WE CAN'T STOP FRIEND OR FOE IN THE DRUG TRADE

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP90-00806R000200820003-6
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 1
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: August 3, 2010
• Sequence Number: 3
• Publication Date: April 9, 1985
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2010/08/03: CIA-RDP9
y.1~~wp
Fn ^I +
WALL STREET JOURNAL
9 April 1985
We Can't Stop Friend or Foe if,
Drug Trade
By KLEIMAN - -
The State Department seems to want us
to believe that the U.S. drug problem is
largely the fault of communist govern-
ments and movements that traffic in drugs
to make money while weakening the Amer-
ican social fabric. Various congressmen,
on the other hand, want to know why the
administration has refused to enforce the
law that denies U.S. aid and trade conces-
sions to nations failing to act against drug
exports when the governments involved
are on our side in the Cold War.
There is less to all of this than meets
the eye.
Governments, their agencies, their em-
ployees and their foreign surrogates are i
rather frequently involved in drug dealing,
because:
during the war in Vietnam surmortin
themselves-with the help of planes from
the CIA-backed Air America-by dealing
in o ium and heroin.
? The
anugan Hand bank (which. if not
actually arm of the U.S. intelligence
community, at least had close ties to ele-
ments of in financing heroin deals through
Hong Kong.
? The Iranian government conferring
retroactive diplomatic immunity on a
nephew of the Ayatollah Khomeini caught
with a kilogram of heroin in West Ger-
many.
? The Hungarian pharmaceutical in-
dustry shipping bulk methaqualone powder
under bogus end-use certificates to Colom-
bia to be pressed into counterfeit Quaa-
ludes for the U.S. market.
Other governments implicated in the
trario it 1Pact thrnngh innrtinn inri,,Ao?
Pakistan, the Bahamas, Bolivia, the Turks
? It is a way to make quick, substantial
and untraceable money.
? They often need or want money they
don't have to account for.
? They have powers, resources, immu-
nities and organizational capabilities that
give them advantages in some aspects of
drug dealing, and these make them more
competitive in moving narcotics than they
are in making steel or automobiles.
A Partial Rogue's Gallery
Even governments that do not traffic in
drugs can help drug dealing in other ways,
either by failing-corruptly, negligently or
through incapacity-to prevent production
and export of drugs or by creating havens
of banking and corporate secrecy, thus
helping drug dealers handle their money
without getting caught.
None of this is any respecter of ideol-
ogy. A (very) partial rogue's gallery would
have pictures of:
? Bulgarian customs guards reselling
seized heroin.
? Colombian colonels protecting mari-
juana exports.
? Left-wing Colombian M-19 guerrillas
financed with cocaine money.
? Right-wing Colombian death squads
financed with cocaine money.
? Cayman Islands (U.K.) banking au-
i thorities enforcing banking-secrecy laws to
conceal drug dealers' assets.
? Afghan mujaheddin growing poppies'
and selling opium to buy guns.
? The Kuomintang (before 1949) and to
this day various Kuomintang "lost ar-
mies" in Burma making a living from
poppy growing and heroin refining.
? The North Korean diplomatic service
financing its embassies by smuggling her-
oin in diplomatic pouches.
? Anti-Communist Hmong irregulars
and Caicos Islands, Nicaragua and Mex-
ico. Nor is it only foreign governments that
find it difficult to control their law-enforce-
ment machinery: In asking about the role
of Mexican police agencies in the death of
a U.S. drug agent there, we should not
forget our own police and drug homicide
scandals in Miami and Puerto Rico.
Among U.S. domestic political groups,
both the Rastafarians (a Jamaican reli-
gious cult that. employs the ritual use of
marijuana) and the anti-Castro Omega-7
movement have used drug dealing as a
means of support.
Most everyone wants to crack down on
drug dealing (except for those libertarians
who take their ideology without ice or wa-
ter). In consequence, when governments
tire of accusing each other of torture, mur-
der, genocide and Sabbath -breaking, they
call each other dope dealer . It is the one
unanswerable charge; ever, torture, mur-
der, and genocide (under euphemisms)
have their defenders, but every man's
hand is against the pusher.
When unfriendly governments and
movements (those unfriendly to us and
those to whom we have decided to be un-
friendly) are involved in drug dealing, the
issue is trumpeted, as in the indictment of
a sitting minister of the Cuban govern-
ment. Similar behavior by friendly govern-
ments and movements is handled quietly;
we did finally ask for the extradition of a
member of the Argentinian military gov-
ernment, but only after Raul Alfonsin's
election as civilian president.
The Drug Enforcement Administration
end intelligence-community reports impli-
cating unfriendly governments become the
basis of congressional testimony. imil
UIC
reports about friendly governments are
marked "Top Secret." Nor can this really STAT
be called an abuse of the classification svs-
tem: it would. in fact. damage U.S. secu-
rity interests to publish the fact that the
government of X. whose troons we are
training to bait the Bear. is up to its
medals in the drug trade or the money-
laundering business, and that the U.S. goy-
ernment says so.
It is fashionable to say that we should
put more pressure on foreign governments
to stop the drug trade. This raises three
questions: Would the pressure be success-
ful? If so, would there be any effect on
our drug problem? What other interests
would we have to sacrifice? In my view,
the answers are, respectively: probably
not in most cases; almost certainly not,
and, far more than we would care to.
Our influence with foreign governments
is a scarce resource to be economized.
Even ignoring foreign policy, and even
from a strictly selfish point of view, we
probably have a stronger interest in the
farm policies, per-capita rates of gross na-
tional product and public-health measures
of most foreign governments than we have
in their drug exports. Better that Mexico
should ship us more oil than less mari-
juana. Haiti's thugs in uniform and thieves
in office threaten U.S. interests far more
profoundly than do Jamaica's government-
tolerated drug producers and smugglers.
Who would seriously propose cutting off
arms to Afghanistan until the freedom
fighters stop growing opium?
Drug enforcement and drug-abuse pre-
vention can be useful tools of foreign pol-
icy when they serve the needs of a foreign
government or help political forces
friendly to us. But the U.S. drug problem
has to be solved in this country, with en-
forcement, prevention and treatment.
The Harrison Narcotics Act of 1914
didn't repeal the law of supply and de-
mand. There are so many potential
sources that the drugs are going to come
from somewhere, and the import price of
drugs is so low as a fraction of final con-
sumer price that foreign actions won't
make drugs significantly more expensive.
The typical "victory" in the foreign-
source control -program remains the Mexi-
can marijuana eradication program.
Spraying the herbicide Paraquat on Mexi-
can marijuana fields virtually eliminated
Mexico as a source of marijuana for the
U.S. market, less by destroying the crops
Continued
Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2010/08/03: CIA-RDP90-00806R000200820003-6