The Imperial History of Narcotics


[Note: Below is a brief excerpt from a section of my upcoming essay that has yet to be published.]

After the fall of Kabul in 1992, but some time before the Taliban came to power, the reactionary tribal chiefs had taken over the Afghan countryside and ordered farmers to begin planting opium poppy, which had been outlawed by the Taraki government. Prior to that, the Pakistani ISI set up hundreds of heroin laboratories at the behest of the CIA so that by 1981, the Pakistani-Afghan border became the largest producer of heroin in the world. It is then apparent that by putting an end to the cultivation of opium poppy, in addition to using the country’s resources to modernize and uplift its own population, the independent nationalist government of the PDPA (People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan) was seen as a threat to U.S. interests that needed to be eliminated [1]. After all, it was during the 1970’s that drug trafficking  served as the CIA’s primary source of funding for paramilitary forces against anti-imperialist governments and liberation movements in the Global South, in addition to protecting U.S. assets abroad. Also, the CIA’s international drug trafficking ties go as far back as 1949, which is the year when Washington’s long war on the Korean Peninsula began [2].

The rationale for the PDPA in campaigning to eradicate the opium poppy harvest was not only for practical health reasons, but also because of the role played by narcotics in the history of colonialism in Asia. Historically, cartel drug lords enabled imperialist nations, served bourgeois interests, and used cheap exploitative slave labour. Oftentimes, the peasants who toiled in these poppy fields would themselves become addicted to heroin in addition to being, quite literally, worked to death [3]. Cartels are understood to be monopolistic alliances in which partners agree on the conditions of sale and terms of payment and divide the markets amongst themselves by fixing the prices and the quantity of goods to be produced. Now, concerning the role of cartels in ‘late-stage capitalism’, Lenin wrote [4]:
Monopolist capitalist associations, cartels, syndicates and trusts first divided the home market among themselves and obtained more or less complete possession of the industry of their own country. But under capitalism the home market is inevitably bound up with the foreign market. Capitalism long ago created a world market. As the export of capital increased, and as the foreign and colonial connections and “spheres of influence” of the big monopolist associations expanded in all ways, things “naturally” gravitated towards an international agreement among these associations, and towards the formation of international cartels. 
This is a new stage of world concentration of capital and production, incomparably higher than the preceding stages.
International cartels, especially drug cartels, are symptoms of how capital has expanded globally and has adapted to create a global wealth divide based on the territorial division of the world, the scramble for colonies, and “the struggle for spheres of influence.” More specifically, international cartels serve as stewards for the imperialist nations in the plundering of the oppressed or colonized nations. Hence the mass campaigns to help end addictions and to crack down on drug traffickers which was not only advocated in Afghanistan under the PDPA, but by Revolutionary China in 1949 [5] and by other anti-imperialist movements as well. Of course, the opium traffickers (and their organized crime associates) in Afghanistan saw the campaign against opium poppy cultivation, among other progressive reforms, as an affront; this made them ideal recruits for the Mujahideen.

_________________

NOTES:

1. Michael Parenti, “Afghanistan, Another Untold Story”, Michael Parenti Political Archives, December, 2008, updated in 2009. http://www.michaelparenti.org/afghanistan%20story%20untold.html 


3. Caleb Maupin, "Drugs, Duterte & The Nature of Imperialism", New Eastern Outlook, May 26, 2016. https://journal-neo.org/2016/05/26/drugs-duterte-the-nature-of-imperialism/ 

4. Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, "Division of the World Among Capitalist Associations," Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, 1916. https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1916/imp-hsc/ch05.htm 

5. C. Kistler, "How the Chinese Revolution ended Drug Addiction," Redspark, March 12, 2017. http://www.redspark.nu/en/imperialist-states/how-the-chinese-revolution-ended-drug-addiction/

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