International Journal of Drug Policy 12 (2001) 107–112

Opium past, opioid futures: imperialism, insurgency andpacification in a global commodity market

Roger Lewis *

Abstract

This is a lightly edited version of Roger Lewis’ notes for the speech he gave at the 11th International Conferenceon the Reduction of Drug Related Harm in Jersey in March 2000, shortly before his death. In this paper Roger Lewisargues for the need to take global and historical view of both drug markets and ways that nations try to control them.Drug markets have become globalised, influenced by changes in communication, finance, commodity and labourmarkets. Drug control activities are used to defend global strategic interests, amd foreign policy imperatives usuallytake precendence over drug policy. © 2001 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.

www.elsevier.com/locate/drugpo

Introduction

The properties of the opium poppy havebeen known to mankind for thousands ofyears and have been recorded in literature,art and archaeological investigation. On theTurkish Anatolian plain, for instance, theplant was integrated into all facets of villagelife as food, fuel, fodder, medicine and as aninvestment. The more recent history of theopium poppy and its derivatives has, in con-trast, been somewhat ambivalent. Today,there exists a global market in licit and illicitproducts and financial services of staggeringproportions, while the rapidity of change and

the speed of communications mean that be-haviours and products travel at a remarkablepace. International drug markets have under-gone major changes over the past 30 years,reflecting the broader globalization of finan-cial, commodity and labour markets that hasevolved since the 1960s. What were oncerelatively straightforward diagrams of opiumand heroin transit routes have become com-plex, interlinking networks.

The transfer of technologies and be-haviours from urban, metropolitan centres tothe rural and developing world has trans-formed the supply, demand and modes ofconsumption of psychoactive drugs. In par-ticular, the erosion of culturally-integratedconsumption of plant products within agrar-ian societies — frequently caught up in atug-of-war between traffickers and law en-forcers — has disrupted some of the least

* Corresponding author. D. Olszewski. Epidemiology De-partment, European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and DrugAddiction, Rua de Cruz de Santa Apolonia 23–25, 1149 045Lisbon, Portugal.

0955-3959/01/$ - see front matter © 2001 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.

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R. Lewis / International Journal of Drug Policy 12 (2001) 107–112108

harmful and most beneficial forms of druguse. In a broader context, it has also becomeevident that counter-narcotics argumentshave been used to defend global strategicinterests and to maintain intelligence bureau-cracies whose survival appeared threatenedby the post-Cold War ‘‘peace dividend’’.

Imperialism

Drug markets cannot be viewed withoutthe context of history or of contemporaryeconomic, social and political developments.In the 19th century, opium was used to forcethe self-sufficient Chinese economy to openup to Western markets and subsequently, tosubsidise the British and French imperial ad-ministrations on the Indian sub-continentand in Indo–China. Opium monopolies werealso a major source of revenue to nationaltreasuries: in the post-Second World Warperiod, opium profits were used to fund theFrench war effort against the Viet Minhthrough Operation X. Later, the drug becamea covert instrument of US policy to retain theloyalty of key Vietnamese allies in Saigon. InMyanmar (Burma) and Afghanistan, opiumhas been used to finance insurgency againstthe government and occupying forces,respectively.

Although nation states have increasinglyidentified drug use as a threat to health andsecurity —either of their own volition orunder great power pressure — the preserva-tion of cultural, economic or military hege-mony almost always takes precedence overdrug policy. Drugs become a surrogate jus-tification and a camouflage for other politicaland strategic agendas involving military ex-pansion or operations in sovereign states. Inthe 1980s, conflict in El Salvador, Panamaand Nicaragua resulted in the turning of ablind eye to, if not outright complicity with,

narcotics trafficking, while between 1984 and1986 the Contras/Sandinista war turnedCosta Rica into a hub for arms and drugssmuggling. The continuing ambiguity of USpolicy in South America is a typical exampleof the way in which counter-narcotics ideol-ogy can be used to defend global strategicinterests.

The precedence of foreign policy impera-tives over drug policy is most evident in thetacit or active involvement of national intelli-gence services in drug trafficking. In SouthAmerica, counter-narcotics activity has oftenbeen translated into simple counter-insur-gency. (On one occasion in the late 1970s, asenior Argentinian official welcomed drugprevention monies with the statement thatcounter-narcotics and counter-insurgencywere one and the same thing. He was subse-quently exposed as a major cocaine traffickerwith close ties to the Argentinian and Boli-vian military.) Istanbul is a major transit andrefining point. There are one million ethnicIranians resident in Istanbul, many of themmembers or relatives of a generation thatmoved into exile following the fall of theShah in 1979. Former employees of the Ira-nian intelligence service, Savak, rapidly be-came involved in trafficking, an activity thatthey had conducted in London before theShah fell. Western intelligence services mayhave been less interested in the profits, buthave certainly benefited from intelligence andinput from known suppliers. Since the break-up of the Soviet Union, decommissioned se-curity operatives have sought and foundfreelance employment in trafficking organisa-tions. In the Balkans, the Middle East and onthe southern rim of the former Soviet Union,the involvement of professional criminal andpolitical lobbies and of intelligence personnelin the drugs trade business has become al-most standard practice.

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The ‘‘peace dividend’’ expected after theend of the Cold War not only obliged formersecurity officials in the former East bloc toseek alternative employment, but also had animpact on intelligence organisations in theWest. Britain’s overseas intelligence arm, theSecret Intelligence Service (SIS), or MI6, hadset up a counter-narcotics directorate as earlyas 1988, an interest which was followed up inthe early 1990s by the domestic intelligencearm, the Security Service (MI5). The ‘‘fetishi-sation’’ of drugs by media and politiciansinto a national security issue enabled intelli-gence services to expand into the field inorder to justify budgets that had come undercritical scrutiny. While the objectives of lawenforcement agencies are relatively clear, theprimary interests of a secret service are in-evitably veiled, while the protocols and con-straints relating to the actions of police andcustoms services are likewise less evident inthe world of intelligence. Such delicate ques-tions do not arise in parts of the developingworld, where military and secret service in-volvement in drug control, repression andeven in drug trafficking itself, tends to beaxiomatic.

Insurgency

The geopolitical dimensions of drugtrafficking cannot be overestimated. Illicitopium and coca cultivation, as well as in-country refining, thrive best in climates ofinstability and insurrection. Yet, the use ofopium and heroin as a political instrumentcan be a high-risk strategy with negative‘‘blow-back’’ consequences. For instance,heroin was widely consumed by US troops inVietnam. After military withdrawal in themid-1970s, the surplus merchandise wasshipped to Western Europe and the USA,creating an upsurge in availability of South-

east-Asian heroin as entrepreneurs and ethnicdiasporas in the Far East sought new cus-tomers in other regions. An equally signifi-cant watershed was the development andrapid expansion of heroin production inTurkey, Iran and, most importantly,Afghanistan and Pakistan. By the late 1970s,Southwest-Asian production was in full flowand was to determine the nature of heroinmarkets in most of Europe for the next 20years.

The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1980resulted in a rapid expansion of opium andheroin production to raise funds for the pur-chase of weapons for resistance movementsand to make profits for insurgents and war-lords. As with the Contras in Nicaragua,Western policymakers and their allies tendedto ignore the evidence in Afghanistan of theflorid traffic in products of all kinds. The USand the British supplied Stinger and Blow-pipe missiles to the Afghan insurgents, withPakistani intelligence officials interposingthemselves as intermediaries to filter deliver-ies. On the ground, Russian troops under-went experiences with heroin and opium thatresembled those of their American counter-parts in Vietnam 10–15 years previously. Theextensive and still-growing markets forheroin in Europe and in Western and CentralAsia are to a considerable degree a legacy ofthat period.

Social and political destabilisation in Rus-sia and in Central and Eastern Europeproved advantageous to entrepreneurs in il-licit goods and services as economic liberali-sation facilitated, rather than hindered, theavailability of heroin locally and in WesternEurope. At times of profound social andpolitical change, distinctions between legaland illegal activity in a privatised world be-come unclear and the magnitude of fundsunder criminal control in some countriesposes a direct threat to the state and to the

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community. Such problems are aggravatedby those of armed conflict or civil war, whencriminalized paramilitary and intelligence or-ganisations invest in, sponsor or directly en-ter the illicit drugs trade. Myanmar,Afghanistan, Pakistan’s Northwest FrontierProvinces and Kurdistan are enduring exam-ples of the interplay between insurrection,repression, warlordism, opium cultivation,heroin refining and the drugs trade in South-east and Southwest Asia. The Government ofMyanmar co-opted opium warlords as auxil-iaries and has itself become enmeshed in thenarcotics business. Afghanistan is a majorsource of heroin in Europe as insurgentgroups that formerly trafficked in order topurchase weapons now focus on high-profitincome generation. As happened with thecoca business in South America, ‘‘revolution-ary taxes’’ may be imposed by non-traffickinginsurgent forces. Frequently, the profits gen-erated through the business supplant the pur-suit of political power as the primaryobjective of the group.

Pacification

The American analyst Peter Andreas hasdescribed how economic experts who studylicit markets seem to inhabit a differentplanet from those examining illicit markets.He illustrates the inherent contradiction inpursuing the globalisation of free marketeconomies while simultaneously requiringtighter controls on product flow (drugs) andon migrant labour. (The Economist magazinehas been more consistent in its liberalism inthat it has endorsed the legalisation of druguse for a number of years).

There are ongoing debates over the advan-tages and disadvantages of the drugs tradefor developing economies: wealth is in-creased, but it is not widely or evenly dis-

tributed and is often invested offshore orspent on luxury goods, real estate or mar-ginal services. The national debt may be re-duced, but this gain is frequentlyaccompanied by civic corruption and militarydespotism. Investment by traffickers in peas-ant cultivation leads to modernised technol-ogy but to increasingly intimidatory andoppressive labour relations. The business pro-vides employment, generates income and mayindirectly boost licit employment, but thegreatest profits accrue outside the producernation, with an estimated 400% increase inmarket value from field to end user, a multi-plier which relates to the perceived level ofrisk in the delivery process.

Black activists in the USA have oftenpointed out that heroin and methadone areideally suited for the pacification of marginal-ized, angry populations. While it seems im-probable that a deliberate policy to achievesuch ends has ever been implemented, a formof pacification may have occurred. If onebalances personal choice and non-victimisa-tion on one side of the scale, it could beargued on the other that the prevention ofdisease and the creation of a population with-out the motivation to assert itself, steal orhustle serves the interests of the privilegedclass more than the interests of those in re-ceipt of drugs. The refusal of heroin-usingsurvivors to become ‘‘methadonians’’ is an-other facet of this discourse. The crack epi-demic in Los Angeles of the 1980s has beenattributed by some analysts to a supply con-trolled by individuals who had been used asintelligence assets to fund Contra rebels, us-ing the same networks, contacts and facilitiesas other Contra activities. It has also beenpresented as a plot to subvert the black com-munity, rather than as the creation of ahighly-profitable consumer market. It may berecalled here that Newsday’s mid-1970s in-vestigation of heroin trafficking showed that

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a large number of individuals connected tothe Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba subse-quently acquired records for drug trafficking(Newsday, 1975).

Conclusion

In terms of the great powers, Britain’s pi-ratical role in the nineteenth century opiumtrade was supplanted by US dominance of anunbalanced and litigious discourse on illicitdrug control in the 20th century. The disloca-tion between the stated opposition of nationstates to the drug business and their actualbehaviour has always been marked, with de-nunciations tending to be partial at best. Thecertification process by which the US judgedand ‘certified’ efforts made by producercountries in Asia and Latin America to erad-icate drug production and trafficking, andawarded trade concessions or imposed tradesanctions accordingly-were applied selec-tively. Where foreign policy interests tookprecedence, the documentation officiallystated that de-certification need not takeplace, even when the conditions fitted thecriteria. There is a certain naivety in an ap-proach which states that, if organised crimeand drug trafficking in one country have beenidentified as a threat to the national securityof another, the international communityshould respond as if the priority of all na-tions should be US national security as theUS chooses to define it. There is palpableresentment in Europe that the world debateon drugs and the position adopted by differ-ent nations on drug issues is assumed byWashington to be a matter for US definition,especially when that nation’s own control ofdrug consumption and gun crime has provedsuch a failure.

In a shrinking world and given the ease ofaccess to advanced technologies, the old as-

sumptions about cultivation, production,transport and distribution no longer apply.Colombian cocaine and heroin supply is acase in point. Castells (1998) in End of Mil-lennium argues that the networking of power-ful criminal organisations which shareactivities on a global scale is a new phe-nomenon. A myriad of regional and localcriminal groupings have come together indiversified networks which permeateboundaries and link up multiple types ofactivity. Drug trafficking may be the mostimportant segment of what is effectively aworld-wide industry, in which managementand production are based in low-risk areaswhere there is relative control over the insti-tutional environment, while the most affluentmarkets are targeted for sales. Privileged ac-cess to production sources and resultant mar-ket domination in certain regions byparticular ethnic diasporas and nationalgroups encourage the use of racist stereotypesas easy shorthand to characterise complexcriminal and business relations. Strategic al-liances to cooperate rather than to competeover territory are created through sub-con-tracting and joint ventures. Despite this, theimportance of cultural identity should not beunderestimated. The global networks of na-tional, regional and ethnically-based criminalorganisations enable them to survive andprosper by escaping the controls of a givenstate in difficult times. Indeed, drug trafficprovides such lucrative levels of business thatlegalisation might conceivably be the greatestsingle threat to the prosperity of organisedcrime.

The contradictions inherent in the way thatnation states oppose, yet take advantage of,international markets in opiates and otherdrugs in some way mirrors the ambivalenceof many opiate users. They want to stopusing, but at the same time they do not wantto stop. They feel successful because they

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have admitted their dependence, yet feel afailure because to do so acknowledges that thedrug has defeated them. It seems unlikely thatthe market for opiates and opioids will changeas long as it is the drug itself that at least tem-porarily, appears to resolve the contradiction.

References

Castells M. The information age: economy, societyand culture. In: The End of Millennium, vol. 3.Oxford: Blackwell, 1998.

Newsday. The Heroin Trail. New York: Newsday,1975.

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