CIA Com­plic­ity in the Global Drug Trade
by Alfred W. McCoy
2003, Lawrence Hill Books
ISBN 1556524838
Illus­trated, 734 pages.

From Pub­lish­ers Weekly
Nearly 20 years ago, McCoy wrote The Pol­i­tics of Heroin in South­east Asia , which stirred up con­sid­er­able con­tro­versy, alleg­ing that the CIA was inti­mately involved in the Viet­namese opium trade. In the cur­rent vol­ume, a sub­stan­tially updated and longer work, he argues that pk the sit­u­a­tion basi­cally hasn’t changed over the past two decades; how­ever the num­bers have got­ten big­ger. McCoy writes, “Although the drug pan­demic of the 1980s had com­plex causes, the growth in global heroin sup­ply could be traced in large part to two key aspects of U.S. pol­icy: the fail­ure of the DEA’s inter­dic­tion efforts and the CIA’s covert oper­a­tions.” He read­ily admits that the CIA’s role in the heroin trade was an “inad­ver­tent” byprod­uct of “its cold war tac­tics,” but he limns con­vinc­ingly the path by which the agency and its fore­bears helped Cor­si­can and Sicil­ian mob­sters reestab­lish the heroin trade after WW II and, most recently, “trans­formed south­ern Asia from a self-contained opium zone into a major sup­plier of heroin.” Scrupu­lously doc­u­mented, almost numb­ingly so at times, this is a valu­able cor­rec­tive to the mis­in­for­ma­tion being ped­dled by anti-drug zealots on both sides of the aisle. First ser­ial to the Pro­gres­sive. Copy­right 1991 Reed Busi­ness Infor­ma­tion, Inc.

THIS BOOK IS IN PRINT
Avail­able commercially.