by Alain Labrousse

About the author: Alain Labrousse is director of Observatoire Geopolitique Des Drogues, an organization that examines international drug production and trafficking. He is author of La drogue, l’argent et les armes (Drugs, Money, and Weapons).

It was US president Richard Nixon, shocked by the tens of thousands of GIs returning from Vietnam as heroin addicts, who coined the phrase ‘the war on drugs’ in 1971. Throughout the war, the CIA had turned a blind eye to the trafficking of its allies in the region and the addiction of at least 10% of its army was an inevitable consequence.

The connection between military adventures, wars and drugs is as old as humanity’s use of ‘mind altering substances’. Between the 11th and 13th centuries, the hashisheen or...