Krogh to John Ehrlichman, 14 May 1971, EKP, box 32, folder 2. 84. SummaryNarcotics Meeting, State Dining Room, 3 June 1971, EKP, box 11, folder 3. 85. Meeting with President and Top Civilian Leaders, Memorandum Richard M. Nixon to Melvin R. Laird, 3 June 1971, EKP, box 32, folderDrug Abuse. 86. Stuart R. Carlin, Mass Urinalysis Started, Army Reporter, 25 October 1971, 3; 10,000 gis Checked Daily for Heroin Addiction in Viet, Pacic Stars and Stripes, 3 June 1972, 7; Drug Abuse Fighter: Jerome Herbert Jae, New York Times, 18 June 1971, 22. 87. Veterans Administration, Drug and Alcohol Dependency Program, FY 1973, House of Representatives, July 1973 (Washington, D.C., 1973); Drug Use in America Problem in Perspective, II, Social Responses to Drug Use (Washington, D.C., 1973), Hearings Before the Special Subcommittee on Drug Abuse in the Armed Services on H.R 9503, House of Representatives, Committee on Armed Services, 12 October 1971 (Washington, D.C., 1971), 7543. 88. gi Drug Abuse in Europe, Memo Jerey Donfeld to Jerome H. Jae, 14 December 1972, EJE, box 9, folder 9; Urinalysis, Detoxication and Discharge, Dr. Jae to Richard S. Wilbur, 18 January 1973, ibid.; gi Drug Abuse in Europe, Richard Harkness to Egil Krogh, 5 December 1972, ibid. 89. Drug Abuse Program: A Future Model? New York, 1973, EJE, box 16, folder 2. 90. Dr. Richard S. Wilbur, Press Conference, A Follow Up of Vietnam Drug Users, Department of Defense, Department of the Army, Office of the Deputy Chief of Staff for Operations, U.S. Army audiovisual center (National Archives, College Park, Md.). 91. Gerald Nicosia, Home to War: A History of the Vietnam Veterans Movement (New York: Crown Press, 2001), 179. Robert Reinhold, Armys Drug Testing Program Stirs Sharp Dispute, New York Times, 2 June 1972, 1. 92. Paul Starr, Drug (Mis)Treatment for gis, Washington Post, 16 July 1972, B1; Clinton R. Sanders, Dopers Wonderland: Functional Drug Use Among Soldiers in Vietnam, Journal of Drug Issues (October 1973): 74. 93. Bob Spencer and Carol Spencer, Abusing Drug Abusers: The Military Solution, Civil Liberties, November 1971; Correspondence Col. Bill Hart and Dr. Tom Robbins, Walter Reed Medical Museum Archives, audiotape 1025, 14 July 1971; Colonel John R. Castellot, Chief Drug Operations Center, USA Health Services Group, Vietnam, Theory and Practice in Drug Treatment from Chaplain Vantage Point Department of the Army, U.S. Army Drug Treatment Center Long Binh, 25 May 1972, DP&P, box 1, folder 4; Personal interview, William Leary, 24 January 2004 (Revere, Mass.). 94. In Starr, Drug (Mis)Treatment for gis, Washington Post, 16 July 1972, B1. 95. See, for example, Stanford Garellek to President Richard M. Nixon, Drug Letters, Memo for Bob Haldeman, Chuck Colson, and Egil Krogh, 18 June 1971, Nixon Presidential Materials, Oce Files, box 12, folderJuly 1971.
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96. See Tom Wells, The War Within: Americas Battle Over Vietnam (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1994); Larry Berman, No Peace, No Honor: Nixon, Kissinger and Betrayal in Vietnam (New York, 2001); Seymour Hersh, The Price of Power: Kissinger in the Nixon White House (New York, 1983). On Nixons murderous record in Laos and Cambodia, see in particular William Shawcross, Sideshow: Nixon, Kissinger and the Destruction of Cambodia (New York, 1979); Ben Kiernan, How Pol Pot Came to Power (New Haven, 1985); Alfred W. McCoy, ed. Laos: War and Revolution (New York); Noam Chomsky, At War with Asia (New York, 1970). 97. Joan-Ho, Nixon Reconsidered (New York, 1994); Melvin Small, The Presidency of Richard Nixon (Lawrence, Kans., 1999); Abuse of Power: The New Nixon Tapes, ed. Stanley Kutler (New York, 1997). 98. See, for example, David Greenberg, Nixons Shadow: The History of an Image (New York, 2003); Allen J. Matusow, The Unraveling of America: A History of Liberalism in the 1960s (New York, 1984); Donald T. Critchlow, Phyllis Schlay and Grassroots Conservatism (Princeton, 2005); Godfrey Hodgson, The World Turned Right Side Up: A History of the Conservative Ascendancy in America (Boston, 1996). 99. See Jerey Kimball, Nixons Vietnam War (Lawrence, Kans., 2001); Henry Kissinger, Vietnam Negotiations, Foreign Aairs (January 1969); Jeremi Suri, Power and Protest: Global Revolution and the Rise of Dtente (Cambridge, Mass., 2003), 242. 100. For an excellent analysis of the political function of the anticorruption campaign, see Chomsky and Herman, Saigons Corruption Crisis: The Search for an Honest Quisling, Ramparts, December 1975, 23. 101. For exposs on Thieus abysmal human rights record, see Jack Anderson,Prisoners Tortured in South Vietnamese Jails, Washington Post, 31 August 1970, B11; Don Luce and Holmes Brown, Hostages of War: Saigons Political Prisoners, Indochina Mobile Education Project, 1973, 14. 102. Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.) quoted in Stanley Millet, ed., South Vietnam: U.S. Communist Confrontation in Southeast Asia, vol. 3, 1968; Foreign Relations of the United States, 196976, vol. 6, Vietnam, January 1969 to July 1970 (Washington, D.C., 2006), 32. See also William J. Lederer, The Anguished American (London, 1968). 103. Foreign Assistance Act of 1971 (Washington, D.C., 1971), 296. 104. Drugs and Smuggling, Department of State Telegram; Saigon (National Archives, College Park, Md.), U.S. Special Forces in Southeast Asia, box 11, folder 3. 105. Summary of Vietnam CablesDrugs, May 1971, Department of State Telegram, 070626, U.S. Special Forces in Southeast Asia (National Archives, College Park, Md.), box 11, folder 3; Memo for Bud Krogh, Indo-Chinese Ocials Removed or Shifted as a Result of Investigations in Drug Tracking, 3 August EKP, box 30, folder 5; GVN Reorganizes Attack on Drugs and Smuggling, American Embassy Saigon to Department of State, 8 July 1971, DP&P, box 286, folder 2. 106. McCoy, The Politics of Heroin: cia Complicity in the Global Narcotics Trade (New York, 2004); Father Tran Huu Thanh, Indictment #1: The Peoples Front Against Corruption for National Salvation and for Building Peace, Letter from Vietnam, Hue, September 1974, Douglas Pike Archive, Texas Tech University Vietnam Center, www.vietnam.ttu.edu. 107. Quoted in Vietnam and Korea: Human Rights and U.S. Assistance, A Study Mission Report of the Committee on Foreign Aairs, U.S. House of Representatives (Washington, D.C., 1975), 78; see also James Hamilton Paterson, The Greedy War (New York, 1971), 155.

108. Historical NarrativePSD Support of Narcotic Control, Michael G. McCann, Director ops, Bureau to John Maopoli, Chief Vietnam Division, ops, Oce of the Assistant Chief of Sta, CORDS, DP&P, box 286, folder 2. 109. Nelson Gross, Bilateral and Multilateral Eorts to Intensify Drug Abuse Control Programs, Department of State Bulletin, 3 April 1972 (DEA Library, International Control on Narcotics folder, 196175); Peter Osnos, U.S. Presses Saigon into War on Smuggling, Los Angeles Times, 27 May 1971, 2. 110. Antinarcotics Campaign in Viet-Nam, Department of State Bulletin, 3 April 1972, 508 (DEA Library, Pentagon City, Va.), International Narcotics Control folder; jnid Raids, macv, Vietnam, box 12, folder 1; Joint Narcotics Investigation Detachment, macv Directive 190-4, Vietnam folder (National Archives, College Park, Md.), box 12, folder 1; Alfred W. McCoy, A Question of Torture: cia Interrogation from the Cold War to the War on Terror (New York, 2006). 111. jnid Conscations, July 1, 1971 to May 31, 1972, HQUSARV, DP&P, box 36, folder 7; Search and DestroyThe War on Drugs, Time, 4 September 1972; Nelson Gross, Bilateral and Multilateral Eorts to Intensify Drug Abuse Control Programs, Department of State Bulletin, 3 April 1972 (DEA Library, International Control on Narcotics folder, 196175). 112. Peter Jay, Saigon Launches Narcotics Drive, Washington Post, 1 May 1971, A10 Translation Catalog SheetRVN Anti-Drug Suppression Campaign at Bien Hoa, 6 May 1971, DP&P, box 6, folder 2. 113. Decree Law No. 008/TT/SLU on the Eradication of Toxic Narcotic and Dangerous Substances, promulgated by President Thieu: The U.S. Heroin Problem and South East Asia: Report of a Sta Survey Team of the Committee on Foreign Aairs, House of Representatives, December 1972 (Washington, D.C., 1972), 85; Thieu Orders Death for Drug Pushers, Washington Post, 14 August 1972, A17. 114. Department of State Telegram, American embassy, Saigon, to E.A. Drug Coordinator, 13 October 1972, ops, Vietnam, Narcotics Control, box 112, folder 8. 115. Anti-Drug Advertisements, Army Criminal Investigation Files, DP&P, box 7, folder 1. 116. Interview with Nguyen Cao Ky, The Listener, 24 November 1977. See also Ky, How We Lost the Vietnam War (New York, 1976). 117. See Daniel Fineman, A Special Relationship: The United States and Military Governments in Thailand, 19471958 (Honolulu, 1997); Surachert Bamrungsuk, U.S. Foreign Policy and Thai Military Rule, 19471977 (Bangkok, 1988). 118. Proposals for Increased Anti-Narcotics Assistance to Thailand, Johnson F. Munroe, Deputy Director, O.P.S. to Nelson Gross, 27 September 1971, ops, Thailand, Narcotics Control, box 212, folder 1; Byron Engle, director public safety to Philip Batson, assistant director public safety, 17 March 1972, ibid. 119. aid Inuence in Law Enforcement Community, Memo Egil Krogh to Byron Engle, Jack Caueld, Gordon Liddy, EKP, box 3, folder 2. 120. Roger Ernst, Director U.S. Operations, Mission Bangkok Thailand, to Joe W. Johnson, Audit Manager, Bangkok Oce, Far-East Bureau, 3 October 1973, ops, Thailand, Narcotics Control, box 212, folder 1; Lobe, U.S. National Security Policy and Aid to the Thailand Police (Denver, 1977); U.S. Police Assistance for the Third World (Ph.D diss., University of Michigan, 1975).
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121. Southeast Asian Narcotics, Hearings Before the Select Committee on Narcotics Abuse and Control, House of Representatives, 95th Cong., 1st sess., 1213 July 1977 (Washington, D.C., 1978), 23. On the human rights abuses of the Thai regime under Thanom Kittikachorn, see Chomsky and Herman, The Political Economy of Human Rights: The Washington Connection and Third World Fascism (Boston, 1979), 22225. 122. Pramuan Case Linked to Foreign Aid Bill, Department of State Telegram, American embassy Bangkok, to Secretary of State, 15 November 1972, American Agency for International Development, ops, box 212, folder 3; Summaries of Recent Thai language Press, American Embassy Bangkok, to Secretary of State, Washington, D.C., 5 October 1972, ibid. 123. The U.S. Heroin Problem in Southeast Asia, 41; The Task Forces of Thailand and Laos, Drug Enforcement Magazine (Fall 1973): 17; Talking Points for Thailand Narcotics Action Control to Interagency Working Group on Narcotics Control from Harriet Isom, EA Drug Control Coordinator, 1973, ops, Thailand, Narcotics, box 212, folder 1; American Embassy Bangkok to Secretary of State, February 1973 Narcotics: Police Training Advisors, ibid. 124. See Clyde R. McAvoy, The Diplomatic War on Heroin, Journal of Drug Issues (Spring 1977): 16379; Capture of Lo-Hsing Han, American Embassy Rangoon to Department of State, 25 July 1973, General Records of the Department of State, 197073, Thailand (National Archives, College Park, Md.), box 3056, folder 1; Narcotics, Department of State Bulletin, 3 April 1972, 507 (DEA Library, Pentagon City, Va.), International Control folder. 125. William P. Delaney, On Capturing an Opium King: The Politics of Lo Hsing Hans Arrest, in Drugs and Politics, ed. Paul E. Rock (New Brunswick, N.J., 1977), 67; Alfred W. McCoy, Requiem for a Drug Lord: State and Commodity in the Career of Khun Sa, in States and Illegal Practices, ed. Josiah McHeyman (New York, 1999). 126. Cabinet Committee on International Narcotics Control, World Opium Survey (Washington, D.C: September 1972), Congressional Record, 6 May 1975, International Control folder, 196175 (DEA Library, Pentagon City, Va.); Proposals for Increased AntiNarcotics Assistance in Thailand, Johnson F. Munroe, Deputy Director, ops to Nelson Gross, 27 September 1971, ops, Thailand, Narcotics Control, box 212, folder 1. On broader economic development programs, see Robert Packenham, Liberal America and the Third World: Political Development Ideas in Foreign Aid (Princeton, 1973). 127. Ronald D. Renard, Opium Reduction in Thailand, 19702000: A 30-Year Journey (Bangkok, 2001), 7582. 128. See, for example, Opium Production and Movement in Southeast Asia: Intelligence Report, Directorate of Intelligence, cia Files (National Archives, College Park, Md.), approved for release, 2001/09/04; Daniel Fineman, A Special Relationship, 133. Fineman likens this failed reinvasion to an Asian Bay of Pigs. 129. NarcoticsKriangsak Proposal, American embassy Bangkok to Secretary of State, 5 December 1971, Research and Development Thailand (National Archives, College Park, Md.) box 3099 (hereafter R&D Thailand); The Narcotics Situation in Southeast Asia: Report of a Special Study Mission by Lester Wol, JanuaryFebruary 1973 (Washington, D.C., 1973), 5; Jack Anderson, Thai Opium Bonre Mostly Fodder, Washington Post, 31 July 1972, B11. 130. On these events, in which Kittakchorns security arm massacred student protestors, see E. Thadeus Flood, The United States and the Military Coup in Thailand: A Background

Study, Indochina Resource Center, 1976; Ben Anderson, Withdrawal Symptoms: Social and Cultural Aspects of the October 6 Coup, Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars (October 1977). 131. Wayland Speer to Harry J. Anslinger, Opium Smuggling in Vietnam January 14, 1957, bndd, box 164, File Vietnam, Roger Warner, Backre: The cias Secret War in Laos and its Link to the Vietnam War (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995), 254. See also David Corn, Blond Ghost: Ted Shackley and the cias Crusades (New York, 1994), 14850; Tom Robbins, Air America: The Story of the cias Airlines (New York, 1979); Dr. Charles Weldon, Tragedy in Paradise: A Country Doctor at War in Laos (Bangkok, 1999), 18485. 132. See, for example, Sheldon B. Vance, International Narcotics Control: A High Priority Program, Department of State Bulletin, 27 January 1975 (DEA Library: International Control folder, 196175). 133. American Embassy Vientiane to Secretary of State, Washington D.C., 28 November 1971, Research and Development, Laos (National Archives, College Park, Md.), box 3075, folder 6 (hereafter R&D); Narcotic Law, American Embassy Vientiane to Secretary of State, Washington, D.C., 27 August 1971, Records of the Department of State, 197073, Laos (National Archives, College Park, Md.), box 3075. 134. Joseph Westermeyer, Poppies, Pipes and People: Opium and Its Uses in Laos (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1982), 18; Use of Alcohol and Opium by the Meo of Laos, American Journal of Psychiatry (June 1971): 101923; Thomas Szasz, Ceremonial Chemistry: The Ritual Persecution of Drug Addicts and Pushers (Syracuse, 1974), 48. 135. John Everingham, The Golden Triangle Trade, Asia Magazine, 23 March 1975, 28; The Task Forces of Thailand and Laos, Drug Enforcement Magazine (Fall 1973), 17. 136. The U.S. Heroin Problem in Southeast Asia, Report of a Sta Survey Team of the Committee on Foreign Aairs, House of Representatives, December 1972 (Washington, D.C., 1972), 28. 137. Narcotics Control, American Embassy Vientiane to Secretary of State, Washington, D.C. 1972, R&D, Laos, box 3075; Report on Completion of Phase 2, Laos Narcotics Control, box 1, folder 3; U.S. Leads Global War on Drug Abuse, Current Foreign Policy, Department of State Medical Services, DEA Library, International Control, 196175 folder. 138. Joseph Westermeyer, The Pro-Heroin Eects of Anti-Opium Laws in Asia, Archives of General Psychiatry (September 1976): 1136. 139. Oce of the Auditor General, Narcotics ControlLaos, box 1, folder 3; Joseph Westermeyer, Methadone: An Orientation to Its Medical Uses, Public Health Division, usaid Laos, March 1972. 140. Methadone, American Embassy Vientiane to Secretary of State, April 1972, R&D, Laos, box 3075; Meeting with Dr. Jae, Narcotics White House SAODAP, Narcotics ControlLaos, box 1, folder 3; Shipment of Methadone HCL for Laos Rehabilitation Program, American embassy Vientiane to Secretary of State, Washington, D.C., June 1972, ibid. 141. Arnold Abrams, Lao Spies Help War on Opium, Miami Herald, 18 April 1972, cia Files, RDP80-01601 (National Archives, College Park, Md.), approved for release, 2001/03/04; Michael Parks, cia Reported Shifting Attention in Laos from Communists to Opium, Baltimore Sun, 13 March 1972, cia Files, RDP80-01601 (National Archives, College Park, Md.), 2001/03/04.
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142. Opium Substitution eorts in LaosPhu Pha Dang ExperimentationExtension A Approach, American embassy Vientiane to aid, 1 April 1974, Pha Dang agricultural station Vientiane A128unclassied Narcotics Control, Laos, box 1, folder 3. 143. Politics and Narcotics Control in Laos, American Embassy Vientiane to Secretary of State, 11 October, R&D, Laos, box 3076, folder 2. 144. Edward Kennedy to John Hannah, 13 July 1973, Narcotics Control Laos, box 1, folder 3. On the general devastation of the air war, see Fred Branfman, Voices from the Plain of Jars: Life Under an Air War (New York, 1972); Letter to Henry Kissinger, Walter Haney, Fa Ngun School, June 1972, Nixon Presidential Materials, National Security Council Files, HAK, Henry A. Kissinger (National Archives, College Park, Md.), box 13, folder 4. 145. Trip ReportLaos, February 710, 1973, Memo from Ogden Williams to Robert Nooter, Narcotics ControlLaos, box 1, folder 3. 146. See, for example, Paul Cecil, Herbicidal Warfare (New York, 1986); Neilands et al., Harvest of Death: Chemical Warfare in Vietnam and Cambodia (New York, 1972); Barry Weisberg, ed., Ecocide in Indo-China: The Ecology of War (San Francisco, 1970). 147. McCoy, Laos: War and Revolution (New York, 1970), 125. 148. Harold Levin to Charles Mann, Director usaid, Chief Lao Desk, 24 June 1971, Narcotics Control, Laos, box 1, folder 5; Discussion with Minister of Justice on Narcotics, American Embassy Vientiane to Secretary of State, Washington, D.C., May 1974, Narcotics Control, Laos, box 1, folder 4. 149. John Everingham, The Golden Triangle Trade, Asia Magazine, 23 March 1975. 150. Fox Buttereld, Laos Opium Country Resisting Drug Law, New York Times, 16 October 1972, 12; John Finlator, The Drugged Nation: A Narcs Story (New York, 1973), 127. 151. Anti-Narcotics Legislation/Permits for Cultivation, G. McMurtrie Godley to Honorable William Sullivan, Deputy Assistant Secretary, Department of State, 9 June 1971 RDS, Laos, box 3075. 152. Drug Abuse Program: A Future Model? (New York, 1973) EJE, box 16, folder 2, 32. 153. Post-War Southeast AsiaA Search for Neutrality and Independence, Report by Senator Mike Mansfield, Committee on Foreign Relations (Washington, D.C., 1976). 154. On social dislocation and the black market economy in particular, see, for example, Frances Fitzgerald, Fire in the Lake: The Vietnamese and the Americans in Vietnam (Boston, 1972); Civilian Casualties and Refugee Problems in South Vietnam, Committee on the Judiciary, 9 May 1968 (Washington, D.C., 1968). 155. Army Criminal Investigation Division Report, June 1972, CIB, box 1, folder 3. See also Jack Anderson, Saigon Dope Dealers Riding High, Washington Post, 30 December 1972, B11. 156. Henry Kamm, Drive Fails to Halt Drug Sale in Vietnam, New York Times, 30 August 1971, 1; Alleged Corrupt Practices of Nguyen Huy Thong, Chief, Narcotics Bureau, Frank Walton to Charles Vopat, 31 March 1971, ops, Narcotic Control, Vietnam, box 112, folder 4. 157. Quoted in Mitchell Satchell, U.S. Drug Reports Dier, Washington Star-News, 16 August 1972, 3. 158. Frank Snepp, Decent Interval (New York, 1977), 14; John Prados, The Hidden History of the Vietnam War (Chicago, 1995), 68; Valentine, The Phoenix Program, 409.

159. See Michael Flamm, Law and Order: Street Crime, Civil Unrest, and the Crisis of Liberalism in the 1960s (New York, 2005). 160. Memorandum for Egil Krogh, Indo-Chinese Ocials Removed or Shifted as a Result of Investigations in Drug Tracking, 3 August 1971, EKP, box 32, folder 2. See also Meeting August 3, 1971, Request for Executive Session Appearance of the Attorney General Re Alleged Involvement of South Vietnamese Ocials in Drug Trac, ibid. 161. Senator McGovern and Drugs, 31 July1972, EKP, box 32, folder 2. 162. Robert B. Semple Jr., Nixon Says He Kept Vow to Check Rise in Crime, New York Times, 16 October 1972, 1; John Finlator, The Drugged Nation: A Narcs Story (New York, 1973), 321. 163. See as an emblematic article, U.S. Losing Smuggler War, Chicago Daily News, 7 June 1975, in Federal Drug Enforcement, Hearings Before the Permanent Subcommittee of Investigations of the Committee on Government Operations, U.S. Senate, 94th Cong., 1st sess., June 1975 (Washington, D.C., 1975), 111; John Finlator, The Drugged Nation: A Narcs Story (New York, 1973), 321; ODonnell et al., Young Men and Drugs: A Nationwide Survey (Washington, D.C., 1974), 59. 164. See, for example, Ted G. Carpenter, Bad Neighbor Policy: Washingtons Futile War on Drugs in Latin America (Washington, D.C., 2004); Christina J. Johns, Power, Ideology, and the War on Drugs: Nothing Succeeds Like Failure (New York, 1992); Douglas Stokes, Americas Other War: Terrorizing Colombia, foreword by Noam Chomsky (London, 2005).

KUSMAROV - From Counter-Insurgency To Narco-Insurgency

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From Counter-Insurgency to Narco-Insurgency: Vietnam and the International War on Drugs

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