ladajo wrote:Ok, but the fundamental point is the majority of soldiers in Vietnam that were "exposed" opium was via morphine. This was administered for the most part under guidance and control of medically trained personel, with the intent to limit dosages in order to prevent addiction. Having had a number of friends and family in the hospital and also watching how careful they are when using opiates for pain control, further reinforces my observation and opinion.
You say it is pain based. Sure. Wound = Pain. Pain management technique = morphine. Morphine was not normally administered for 'mental' pain.
Simon misrepresents once again, and makes a hand wavy statement that 45% of soldiers survived exposure without addiction. I point out that this was a function of them being exposed in under rules designed to prevent addiction. Ie. "control". So it should follow that if morphine had be made completely and freely available to all soldiers, with no rules and controls, that addiction rates would have been much higher, as seen in other population groups where this is the case.
Your point doesn't make much sense in the bigger argument.
Of course I have yet to talk about his "45%" claimed exposure rate.
Let's see...3.4 million (ish) total deployed forces. 2.6 million (ish) on the ground in Vietnam. 300K (ish) total wounded, 50K (ish) killed. Of the 300K wounded, about half required hospital care. So even if you say that every wounded or killed troop got morphine (not the case), that still only makes for 350K out of 3.4 million.
So, I have to wonder with some gravity how Simon is justifying his hand waved, and more than likely misrepresented "45% exposure".
You need to get your facts correct. illegal opiates were widely used and available in Viet Nam.
Read - McCoy "The Politics of Heroin" before you start spouting your revisionist history. You could also look up "Nixon methadone Viet Nam" for more information.
You are of course entitled to your opinion. But making up facts? That is so unlike you. Or maybe I just didn't know you.
Assuming you haven't looked I will leave some links:
http://druglibrary.eu/library/books/McCoy/mccoy.pdf
http://www.library.vanderbilt.edu/centr ... ietnam.htm
http://articles.businessinsider.com/201 ... lee-robins
http://www.gradesaver.com/the-things-th ... /section9/
In southeast Asia, the governments of most countries and many colonial officials had been involved in the opium trade for a very long time. The Vietnam War and CIA operations in Laos had the unintended consequence of first opening up many areas of Southeast Asia to modern transportation and then presenting a ready-made market for the drug among the U.S. military personnel stationed in the region.
The turning point came in 1970-71 when the first high-grade heroin laboratories opened in the Golden Triangle. Prior to this, the chemical skills for refinement had existed only in Europe. This gave the opium producers control over the creation of the final product. The hundreds of thousands of American servicemen in Vietnam provided a perfect market for the heroin producers, and heroin use among soldiers rapidly increased.
http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index ... 543AAiOpwQ
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Back in 1971, Robert Steele from Connecticut and Morgan Murphy from Illinois visited Vietnam in their capacity as United States congressman. They returned with some unexpected news, estimating that about 15 percent of the US troops serving in Vietnam were living with an active heroin addiction. President Nixon responded by creating The Special Action Office of Drug Abuse Prevention and authorized studies to follow these addicted military members when they returned home to determine how they fared in treatment and beyond.
http://www.michaelshouse.com/blog/what- ... addiction/
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Behind the scenes, the CIA, along with Pakistan’s ISI, were secretly funding Afghanistan’s mujahideen to fight their Russian foes. Prior to this war, opium production in Afghanistan was minimal. But according to
historian Alfred McCoy, an expert on the subject, a shift in focus took place. “Within two years of the onslaught of the CIA operation in Afghanistan, the Pakistan-Afghanistan borderlands became the world’s top heroin producer.”
Soon, as Professor Michel Chossudovsky notes, “CIA assets again controlled the heroin trade. As the mujahideen guerrillas seized territory inside Afghanistan, they ordered peasants to plant poppies as a revolutionary tax. Across the border in Pakistan, Afghan leaders and local syndicates under the protection of Pakistan intelligence operated hundreds of heroin laboratories.”
Eventually, the Soviet Union was defeated (their version of Vietnam), and ultimately lost the Cold War. The aftermath, however, proved to be an entirely new can of worms. During his research,
McCoy discovered that “the CIA supported various Afghan drug lords, for instance Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. The CIA did not handle heroin, but it did provide its drug lord allies with transport, arms, and political protection.”
http://www.americanfreepress.net/html/c ... n_158.html
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Between May and September 1972, 943 men who had returned to the United States from Vietnam in September 1971 as Army enlisted men were sought for interview and collection of urine specimens. Of these men, 470 represented the general population of Army enlisted men returning at that time; 495 represented those whose urines had been positive for opiates at time of departure from Vietnam. At interview 8–12 months after their return, 83% were civilians and 17% still in service. Nine hundred were personally interviewed and urine specimens collected for 876. Almost half of the “general” sample tried heroin or opium while in Vietnam and one-fifth developed physical or psychological dependence. In the 8- to 12-month period since their return, about 10% had some experience with opiates, but less than 1% had shown signs of opiate dependence.
http://aje.oxfordjournals.org/content/99/4/235.short
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Chiang Kai-shek and the Drug Warlords of the Golden Triangle
http://www.chiangraitimes.com/news/4771.html
Vietnam was in the Golden Triangle - Chiang was a favorite of the US in the war against Mao and subsequently Chiang's landing in Taiwan.
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Following their defeat in the Chinese civil war in the late 1940s, thousands of Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalist Chinese troops retreated from southern China into the Shan States of Myanmar
(then known as Burma) and later into northern Thailand. There, they established bases from which they attempted to re-take China from the Mao Zedong-led communists.
This "secret" army was supported by the Republic of China, which had retreated to the island of Taiwan, as well as the United States Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Along with covert operations in Tibet, it was the first of other secret and not-so-secret CIA-orchestrated wars in Cuba, Nicaragua, Angola and Afghanistan.
and:
Richard Gibson, a now retired former US Consul General in Chiang Mai, has written the first complete account of this secret war. Assisted by Wenhua Chen, a former Chinese translator at the United Nations, Gibson went through a trove of documents in Chinese to piece together this groundbreaking volume.
The extensive research means that the book contains far more detailed information about this covert operation than, for instance,
Alfred McCoy's classic The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia and Catherine Lamour's excellent Enquete sur une Armee Secrete, which is available only in French.
The Secret Army is more than a history of a largely forgotten war. The book explains the origin of the chaos and anarchy that made it possible for the Golden Triangle drug trade to take root and flourish to this day. It also shows that opium has always been an integral part of insurgency, as well as counter-insurgency, in one of Southeast Asia's most volatile regions. Burton Levin, a former US ambassador to Myanmar, writes in an endorsement of the book: "We owe our thanks to Mr Gibson for reminding us of yet another instance where covert action brought us more grief than relief."
Ironically, the Nationalist Chinese involvement in the opium and its derivative heroin trades reached its height during the Indochina war in the early 1970s, when the most lucrative local market for the drugs was among US troops stationed in Vietnam. This, of course, was not appreciated but nevertheless tolerated as long as they served Thailand's and America's security interests. That's because they remained sources for crucial intelligence in areas where the Thais and Americans had little or no direct access. This information flow was especially important precisely during the Indochina war and in the fight against the CPT.
When the US GIs returned home, the narcotics problem shifted from army barracks and camps in South Vietnam to poor communities and even middle-class suburbs in the United States. The public became alarmed and Washington started taking measures aimed at solving the narcotics problem through its so-called "war on drugs". Conveniently forgotten was that the flow of narcotics was a direct outcome of the US-supported secret war in the Golden Triangle.
Revelations of a secret war
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Southeast_ ... 9Ae02.html
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I finally found a site that reviews the history of how the US got into the business of running drugs: The Takao Club.
Now, it’s important to understand that the US was not the first. The British beat us into the state-driven drug trade by a couple of centuries in the Opium Wars. But drug running has become a central part of US military action. The roots of US involvement are in World War II.
Alfred McCoy gives a comprehensive history of that involvement through the mid-70s. In the case of Luciano, drug running was incidental; Luciano was clearly a bad guy (McCoy adds the fascinating point that Patton’s sweep through Sicily was facilitated by the Mafia). In Southeast Asia, drug running became part of policy.
http://phoenixwoman.wordpress.com/2011/ ... ut-patton/
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Well that is enough education for you today. If you take advantage of it. Anyway read McCoy. It is a book. It will take time. You might learn some history.
There is no point in making up shite when discussing this subject with me. I have actually studied it. You might try it as well. As you admonish others on different subjects.
What is amusing is that the right is as ignorant of drugs as the left is of guns. The parties as I said are mirror images.