During the Vietnam War, the CIA supported Hmong tribesmen in Laos and South Vietnamese officials who were heavily involved in the opium trade. This led to a heroin epidemic among U.S. soldiers serving in Vietnam, with estimates suggesting up to 15% were users by 1971.
The book traces this pattern across multiple decades and regions, showing how U.S. intervention consistently correlated with surges in drug production: The politics of heroin : CIA complicity in the ...
McCoy argues that CIA complicity was rarely a matter of agents directly selling drugs. Instead, it was a "coincidental complicity" where the Agency allied with local warlords, political leaders, and criminal syndicates who used the drug trade to finance their own activities. In exchange for their anti-communist loyalty, the CIA provided these allies with: During the Vietnam War, the CIA supported Hmong
Updated editions of the book detail how the CIA-backed Mujahideen in the 1980s transformed Afghanistan into the world's leading opium producer. McCoy asserts that while the U.S. provided arms to fight the Soviets, it ignored the massive heroin trade that sustained these guerrilla forces. The book traces this pattern across multiple decades
In post-WWII Europe, the CIA collaborated with the Corsican Mafia to break the power of communist-led unions on the docks of Marseille, inadvertently allowing the syndicate to establish the "French Connection" heroin pipeline to New York.