Dollars, Dope, and Deception
‘The War on Drugs’ as the CIA's Masterstroke
Everyone experiences what I've personally referred to as the "wilderness of youth," a phase in which young people begin to believe that they are more knowledgeable than their elders, where boundaries are tested, and often erode completely.
Not everyone makes it out of that wilderness alive; most will encounter a cornucopia of degenerate behavior; things like alcohol abuse, promiscuous sex, and in most cases, the various scheduled substances that Gen-Z and Millennials were all taught how to spot (and use) in D.A.R.E. classes across the country.
For decades, the United States has purported to wage a highly publicized "War on Drugs," portraying it as a noble crusade against the scourge of narcotics plaguing American streets and destabilizing nations abroad. Billions of dollars have been funneled into law enforcement, military operations, and international partnerships to combat cartels, traffickers, and kingpins, all the while a “prison industrial-complex” bloomed into a multi-billion dollar industry annually (See CoreCivic and Geo Group revenue reports.)
Yet beneath this rhetoric lies a troubling paradox: allegations persist that the very agencies tasked with fighting this war—that unholy trinity of the CIA, State Department, and Pentagon—have, at times, exploited drug trafficking to fund their own covert agendas, both at home and overseas.
The truth is that the so-called "War on Drugs" isn’t some “noble crusade” to save America from the scourge of narcotics. It’s a sham. A meticulously engineered operation, birthed in the shadowy bowels of Langley, designed not to stop drugs, but to harness their economic and destructive powers.
Far from a conspiracy theory confined to fringe circles, these claims have surfaced in congressional reports, declassified documents, and firsthand accounts, painting a picture of a war where the lines between enforcer and enabler blur.
If you consider the “war on drugs” a war and not just a term used to convince the public that Washington was fighting it, it would technically be the longest war in American history.
It’s the ultimate “endless war,” one that has been rumored to have funded black ops, special access programs (SAPs), paramilitary endeavors and many other things over the last half a century or more.
What follows isn’t speculation. This is history, scrubbed from your textbooks, but screaming from declassified documents, whistleblower testimonies, and the bodies left in the wake.
The "War on Drugs" wasn’t about protecting Main Street—it was about control, cash, and chaos, (allegedly) all funneled through the Central Intelligence Agency’s black-budget playbook.
A Historical Pattern: Drugs as a Means to an End
The notion that U.S. agencies might turn a blind eye to—or even facilitate—drug trafficking isn’t new. It stretches back, at least, to the Cold War, when the CIA’s mission to counter communism often trumped moral or legal constraints.
You can go back even further than the Cold War, to a time when the CIA didn’t even exist.
Its predecessor, the OSS—through the little-known but supremely important Operation: Underworld—was cozying up to Italian and Jewish organized crime during World War II. The deal was simple: you help us, we look the other way while you sling heroin. [Aspects of this merger are covered thoroughly in Whitney Webb’s One Nation Under Blackmail and are dramatized in HBO’s Boardwalk Empire.]
In my personal opinion, it was at this point in time that the Western intelligence community forever merged with international organized crime to create what eventually became the “deep state” as we know it today.
Fast forward to 1947, and the CIA is born, and they don’t waste time. They’re cutting deals with the Corsican mob in Marseille—the French Connection—to keep the docks free of law enforcement. Heroin starts flowing into the U.S., and the Agency’s fingerprints are all over it.
By the ’50s, they’re arming Chiang Kai-shek’s defeated generals in the Golden Triangle, trading guns for opium intel. Then comes Laos in the ’60s…
In Southeast Asia during the Vietnam War, the CIA allied with Laotian warlord Vang Pao, whose Hmong forces cultivated opium poppies as a generations-old tradition. Historians like Alfred McCoy have argued that the CIA’s airline, Air America, became a conduit for moving opium and heroin precursors, with profits helping sustain anti-communist operations.
On Page 318 of Alfred McCoy’s book, The Politics of Heroin, he shows how USAID funded Vang Pao’s airline, purportedly knowing that it would be used for transporting opium.
“…Poe charged that Vang Pao later used a DC-3 to fly heroin across southern Laos into central Vietnam, where ‘number two guy to President Thieu would recieve it.’ Poe claimed that his opposition to Vang Poe’s corruption led to his transfer from Long Tieng…
According to one former USAID employee, USAID supported the project… The USAID officials involved apparently realized that any commercial activity at Long Tieng would involve opium, but decided to support the project anyway.
While official denials abound, former DEA agents like Hector Berrellez have claimed that CIA contract pilots knowingly transported drugs into the U.S., landing on military bases with impunity.
You can watch a compelling interview with Hector HERE.
This wasn’t an isolated case.
In Afghanistan, during the Soviet occupation of the 1980s, the CIA backed Mujahedeen fighters, including Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, a known drug lord whose heroin empire supplied much of the world’s market.
Afghanistan’s opium production surged during this period. The Mujahedeen, including warlords allied with the CIA, controlled poppy-growing regions like Helmand and Nangarhar.
Related - Operation Cyclone - The Seeds of Terror
Heroin was processed in labs along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, often with ISI [CIA-friendly Pakistani Intelligence] oversight, and trafficked globally. The CIA’s focus was on defeating the Soviets, not policing narcotics, so drug activities by allies were largely ignored or tolerated as a byproduct of the war effort, if not encouraged.
Declassified records (#,#) show U.S. officials and the CIA were aware of the trade, but prioritized the anti-Soviet fight over drug enforcement.
There’s the declassified CIA document titled Afghanistan’s Expanded Opium Trade: Byproduct of War.
This report, available via the CIA FOIA portal, analyzes the growth of Afghanistan’s opium trade during the Soviet occupation. It notes that wartime disruptions made heroin refining "an attractive enterprise," and that smugglers adapted to the conflict, enhancing their operations. It acknowledges the agency’s awareness of the trade’s expansion under conditions the U.S. was actively shaping through its support of the mujahideen. The report implies a lack of U.S. effort to curb the trade, focusing instead on the war’s broader dynamics.
The document states,
"Afghanistan’s role as a heroin supplier to international markets probably will expand as long as the instability and strife continue …"
This suggests that U.S. officials understood the growth of the trade, but justified it as a means to an end.
Another document was declassified in 2013 called "USSR: Domestic Fallout from the Afghan War." This document discusses Soviet concerns about drug abuse among troops in Afghanistan, noting Afghan opiates on Soviet vessels. It indirectly highlights the scale of the drug trade during the war, which the CIA monitored, but did not act against, consistent with a focus on Soviet defeat over narcotics control.
We also have Congressional testimony and reports like the Kerry Committee Report in 1989.
The Senate Foreign Relations Subcommittee on Terrorism, Narcotics, and International Operations—chaired by Yale alumni and Washington elite John Kerry—investigated CIA links to drug trafficking in the 1980s. While the investigation focused primarily on Central America, it also addressed issues related to Afghanistan. The report concluded that U.S. officials often overlooked drug activities by allies when they served strategic interests, a pattern applicable to Afghanistan.
It notes that "elements of the U.S. government were aware of the involvement of some of their allies in drug trafficking," but took no significant action, prioritizing anti-communist goals.
Many CIA records from Operation Cyclone remain classified, limiting direct evidence of internal decision-making.
Fast forward to the post-9/11 era, and opium production in Afghanistan skyrocketed under U.S. occupation—some suggest as a tacitly tolerated revenue stream for allied warlords, with profits potentially circling back to intelligence operations.
United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) data confirms a dramatic rise in opium production post-2001.
In 2001, under the Taliban’s poppy ban, production was 185 metric tons. By 2006, it reached 6,100 tons, and in 2007, it peaked at 8,200 tons—over 40 times the 2001 level. By 2017, it hit a record 9,000 tons (UNODC World Drug Report 2018 #,# and Afghanistan Opium Survey).
The U.S. occupied Afghanistan from 2001 to 2021, and this surge occurred under its watch, with cultivation concentrated in provinces like Helmand, where U.S. and NATO forces were active.
The United States is starting to look like the most successful heroin dealer on the planet, but it’s obviously not as simple as pinning it on one country.
Perhaps the most infamous example is the CIA’s involvement with the Nicaraguan Contras in the 1980s.
The Contras, a rebel group fighting the leftist Sandinista government, were a key part of the Reagan administration’s anti-communist strategy in Central America.
But when Congress cut off official funding via the Boland Amendment, the CIA and its allies (allegedly) found an alternative: drug money.
The aforementioned 1989 Kerry Committee report, based on a two-year Senate investigation, found that Contra supporters, suppliers, and pilots were deeply entangled in cocaine trafficking, often with the knowledge of U.S. officials who failed to act "for fear of jeopardizing the war efforts against Nicaragua."
The report documented payments from the State Department to companies owned by known traffickers, ostensibly for "humanitarian aid," even after some had been indicted. The declassified CIA document, Allegations of Connections Between CIA and the Contras in Cocaine Trafficking to the United States (Vol. II, 1998) sheds greater light on the scandal.
Meanwhile, the State Department’s payments to traffickers—such as the $806,000 funneled to narcotics-linked firms for Contra supplies—raise questions about whether drug money was seen as a "perfect solution" to funding gaps, as the Kerry Committee hinted.
Journalist Gary Webb’s 1996 "Dark Alliance" series took it further, alleging that Contra-linked traffickers like Danilo Blandon and Norwin Meneses funneled cocaine into Los Angeles, fueling the crack epidemic, with profits flowing back to the CIA-backed war.
On December 10, 2004, Webb was found in his home with two gunshot wounds to the head. The autopsy concluded the wounds were self-inflicted.
At home, the Pentagon’s domestic surveillance and militarized drug interdiction efforts have ballooned since the 1970s, yet critics point to a curious inefficiency: despite vast resources, drug flows persist. Some speculate that such efficiency reflects a deeper agenda—maintaining a perpetual "war" to justify budgets and control, while overseas profits quietly fund black ops.
Mena, Arkansas — A Hub of Alleged Drug and Arms Trafficking
In the 1980s, Mena, Arkansas—a quiet town tucked in the Ouachita Mountains—became a dark stage for a twisted drama involving drugs, guns, and government shadow games.
Anyone familiar with the Clintons sordid history prior to their ascension to the highest halls of power in the United States will likely know where this is going.
Mena Intermountain Municipal Airport, a small airstrip surrounded by pine forests and largely out of view, turned into a buzzing hub where the usual suspects allegedly turned the "War on Drugs" into a cash cow for their Contra obsession. While this went down, then-Governor Bill Clinton seemed content to look the other way, leaving locals to whisper amongst themselves, sometimes to their own peril.
Enter Barry Seal, a morally gray pilot with a rap sheet longer than a Mena runway.
Seal landed in town in 1981, fresh off smuggling for the Medellín Cartel—$50 million in cocaine, 1,000 pounds a month, by his own account in court testimony during his 1983 DEA case (Mara Leveritt, The Boys on the Tracks, 1999, also covered extensively in One Nation Under Blackmail Vol. 1).
He set up at Rich Mountain Aviation, making the airstrip his personal fiefdom. The DEA nabbed him in 1983, but Seal flipped, becoming an informant. By 1984, he was on the CIA’s payroll, his C-123 plane fitted with a hidden camera for a Nicaragua sting that caught a Sandinista official allegedly handling coke, per declassified CIA records cited in the 1996 CIA Inspector General report (released via Judicial Watch, 2020).
The Reagan administration leaked the photos to paint the Sandinistas as narco-thugs, but it backfired, and it is believed that Seal’s cover was blown. In February 1986, Colombian hitmen gunned him down in Baton Rouge, though many believe the hit was orchestrated from within the United States Government.
Eight months later, in October 1986, his plane—now tied to Oliver North’s Contra resupply network—crashed in Nicaragua with a load of guns, dragging Mena into the Iran-Contra scandal’s harsh spotlight, per PBS Frontline’s 1987 report on the crash.
Arkansas State Police investigator Russell Welch and IRS agent Bill Duncan dug into Seal’s operation, uncovering a swamp of drug smuggling and money laundering. An FBI memo from 1986, later cited in a 1991 congressional hearing by Rep. Bill Alexander, estimated $3 to $5 billion in cocaine flowed through the airport.
The Mena Arkansas rabbit hole is deep, and while relevant to the topic at hand, couldn’t possibly be fully covered here.
Nevertheless, there are more than enough dots to connect to provide an incriminating picture, and our good friends at USAID seem to be at the center of it all.
Earlier we talked about how the U.S. controlled the Afghan poppy operation from 2001-2021, one of the most glaring examples of the U.S. being the world’s premier drug facilitator.
Here we have an article from the United States Institute of Peace(USIP)—one of the various controlled institutions of NGO world—attempting to spin the narrative that the opium ban instituted by the Taliban after it reclaimed power in Afghanistan was a bad thing.
[The original article requires the use of the Wayback Machine at Archive.com to see, as it will now lead you to a dead page. But the article is preserved on other websites.]
What’s interesting is that this NGO gets roughly $56 Million in taxpayer funding annually and sits right across from the State Department in Washington DC, and given what we’ve covered across various articles about the CIA/Pentagon/State Department nexus that births these various cut-out NGOs, I’ll leave the reader to draw their own conclusions about who really runs USIP.
To reiterate, we have an (allegedly) State Department/CIA/Pentagon-controlled NGO telling you that the Taliban’s opium ban—again, the Afghan poppy fields account for 90% of the WORLDS OPIUM (HEROIN) SUPPLY—is bad for Afghanistan and the world … that it will have “negative economic consequences.”
Despite the grim overtones of this UISP article by the good William Byrd PhD, there’s some truth to the assessment. Depending on who you ask, narcotics are the third biggest global commodity behind crude oil and natural gas, so naturally, the Taliban’s opium ban was going to ruffle some feathers.
It’s not just Afghanistan either. Since the DEA got the boot from the Bolivian government in 2008, cocaine production in that country has steadily fallen year after year.
How do you think this is all facilitated?
Well, short of a smoking-gun, all signs point to USAID.
In countries with significant drug trafficking—like Colombia, Peru, or Mexico—USAID’s funds for governance or security sometimes intersect with corrupt officials or institutions.
For instance, testimony from USAID officials in 2021 highlighted how corruption enables drug cartels, suggesting that aid can be siphoned off or misdirected, unintentionally bolstering criminal networks.
In a nutshell, allegations of USAID facilitation stem from:
Historical overlap with CIA operations in drug-producing regions.
Alternative livelihood programs that critics say fail to dismantle drug economies.
Potential misuse of aid in corrupt, trafficking-prone areas.
Preserving drug production for stability (e.g., Afghanistan).
Next time, some suit on CNN cries about fentanyl or cartels, ask: who’s holding the strings?
The War on Drugs isn’t lost—it’s won. The circus rolls on, and the clowns in America are at the wheel.
Abroad, it’s coups and proxies; at home, it’s control—prisons packed, communities gutted, and plenty of funds to facilitate god knows what.
Further Reading
Most of the statements made in this article have come from the following sources:
The Politics of Heroin [PDF] by Alfred W. McCoy
Drugs, Law Enforcement, and Foreign Policy by the U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Narcotics, Terrorism, and International Operations
One Nation Under Blackmail Vol. 1 and 2 by Whitney Webb
The Last Narc: A Memoir by the DEA's Most Notorious Agent by Hector Berrellez
American War Machine: Deep Politics, the CIA Global Drug Connection, and the Road to Afghanistan [PDF] by Peter Dale Scott
Dark Alliance [PDF] by Gary Webb
THE CIA-CONTRA-CRACK COCAINE CONTROVERSY:
A REVIEW OF THE JUSTICE DEPARTMENT’S INVESTIGATIONS AND PROSECUTIONS OIG (December, 1997)
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The CIA was very good at hiding the purpose for which they were actually created. This must ALL be exposed. The Clintons were just a couple in a long line of traitors masquerading as America-loving politicians.
This was an awesome read, Ryan! Going to take me a few go-throughs to soak it all in. Quite comprehensive! Love all the references.