University of Virginia Library

Clandestine Activities

The ironies that have accompanied the war
in Vietnam since its onset are more poignant
than before. At the very moment that public
officials are wringing their hands over the
heroin problem, Washington's own Cold War
crusade, replete with clandestine activities that
would seem far-fetched even in a spy novel,
continues to play a major role in a process that
has already rerouted the opium traffic from the
Middle East to Southeast Asia and is every day
opening new channels for its shipment to the
U.S.

At the same time the government starts
crash programs to rehabilitate drug users among
its young people, the young soldiers it is
sending to Vietnam are getting hooked and
dying of overdoses at the rate of one a day.

While the President is declaring war on
narcotics and on crime in the streets, he is
widening the war in Laos, whose principal
product is opium and which has now become
the funnel for nearly half the world's supply of
the narcotic, for which the U.S. is the chief
consumer.

There would have been a bloodthirsty logic
behind the expansion of the war into Laos if
the thrust had been to seize supply enters of
opium the communists were hoarding up to
spread like a deadly virus into the free world.

But the communists did not control the
opium there: processing and distribution were
already in the hands of the free world.

Who are the principals of this new opium
war?

The ubiquitous CIA, whose role in getting
the U.S. into Vietnam is well known but whose
pivotal position in the opium trade is not; and a
rogue's gallery of organizations and people —
from an opium army subsidized by the
Nationalist Chinese to such familiar names as
Madame Nhu and Vice President Nguyen Cao
Ky — who are the creations of U.S. policy in
that part of the world.