University of Virginia Library

Air America Flies For Dope Business

America's chief contract is with
the American Central Intelligence
Agency.

Air America brings Brahmin
Bostonians and wealthy Wall
Streeters who are the China Lobby
together with some of the most
powerful men in Nationalist China's
financial history.

One of its "opium army" in
Burma; another has been as a major
carrier of opium itself. Air America
flies through all of the Laotian and
Vietnamese opium pick-up points,
for aside from the private
"butterfly fleet" and various
military transports, Air America is
the "official" airline.

What has taken place in
Indochina is more than a flurry of
corruption among select dramatis
personae in America's great Asian
Drama.

The fact that Meo tribesmen
have been nearly wiped out, that
the Corsican Mafia's Air Opium has
been supplanted by the CIA's Air
America, that Nationalist Chinese
soldiers operate as narcotics bandits,
that such architects of U.S.
democracy for the East as the Nhus
and Vice President Ky have been
dope runners - these are only the
bizarre cameo roles in a larger
tragedy that involves nothing less
than the uprooting of what had
been the opium trade for decades -
through the traditional lotus-land
of the Middle East into Western
Europe - and the substitution of
another network, whose shape is
parallel to that of the U.S. presence
in Southeast Asia.

The ecology of narcotics has
been disrupted and remade to
coincide with the structure of
America's Asia strategy - the
stealthy conquest of a continent to
serve the interests of the likes of
the China Lobby.

The shift in the international
opium traffic is also a metaphor for
what has happened in Southeast
Asia itself. As the U.S. has settled in
there, its presence radiating a
nimbus of genocide and corruption,
armadas of airplanes have come to
smash the land and lives of a
helpless people; mercenary armies
have been trained by the U.S.; and
boundaries reflecting the U.S.
desires have been established, along
with houses of commerce and petty
criminality in the American image.

One of the upshots has been
that the opium trade has been
systematized, given U.S.
technological expertise and a
shipping and transportation
network as pervasive as the U.S.
presence itself. The piratical
Corsican transporters have been
replaced by pragmatic technocrats
carrying out their jobs with deadly
accuracy.

It is a fitting trade-off, one that
characterizes the moral quality of
the U.S. involvement. This ugly war
keeps coming home, each
manifestation more terrifying than
the last; home to the streets of the
teeming urban ghettos and the
lonely suburban isthmus where in
the last year the number of teenage
heroin addicts has taken a quantum
leap forward.

Bringing The War On Home

Heroin has now become the
newest affliction of affluent
America - of mothers in Westport,
Connecticut, who only wanted to
die when they traced track-marks
on their daughters' elegant arms; or
of fathers in Cicero, Illinois
speechless in outrage when their
conscripted sons came back from
the war bringing home a
bloodstained needle as their only
lasting souvenir.