An OpEd by Paul Rosenberg, Senior Editor of Random Length News, published in Al Jazeera, that looks, first, at the U.S's. and other government's rejections of the Global Commission report and then goes into some of the political history of the origins of the "war against drugs."
The global drug war and the Nixon connection - Opinion - Al Jazeera English: "As historian Alfred McCoy explained in his 1972 classic, The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade - later revised and expanded into The Politics of Heroin - the global hard drug trade was virtually destroyed by World War II. The CIA helped revive it, beginning by striking a deal with the Corsican Mafia to secure their assistance in driving communist union organisers off of the docks of Marseilles, laying the foundations for the 'French Connection'.
There followed a long, far-reaching pattern of cooperation between US covert operations and high-level drug-dealing organisations, who helped make the shadier covert operations self-financing, insulating them from unwanted oversight. Thus, Southeast Asia became a major global drug-supplier as an off-shoot of the Vietnam War, especially its more covert aspects. Similarly, the CIA-supported Afghanistan conflict not only helped create al-Qaeda, it rocketed the local poppy crop to the top of the global charts. In addition, a wide range of covert actions across Latin America helped fuel the cocaine explosion of the 1970s and 1980s, including the innovation of crack cocaine.
But this was only one side of the story. The other side begins with Richard Nixon, who ran for president on 'law and order' in 1968."
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