From Nazi soldiers on meth
to the Taliban funding jihad through selling heroin,
the history of drugs and the history of warfare
have been deeply intertwined for centuries.
Yet this relationship between drugs and war
has almost never been properly examined...
until now.
I’m JS Rafaeli.
I’ve spent years writing about drugs—
why people take them,
and why our governments chose to declare war on them.
At VICE, we make a lot of films about drugs,
but in this show, I get to dig a bit deeper.
I get to talk to fellow expert drug nerds
about their research
into the crazy world of mind-altering substances.
[NEWS ON DRUGS]
A one-liner would be: drugs made war...
and war made drugs.
Peter Andreas is a writer and political scientist.
In his new book,
he looks at the relationship between war and six key drugs:
amphetamine, cocaine, alcohol, tobacco,
caffeine, and opium.
Peter, thank you so much for joining us.
Great to be here.
There are drugs which are illegal,
which we’re constantly told are very dangerous,
but armies are dishing them out to their own soldiers
to get them to fight harder.
Let’s talk about that for a minute.
One of the most important relationships between drugs and war
is the actual use of drugs by combatants,
by those who do the work of war.
It’s very stressful, anxiety-ridden work,
so it’s no surprise.
I mean, I take caffeine for my job,
but soldiering is a much more difficult and stressful job.
So no surprise that throughout the centuries,
they’ve used various psychoactive substances,
often actually pushed by states themselves.
You know, this ranges from
getting tobacco and alcohol rations in earlier eras—
no longer as fashionable to do that with soldiers—
to now getting prescribed medications that--
Essentially one way to look at it is in Vietnam,
soldiers self-medicated.
US soldiers self-medicated with heroin and marijuana and so on.
But now there’s actually much more access to prescription medications
doled out by the government itself.
So people shouldn’t underestimate the scale of this.
I mean, when one looks back to, say, the German army during World War II
and just how hopped up on methamphetamine they were.
So one way to look at it is it’s a war on sleep, right?
And if you can keep your soldiers energized, motivated,
less needing of rest, less needing of sleep,
you have an advantage.
The blitzkrieg itself was
a core dimension of it was lightning strike was what it was,
and it happened to be speed.
So we look at importance of logistics and fuel and food for an army,
but I think we also need to look at
the role of psychoactive substances as well.
And likewise, it wasn’t just the Germans.
The Japanese gave their soldiers,
especially the kamikaze pilots,
and the Americans and the Brits were all on these pep pills.
You’re right that the Japanese--
Think about a combatant that needs a pepper-upper
it would be a kamikaze pilot, right?
But it wasn’t just the soldiers either.
At home, Japan, to ramp up production,
to keep the war machine going,
the total war mobilization
required also giving workers meth to work overtime
to keep the military machinery going.
And that’s an interesting thing about the illicit market, right?
Because I’m really interested in how when drugs are made illegal,
the kind of the business of war and the business of crime
start to meet.
The trend one sees is that the more legal the drug,
the more it is served as a basis of financing of governments,
of legal regimes,
and the more criminalized the drug,
the more it's become a profit center for insurgents, militias, gangs,
terrorists and so on.
But then there’s that murky in-between,
as you point out, where for geopolitical reasons,
governments at various times overlook the drug dealing activities of allies
for immediate, very pragmatic reasons.
You know, we saw this during the Cold War in Afghanistan,
but we also saw it more recently in Afghanistan as well.
We would overlook supporting warlords and so on in Afghanistan
who were involved in drugs,
or the government in Afghanistan, the deep drug-related corruption,
we’re overlooking it for the War on Terror.
And this continues through Central America in the 80s
with the various civil wars there and how the CIA got involved.
It’s a murky story, but in some ways perfectly clear
that if your priority is fighting communism,
you might put fighting cocaine as a secondary issue.
If some of your somewhat unsavory allies
in fighting communism on the ground,
so Contra combatants in Honduras or Costa Rica,
if they’re also dabbling in the drug trade,
you're not going to prioritize that as an issue.
So sticking with this business of the business of war,
it is quite shocking how much warfare has been paid for,
throughout human history,
by governments taxing different kinds of drugs, right?
You often don’t have
direct tax revenue through national income tax back then,
so you do indirect taxes on commodities.
So tobacco becomes hugely important,
taxing tobacco, taxing tea, taxing coffee, taxing alcohol.
If you add those all up,
and I haven’t even gone to illegal drugs
because we’re talking about legitimate governments taxing stuff
to pay for their war machine.
I mean, then you, you know...
we talk about narco states today,
one could say, really, the first narco state was Britain.
In fact, it was a narco empire.
I mean, if you just think about the importance of tea and opium.
So I really wanted to get into
this narco state versus narco empire thing,
and I’m really interested in that.
I mean, one way to look at this historically is
no modern-day so-called drug cartel
has ever had the power and influence in the drug trade
as the British East India Company.
Never has, never will.
It was an extraordinary moment in history
when it just dominated the opium trade,
and it ultimately contributes to the outbreak of interstate warfare,
a hugely lopsided conflict between Britain and China.
China loses, and the floodgates open even more to opium.
But then there’s the Second Opium War,
where China basically throws in the towel and legalizes the product.
And then, interestingly enough, import substitution strategy was,
“You know what? If we can’t beat Indian supplies,
we’ll just produce the stuff locally.”
And likewise,
in another historical example of this importance of taxation warfare,
is that America basically wouldn’t exist without rum and tobacco, right?
The colonies, an important part of their economy was smuggling,
and the most important smuggled commodity
was molasses from the French West Indies.
And why am I talking about molasses when we’re talking about drugs?
Well, molasses was the crucial ingredient for rum.
And this was crucial for the triangle trade.
You export rum to West Africa for slaves,
the slaves are brought forcibly to the plantations in the Caribbean,
then you bring more molasses back.
And what was happening
is much of the molasses trade was in violation of British trade rules—
they weren’t paying taxes on the stuff.
And the British were for a long time,
not particularly interested in enforcing the rules.
But when they did crack down
and indicate a serious interest in enforcement,
the merchants not only balked,
but they actually raised arms and revolted.
You know, this sounds very provocative and controversial,
but John Adams himself, one of our founding fathers,
I’m paraphrasing here, said, after the revolutions,
“We should not blush to recognize
the importance of molasses in the American Revolution.”
I think we should make clear,
brass tacks, the most important drug
with relationship to warfare is alcohol,
and the scale of this has to be made clear.
Like, just how pissed-up were most soldiers in most battles
through most of human history?
For much of human history,
it’s OK if your soldiers are a little buzzed from alcohol.
It steels their nerves—
liquid courage is what we called it, right?
And it helped them in World War I,
[and] going back centuries.
But as war has become more complicated—
more skilled positions,
the extraordinarily expensive machinery to operate—
the tolerance for alcohol on the battlefield
has radically decreased for major modern militaries.
And I think with the cigarette,
there’s something very interesting as well,
in terms of how wars and armies have spread
the use of certain drugs and drugs in certain forms, right?
Because it was World War I which spread the cigarette.
It starts with the Romans, actually, spreading wine to the rest of Europe.
I mean, France is this famous wine-producing country,
but who brought wine to France?
It was Roman conquest.
Before that, they would have been drinking beer.
Bordeaux, the port, was founded by Romans, after all.
But then fast-forward to more recent centuries,
absolutely tobacco.
Especially in the 20th century,
the globalization of cigarette use
followed the proliferation of soldiers across the world.
Say with World War II,
you had the Coca-Cola Company
deeply ingrained with the American military,
and the American military actually building...
international Coca-Cola plants.
Yes, Coca-Cola’s so valued by US soldiers that
rather than the difficult logistics of exporting the stuff from the US
to the soldiers deployed all over the world,
[they] actually set up bottling plants at military bases.
It’s not just Coca-Cola. I mean, tea for the British, right?
The importance of the tea cars in London
during the bombing of London.
Coffee rations.
Instant coffee was an instant hit on the battlefield,
and it really didn’t take off
until it really reached the front lines and then endured.
I mean, some things that have been institutionalized now
have a war link—
so the tea break or the coffee break, and so on
[were] very much part of keeping a productive workforce
going strong for the war effort.
So now I’d like to move on to the actual war on drugs.
And this is a really interesting
bleed over the military into civilian life.
And I think that's a really important process to talk about.
What’s important about the war on drugs
and why it fits in the story
is the war on drugs went from being war as metaphor,
say, Nixon declaring a war on drugs,
to actually deploying troops to fight drugs,
which frankly, Nixon didn’t send in the Marines to fight drugs.
It was George Bush senior who invaded Panama in December of 89
to depose Noriega on drug trafficking charges.
And the war against drugs has become literal
in the sense that a country such as Mexico,
there’s been more drug-related deaths in Mexico since 2006
than there have been in Afghanistan and Iraq combined.
Yet people who study war,
Mexico’s typically not on their radar screen
as a sort of major war zone.
And I think even within the United States itself...
could you describe the process by which civilian policing
and military engagement has sort of bled into each other
and police have started to come to almost resemble military forces?
Yeah, I’m glad you brought that up
because there is a domestic dimension to this.
I mean, actual deployment of US troops to fight drugs
is prohibited domestically.
You can’t send troops to Providence or Chicago or whatnot
to go after drug dealers.
That’s not allowed.
But what is allowed is the proliferation of, say, SWAT teams,
basically militarized special police units
that increasingly resemble military police.
You can’t really explain why so many police forces around the country
have their own SWAT teams if you take out drugs.
So there’s been essentially a...
militarization of policing domestically
and civilianization of soldiering.
So let’s talk for a minute about the war on drugs
and the relationship between insurgency warfare
and, say, the cocaine trade in South and Central America.
Yeah, this is a clear example where the war on drugs...
is so militarized that it overlaps and blurs with counterinsurgencies.
It’s no surprise that a government like Colombia
is going to basically use the tools of the drug war
to fight its counterinsurgency campaign.
The politics of this internationally, though,
are that the US is perfectly willing to give Colombia
lots of anti-drug money.
Plan Colombia, really, you know, extraordinarily expensive operation.
I think it was the largest US military aid operation
outside of the Middle East.
Plan Colombia, around 2000.
But the Colombians basically used it
more to fight insurgents than to fight drugs.
So the war on drugs and the war on insurgents
became inescapably intertwined.
But the Colombian government’s priority
was clearly fighting the guerrillas, not the drugs.
Basically the insurgency is largely tamed,
but Colombia remains the world’s largest exporter of cocaine,
so fighting drugs arguably took a backseat to fighting guerrillas.
And policymakers in the US,
to a significant extent, were willing to turn a blind eye to this,
especially after 9/11
because after that, suddenly the insurgents in Colombia,
which had been operating for decades,
were considered part of the war on terror.
We’re taking up this theme of the war on drugs
and the war on terror.
We’ve just seen American military catastrophe in Afghanistan.
And looking back over 20 years of America’s engagement there,
well, more 40 years,
one can’t escape the role of the opium market
and the illegal heroin trade, right?
Really, the important move was the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.
And during the 80s, desperate Afghan farmers
increasingly turned to opium production.
And after the Soviets leave,
the Western powers, especially the US,
essentially abandons the country.
Afghanistan becomes the world's largest producer of opium.
The Taliban’s a major beneficiary of that
as they take power in the 1990s.
And interestingly, the US then invades Afghanistan,
and the story of the post-invasion years
is Afghanistan production surges to record levels,
with arguably all sides profiting from this business.
And now fast-forward to today, the economy is in total shambles,
foreign aid’s been obviously cut off,
sanctions are imposed, predictably, on the new Taliban regime,
and guess what?
No doubt that the opium economy
and the illicit economy in Afghanistan in general
are going to become a huge source of survival for Afghan.
OK. What's the future of drugs in warfare?
I don’t have a crystal ball,
and I’m reluctant to make predictions,
but one prediction I can pretty safely make
is that this drugs and war relationship is alive and well
and will remain so.
Drugs and war have gone hand in hand for a long time,
so in the absence of a war-free world,
we’re not going to have a drug-free world, right?
The last thing I'll say,
and I don’t really discuss it in the book
but I mention at the very end,
is war itself has drug-like qualities
in terms of the adrenaline rush that comes from war.
There’s lots of memoirs, war memoirs and recollections
that describe the rush of war in strikingly drug-like terms.
I don’t know if you remember the last scene
in the movie
where he comes back from Iraq,
and he’s bored to death strolling around the grocery store,
and he re-enlists.
Yeah, yeah. It’s like the opening of
Or in fact, all of