(cow mooing)
(air whooshing)
(frogs croaking)
(suspenseful music)
- [Narrator] This is a poppy field.
Once cut, the part of the plant secretes
a miraculous milky fluid called latex.
Base opium used by man as a balm
for more than five millennia.
Opium relieves pain and appeases the mind,
and that should have been the end of it.
But this drug would play a part
in some of mankind's greatest upheavals,
imperialism, colonization, the Cold War,
and more recently, globalization.
Without the backing of states,
drug trafficking would never have existed.
Released into the heart of the system,
drugs have dictated their own geopolitics in the shadows,
secret operations, widespread corruption.
(guns firing)
Drugs are now part of the very flesh
of the world's democracies,
from Wall Street to the jungles of Colombia,
from Shanghai to Kabul,
cartels, mafia, banks, pharmaceutical labs,
and political parties have all lived off drug trafficking.
The results are devastating.
Whole populations stigmatized or displaced,
families torn apart.
Today, we've stopped counting the dead.
(gentle ominous music)
This documentary series looks back at the sinuous history
of drug trafficking starting with opium,
which the farmers here called the gift from the gods.
(suspenseful music)
At the turn of the 19th century,
Britain was engaged in a frantic race
to conquer new territories and new resources.
With cotton, tea, pepper, and other commodities,
the British Empire liberalized the world.
In India, Britain laid it's hands
on a particularly strategic resource,
which was close to the city of Benares in the Ganges Valley,
that the highest quality of opium grew.
The British structured its farming
and intensified production.
With this opium, Britain hoped to win
the power struggle against the world's greatest power
at the time, the Empire of China.
China refused all free trade.
It sold massive amounts of porcelain and tea,
so appreciated by the British,
but bought nothing at all in return.
- There wasn't much that China needed.
China was the oldest operating economy in the world,
dating back millennia.
It was a self-contained economy.
And so, coming up with goods
that the world's most advanced consumer economy needed,
that was an impossibility.
(suspenseful music)
- [Narrator] In this closed empire,
the Chinese elite had long sought evasion
by stuffing their pipes with all kinds of spices,
saffron, camphor, and one day opium.
And its wafts of smoke could soon cast its spell
on Chinese high society.
In a panic, the emperor decided to ban it.
The modern history of drugs started here
with the prohibition of an addictive substance
and the greed of the British Empire.
- These substances have one very powerful advantage
from a cynical business perspective.
So, the fact that drugs are addictive creates out of early,
possibly earlier willing consumers and willing consumers.
The people literally get hooked on the substance.
- [Narrator] The next step was purely logistical.
The British crown couldn't be seen
to be involved in smuggling.
So it gave the job to private traders,
the most avid amongst them,
William Jardine and James Matheson
loaded thousands of chests of opium
onto their ships in India and set sail for China.
- The distinction between private mercantile interests
and the government, these were not completely separate.
There was a commonality of interests.
This was the age of imperialism.
Commerce was good for the empire,
the empire was good for commerce.
So these things very much went together.
- [Narrator] On behalf of the British crown,
Jardine and Matheson, two Scottish gentlemen
in embroidered waistcoats and patent leather slippers
invented international drug trafficking.
In the Bay of Canton, the two traders bribed
the port authorities and sold their cargoes of opium
to the Chinese emperor's worst enemies, the Triads.
These powerful, secret societies had a single aim,
to overthrow the dynasty and power.
- [Interpreter] Opium gave money and means
to the empire's enemies to subversive forces.
These subversive forces needed accomplices.
And together, they tore the state of power apart.
Army officers were opium addicts, state governors,
top public servants were opium addicts,
and all were accordingly traitors to the powers that be.
In fact, opium addicts were referred
to as (speaks in foreign language), traitors to China.
- [Narrator] In 1839, the emperor felt under threat.
He imprisoned thousands of smugglers and had 20,000 chests
of British opium destroyed.
Jardine and Matheson seized on this as a pretext.
Back in London,
they convinced the highest authorities
that war was the only way to open up the huge market
that China represented
with a third of the world's population.
So in the name of profit, Britain launched the opium wars.
(tense rock music)
- Because of British superiority and naval superiority,
the war, of course, ended in a disastrous defeat
for the Chinese and a very unequal treaty.
And, in fact, in China, many Chinese historians date
the modern era from the opium wars.
This is when China,
which had been a self-sufficient empire
for hundreds or thousands of years suddenly
becomes the victim of imperialism.
- [Narrator] The defeated emperor was forced
to legalize opium and open up his country to foreign trade.
He seeded Hong Kong to the British, who turned the island
into an outright opium hub.
In 15 years, sales of the drug had risen from 3000
to almost 6,000 tons a year.
(tense suspenseful music)
To finance this boom in opium trading,
a bank was founded,
the Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking Corporation, HSBC.
These glass towers are the heritage of an era
which saw the birth of what is now
the seventh largest bank in the world
in terms of assets.
And the Jardine Matheson group,
a pillar of world trade and the first business
to grow mega rich from drug trafficking.
- The symbolism really was
that the colonial power was shoving opium,
literally down the throats of the Chinese people
and sentencing Chinese men and women
to devastating drug drug addiction,
that debilitated lives, that kept them often torn
from their families and economically deprived.
- [Narrator] Following the opium wars,
uprisings broke out across China,
resulting in millions of deaths.
The empire sunk into a slow agony.
To avoid the total collapse of its economy,
China began growing its own poppies.
China's borders were finally open.
Millions of Chinese fled to the world's main ports
like London, Amsterdam, and San Francisco.
- And they took the practice of opium smoking with them.
So, if the original sin was that the West
or western imperialists foisted opium on the Chinese,
the Chinese in a way had their revenge
because with this great diaspora
of the Chinese immigrant community,
opium smoking is transplanted all over the world.
(gentle ominous music)
- [Narrator] In the United States,
at the time of the Gold Rush,
Chinese workers provided easily exploitable labor.
Opium spread through the Chinatowns of the big cities.
Soon, petty criminals gave into it, swirling smoke.
Throughout the West,
the passion for opium reached marginal circles,
fed the fantasies and the verses of French poets.
In Europe, opium also made nations heady.
The drug would make the dreams of colonial grander come true
for various countries.
France, the eternal rival of great Britain
intended to turn into China into a modern colony,
a mirror of its own power.
It constructed expensive infrastructures, such as roads,
bridges, and railroads.
The colonization wreaked havoc with the French budget.
- [Interpreter] People often mistakenly think
that colonization earned big money.
In general, colonies cost a lot of money first.
So governors were always looking for ways
to balance their budgets.
- [Narrator] In 1882, France started buying raw opium
in India and China and refining it in a modern factory
in the city center of Saigon.
Opium became a standardized,
ready to smoke product called Chandu on sale
in 1000 or so stores with the RO sign,
(speaking in French) opium, opium regime.
France jealously guarded its monopoly
and severely punished any smuggling.
The more opium addicts they were in Indochina,
the fuller the colonial coffers became.
The regime would supply almost a 1/3
of IndoChina's budget.
This lucrative model was copied
by the other colonial powers,
and the British, Spanish, and Dutch
soon founded their own regimes.
The opium industry would run on full steam
until the end of World War II
drugging millions of people across Asia.
- Now, there was opposition to this.
In the 19th century, one very important group
opposing this traffic was, of course, the missionaries
because they saw the traffic in drugs
as being opposed to their essential mission
of Christianizing these lands.
And so, there's certainly tension
between the merchants, and the governments,
and the imperial administrations
that are interested in revenue, and the missionaries
who are interested in salts.
- [Narrator] This tension reached a peak in China
in the early 20th century.
The empire had become
the world's largest opium producer, overtaking India.
From deep within the country,
huge cargoes descended the Yangtze River to Shanghai.
Within a few years, the port city had dethroned Hong Kong.
Shanghai was the new well capital of opium.
The European powers controlled entire districts
of the city known as concessions
where the opium trade was booming.
In Shanghai, different qualities of opium were available.
Foreign refined opium, coveted by the wealthy youth
or cut Chinese opium for the poorer classes.
In 1906, 13 million Chinese people were opium addicts.
It was carnage.
A massive prohibition campaign
was conducted across the empire.
The Europeans, not yet addicts of the drug,
but of its trade ignored the ban
and continued business as usual.
So China turned towards a new power.
- [Interpreter] The Americans realized the interest
the ban on opium could have for them,
especially as it was produced by the colonial powers.
The Americans had no colonies,
unlike the British and French.
And they understood that by backing the prohibition,
they could embarrass the colonial nations,
which had become its rivals in the early 20th century
when the U.S. was growing
into one of the biggest powers in the West.
(gentle dramatic music)
- [Narrator] - In 1909, in Shanghai, the United States
and China convened the first International Opium Convention.
The European nations unanimously refused
to reduce their production,
but Paris, London, and Amsterdam
would soon reconsider their position
when they realized how far opium addiction
had spread across the West.
(suspenseful music)
(gentle ominous music)
Throughout the 19th century,
Europe had gone through its various industrial revolutions.
Millions of farm laborers had left the countryside
and crammed into the centers
of monstrous manufacturing cities.
With the insalubrious living and working conditions,
the slightest cut became infected.
Cases of gangrene increased, epidemics were rife,
typhoid, tuberculosis, cholera.
Doctors were at a loss.
Then suddenly, the pain stopped.
From the fruit of the poppy, chemists managed to extract
a miraculous substance.
They named it after Morpheus,
the Greek god associated with sleep and dreams.
- [Interpreter] The invention of morphine
was a revolution for the mind.
It changed our relationship with our body.
Time became a choice.
It was no longer something the human body had to suffer.
- In the mid 19th century,
the German Heinrich Emanuel Merck pioneered
the large scale commercial production of morphine.
Within a few decades, his small lab had turned
into Germany's first pharmaceutical empire.
Today, it's the fifth largest pharmaceutical group
in the world.
From 1861 during the American Civil War,
10 million doses of morphine were given to union soldiers.
During this first massive bloodbath of the modern era,
the quality of war surgery also improved greatly.
Thanks to morphine, doctors could ease pain,
operate, and if necessary, even amputate on the battlefield.
The invention of the hypodermic needle
accompanied this progress.
Injected intravenously, morphine's grip tightened.
Patients no longer suffered,
but they became totally hooked.
So the pharmaceutical industry set out
to find an antidote and came up
with a multi usage substance,
which could unhook opium, addicts, cocaine.
Advocated by young Viennese doctor, Sigmund Freud.
- [Interpreter] Cocaine symbolized modern times.
It was something very new, almost magical,
a gift from European science.
- You would go to a pharmacy,
the pharmacist would have a little chart
that will take cocaine and would dispense you cocaine
for a variety of ailments.
(suspenseful music)
- [Narrator] Cocaine became a flagship product sold
in the form of an ointment, spray or cigarette.
Newspapers were full of ads.
The main targeted customer was the well-to-do woman.
She didn't work, so her major suffering was boredom,
and cocaine promised to fill her life
with a few moments of euphoria.
- Throughout the 19th century
and in to the early 20th century,
drugs became cheaper, and people discovered that,
oh, you can inject cocaine or snort it up the nose,
or you can mix morphine and cocaine and you can inject them,
and it produces a very powerful euphoria.
(suspenseful music)
- [Narrator] In 1898, the industrial pharmaceutical lab,
Bayer, came up with a new opium derivative
guaranteed 100% non-addictive.
The results of the first test performed on dogs
were hardly conclusive, intense drowsiness,
a tendency of vomiting, and abundant salivation.
Bayer nonetheless, launched its new product
under the triumphant name of heroin,
recommended for the treatment of asthma
and infant teething pains.
- If you look at the history of morphine,
if you look at the history of heroin,
if you look at the history of cocaine,
these things do not enter the world
as evil underworld drugs.
They enter the world as medicines.
It's almost like a genie that escapes the bottle.
- [Narrator] There was no cure for morphine addiction.
Worse still, each new product attracted
its own band of addicts.
Throughout the 19th century,
the industrialization of western nations
turned living conditions, hygiene,
and education upside down.
New work organization practices placed
the individual at the center of their concerns.
The 20th century dawned with new models.
- There was a rise of the idea
that the state had the responsibility
in order to produce a stronger citizenry
for military mobilization, for national development,
that the state had a responsibility to regulate
how the was body used.
- The unfettered market in addictive drugs
was a real social problem and a real social evil
that needed to control.
Drug control, including prohibition was born
of the same progressive international movement
that gave us the regulatory state,
that gave us the welfare state, that gave us social reform,
that gave us protections for workers, for unions.
- [Narrator] Prohibition was finally enforced.
The United States began by banning opium in 1909.
This footage shot in San Francisco
shows hundreds of opium pipes going up in flames.
(suspenseful music)
In 1914, with the Harrison Act,
the U.S. regulated and taxed opiates and coca products.
Indispensable for surgery, from then on, cocaine,
morphine, and heroin would only
be available by prescription.
Thousands of drug users who once bought their daily fix
over the pharmacy counter didn't know where to turn
to ease their terrible cravings.
(suspenseful music)
- [Interpreter] If a government says,
"I prohibit all supply of this merchandise
in order to curb demand,"
it will only naturally generate a black market,
a black market that breaks the law.
And who's ready to break the law?
Criminals, of course.
(suspenseful music)
- [Narrator] To meet demand,
the criminal underworld learned how to refine heroin.
In Mexico, in the fertile region of Sinaloa,
farmers grew poppies
to supply the American pharmaceutical industry.
In the early 1920s, they saw new customers suddenly turn up.
The first big figure in Mexican drug trafficking
was Ignacia Jasso, alias La Nacha.
She bought raw opium in Sinaloa and had it transformed
into a brown heroin of mediocre quality
by chemists in her employ.
La Nacha set up her clandestine laboratories close
to the border with the United States in Ciudad Juarez.
- [Interpreter] Only the borders separates Ciudad Juarez
from the first city in the U.S.,
which is El Paso, Texas.
So it's a crossing point
for a lot of both legal and illegal merchandise.
Everything goes through there, arms, money, drugs,
and a host of other things.
All you can imagine crosses the border at Ciudad Juarez.
- [Narrator] For a few years,
United States had been living under the yoke
of the prohibition of alcohol.
First, the Americans closed the Rio Grande
to soak up bad quality whiskey
in the gambling dens of Ciudad Juarez.
Amid this happy debauchery of booze and contraband,
La Nacha had no trouble getting her heroin
through the border posts.
Her family run business would dominate trafficking
for three generations until the birth
of the first Mexican drug cartels.
(suspenseful music)
The illegalization of drugs gradually stretched
across Europe, giving rise to new black markets.
With increasingly powerful ships,
maritime transport brought borders even closer.
The big commercial ports became strategic smuggling points,
among them Marseille, where figures
from Corsican organized crime seized their chance.
- [Interpreter] At the outset,
the Corsicans were what you could call seafarer traffickers.
Meaning, they were part of the French colonial empire.
In the 1870s, after the opening of the Suez Canal,
Marseille became the main port
for France's colonies in the far East
and in the Ports of Call on the merchant shipping route.
The Corsicans organized trafficking of different kinds
and different intensities.
It started with the trafficking of women, then money,
gold, cigarettes, and finally,
the trafficking of heroin, of drugs.
- [Narrator] In the mid 1920s, Paul Carbone,
a former merchant seaman turned white slave kingpin
became the boss of the Corsican mafia.
He bought opium in Turkey where it was widely grown
to supply pharmaceutical labs.
In Marseille, the chemist employed
by the Corsican mafia transformed it into heroin,
which was then shipped to where
the prohibition of drugs was the strictest,
the United States.
- [Interpreter] Little by little,
this drug trafficking intensified.
They continued to use the same routes and intermediaries,
but the set-up became more and more sophisticated.
- [Narrator] With his drug money,
Paul Carbone bought the mayor of Marseille,
had his own man hired on the waterfronts,
and bribed the city's police force.
The godfather ramped up his trafficking,
laying the foundations of the French connection.
In those early days of drug trafficking,
arrangements with the powers that be
were crucial to organized crime,
whether that was at a city level
like with Marseille or a country level,
a country where the story began, China.
(suspenseful music)
In the early 1920s,
the empire collapsed and army started fighting
over dozens of China's regions.
There was no central power, and therefore,
nobody to fight organized crime.
In Shanghai, the opium dens had never been so prosperous.
The Triads rained as masters of the underworld.
- [Interpreter] The Triads were opium traffickers.
They owned the gambling dens
and they had close contacts
inside the city's police force.
- [Narrator] From the powerful Green Gang,
one man stood out, his name, Du Yuesheng.
Du Yuesheng had set up business
in Shanghai's French concession,
where his men had eyes and ears inside the opium dens,
and where they wiped out his competitors.
- Du Yuesheng's a genius.
And this is where it gets interesting,
was that he didn't want to stay as simple gangster.
He longed to get into politics.
- [Narrator] In 1921, the Chinese communist party
was founded inside the French Concession.
The French authorities were scared
and approached Du Yuesheng.
- [Interpreter] France feared a wave of strikes
and protests against the foreign presence,
the concessions, and so on.
The Chinese nationalism was on the rise,
and the situation looked dangerous.
So the French console, negotiated,
what would soon be referred to as the pact with the devil.
- [Narrator] The French asked Du Yuesheng
to reestablish order inside their concession.
In exchange, the trafficker would be allowed
to take over all of the concession's opium dens.
(suspenseful music)
- [Interpreter] And consequently,
there were no strikes in the French Concession.
All was calm.
- [Narrator] Once comfortably installed,
Du Yuesheng offered his services
to the ambitious Chinese general, Chiang Kai-Shek.
As head of the army of the Kuomintang,
the Chinese Nationalist Party,
Chang Kai aimed to reunify the country.
To do so, he would have to take Shanghai.
In 1927, Du Yuesheng ordered his men
to massacre hundreds of communists
who taken control of the city and open the gates
of Shanghai to Chiang Kai-Shek army.
(suspenseful music)
The general soon imposed the Kuomintang
as the country's government.
But to keep control of China, he needed money.
So the Kuomintang legalized opium.
Du Yuesheng's Triad, the Green Gang.
became the government's main supplier,
and a number of its members were sent to sit at parliament.
China became the world's first narco state.
Du Yuesheng stepped up his activities,
hiring chemists and setting up a heroin factory
inside Shanghai central market.
- [Interpreter] Du Yuesheng's great strength
was that he became an extremely respectable figure
of the Chinese underworld.
He was the president of several banks.
So he was the perfect role model
of a criminal gang boss successfully increasing
his involvement in the legal world.
Again, he was the perfect example.
Let's say, extreme example of the symbiotic relationship
between the criminal world and the legal world,
the perfect model of organized crime.
(suspenseful music)
- [Narrator] The heroin refined in China, Mexico,
and France converged on the United States.
But in late '20's, America, the biggest issue was liquor.
Prohibition was making gangsters rich, the Jewish, Italian,
and Irish mobs born out of racketeering and prostitution
in the big cities rubbed their hands together with glee.
- Organized crime took over one of the largest industries
in the United States.
That was the origins of modern organized crime
in the United States,
transforming, basically, street corner thugs
into powerful criminal syndicates.
(suspenseful music)
- [Narrator] To monopolize the millions made
from smuggled moonshine,
the Italian mafia systematically threatened and murdered
until it had crushed its competitors.
Prohibition created an unpredicted destructive power
and widespread corruption.
Al Capone had judges, police officers,
and politicians in his pocket until he finally fell.
(suspenseful music)
- By 1930, it was clear that this was failing.
There was a government commission
called the Wickersham Commission
that surveyed the alcohol prohibition
and decided that it was riven with corruption.
And so, in 1933, you got end of prohibition of alcohol.
Suddenly, the mafia had lost
this enormously profitable enterprise.
(gentle ominous music)
- [Narrator] Deprived of its main source of income,
the Italian mafia united around Lucky Luciano,
formed an alliance with the boss
of the New York Jewish mob, Meyer Lansky.
Together, they took control of the heroin market.
To maximize profits,
the mobsters cut and recut the drug.
Their adulterated product caused infections and overdoses.
But the end of the prohibition on alcohol also caused rancor
and frustration amid
puritanical conservative white Americans,
the enemies of all kinds of highs and pleasures.
The pre-prohibition fight was led
by the new head of
the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, Harry J. Anslinger,
an advocate of strong arm tactics and a brilliant tactician.
- The man is a legend.
He's a legend in drug law enforcement.
He was very instrumental in developing
the law enforcement tools and techniques
for investigating large scale drug trafficking,
both in the United States and outside the United States.
- He saw himself not just as enforcing
a prohibition on drugs,
He was in fact, first of all,
a moral campaigner in forcing, if you will,
a moral consensus upon the society,
getting rid of an evil influence and the male factors,
the criminals that were trafficking in this.
And so, for him, it was a moral campaign.
(dramatic music)
- [Narrator] In 1930s America,
Hollywood was electrifying audiences.
Harry Anslinger encouraged movie directors
to instill the fear of drugs among them.
He directed his wrath on marijuana,
which was still legal in the United States.
On screen, white women, tempted
by the devil, inevitably succumbed.
(women laughing)
And in the role of
the suntanned mustachio tempter, a Mexican.
Little-by-little, Harry Anslinger's moral campaign
veered towards racist propaganda.
- [Interpreter] Harry Anslinger, like many other
North American ultra conservatives considered Mexicans
as racially different, as racially inferior.
- He made an absolute equation between ethnicity and drugs.
Opiate was Chinese, marijuana was Mexican Americans.
And so, he was unashamed in using the drugs
as a way of stigmatizing and attacking minorities.
- [Narrator] In 1937, marijuana was prohibited
in the United States.
Organized crime would benefit from this new ban.
Harry Anslinger knew it and got ready to fight them.
- Harry Anslinger really believed
in the importance of eternal vigilance.
There were many possible sources of drugs.
There were different producer nations.
There were new smuggling routes that could open up.
There were new criminal organizations.
So he was always watchful.
He was always worried.
It's almost as if he felt he was dealing
with a hydra headed monster.
(suspenseful music)
- [Narrator] Under Harry Anslinger,
the Federal Bureau of Narcotics
fostered international cooperation.
And in 1932, the traffickers
and their merchandise was finally traced.
From Istanbul to New York via Berlin and Shanghai.
(tense suspenseful music)
(gentle ominous music)
During the first years of World War II,
oceans and seas were the theaters of fierce battles.
Trafficking came to a halt and the drugs ran out,
but this respite was short-lived.
The first huge international drug trafficking network
would lay its foundations at the height of war.
In 1943, after the U.S. Army landed in Sicily,
its priority was to keep it out of Axis hands for good.
Washington started looking for men
to temporarily govern the Island.
- [Interpreter] In Sicily, where all of
the elite were fascists, the big landowners, the church,
the administration, where could the Americans find men
without a fascist pedigree?
There were two possibilities, the communists or the mafia.
The Americans already knew that after the war,
their enemy number one would be the communists.
So they opted for the mafia,
which would be able to help manage the islands towns
during those troubled times.
- [Narrator] Backed by the Americans,
Mafiosi moved into the town halls
and took control of the different parts of the Island.
In 1945, the U.S. expelled to Italy
more than 100 mobsters involved in heroin trafficking,
including Lucky Luciano, the boss of Cosa Nostra.
The American Cousins, and the Sicilian Mafia would turn
the island into a drug trafficking hub.
- [Interpreter] For the post liberation Italian authorities,
this didn't present a public order problem
because the level of drug addiction was fairly low in Europe
and didn't exist at all in Italy.
There was no drug market in Italy,
and therefore, no social alarms.
So, the Italian police let Lucky Luciano do as he pleased.
- [Narrator] Heroin, once again,
flowed into the United States,
but heroin of poor quality.
Sicily was short on qualified chemists.
In 1950, in Marseille, Lucky Luciano met
with the new bosses of the Corsican Mafia,
Antoine and Barthelemy Guerini.
The brothers had the chemist capable of refining opium
to make the highest quality heroin, heroin IV,
practically pure and possible to cut dozens of times
to make the biggest profits.
- [Interpreter] The Corsicans vere very strong.
They were well organized and experienced.
They'd already done it in the 1930s.
They had the know-how.
- [Interpreter] And that's when
the big clandestine labs were set up around Marseille.
But not only in Corsica and all along the French Riviera,
they refined tons of the stuff.
- [Narrator] The meeting between the Guerini
and Lucky Luciano gave birth
to the French connection, a vast web of Turkish,
Lebanese, Corsican, and Sicilian traffickers.
Cosa Nostra controlled the distribution
in the United States.
But very soon, the Corsicans in charge
of refining and transport would gain ascendancy.
- [Interpreter] The U.S. Narcotics Bureau soon became aware
of what was going on with their first seizures in New York.
The first smugglers arrested happened to be Corsicans.
So the Americans realized
that the chain led back to Marseille,
to the Corsicans of Marseille.
- [Interpreter] Lucky Luciano, the most powerful man
in the American mafia,
was actually scared of the Corsicans.
He realized they were extremely powerful,
notably because, as he underlined, of their contacts
inside the French secret service.
- [Narrator] Having infiltrated the authorities
in Marseille, the Corsican Mafia had strong ties
inside the French state apparel.
In 1951, at the height of the Indochina war,
the French secret service was deployed
to organize the counter attack against
the Viet Minh Guerrillas,
but it was seriously short of money.
Paris begrudged having to fund this costly war,
and the French opium regime, which once financed
the colony had been forced to shut up shop
in the face of international pressure.
The French secret service mounted Operation X.
They contacted a tribe in the hills of Laos, the Hmong,
and bought their entire poppy crop,
which they transported to a military base in Saigon.
Their French agent sold opium to Chinese Vietnamese gangs
under the Corsican mafia, who turned it into heroin
and dispatched it to the United States.
The drug money would allow French intelligence
to build a counter insurrection army of 40,000 men,
recruited from the tribes of Indochina.
- It was one of those bizarrely clear instances
of a modern Western intelligence apparatus
actually operating a drug trade.
It was extraordinary.
There was many instances of collusion and corruption,
but nothing quite like that,
where the intelligence service of a legitimate government
is actually operating the traffic.
- [Narrator] Operation X came to nothing.
In 1955, France evacuated its troops from Indochina.
The regions' geopolitics had changed.
The colonial powers had withdrawn.
The opium regimes had closed down,
and China, a communist state since 1949,
had brutally wiped out poppy growing.
That should have sounded the death nail
for narco politics in Asia,
but the Cold War had only just begun.
And the scene was set for secret ops
and mounted coups carried out
by the secret services of the great powers.
- There are times where there's no question
that before the collapse of the Soviet Empire
and the bringing down of the Berlin wall,
the Cold War was a priority national security objective
of the United States.
And if things came into absolute conflict,
I would expect that the Cold War objectives would prevail
over fighting drug trafficking.
- There is a specialist skill
to operating outside the bounds
of civil society, of being able to transfer money,
mobilize people, create operations, buy arms,
transport arms across the globe,
deliver them into the hands of people.
There are only two kinds of people on the planet
that have this sensibility and have this ability,
intelligence operatives and criminals.
And the criminals, what do they need?
Above all, they need protection.
They need protection from state actors
that can protect them from investigation and prosecution,
that can get them off the hook if they get caught.
So they not only have the same sensibility,
but they have complimentary needs.
And so, it's not surprising
that they very often wind up working together.
- [Narrator] The Asian drug trade took off again
when the United States attempted to overthrow
the Chinese communist regime.
Washington gave its backing to the enemies of Chairman Mao.
The Kuomintang, 6,000 Chinese nationalists were entrenched
across the border in Burma.
The CIA sent them provisions, arms, and munitions.
The man of the Kuomintang made several incursions
into China, but were easily pushed back
by the Chinese popular liberation army.
- Then support from the CIA started to decrease.
And these local Kuomintang units start to look for money.
And there's a very famous quote
from one of those Kuomintang generals, he said,
"If you need an army, you need guns.
If you need guns, you need money.
The only money in these mountains is opium."
So that's what they turned into.
they saw over open fields there,
they collected the opium from the farmers.
They brought it down to the Thai border.
They sold it to international traders,
and slowly they start to expand and increase this trade.
- [Narrator] With the drug money,
the Kuomintang soldiers prospered,
but China put pressure on Burma.
In 1961, the Kuomintang army was evacuated.
A part of the troop set up a new base in Northern Thailand,
where the monarchy welcomed them in sympathy.
From the high up villages they occupied,
the Kuomintang soldiers blocked
the infiltration of communist groups, but more importantly,
kept a close eye on their loads of opium
as they crossed the border.
- Everybody knew, of course,
that the Kuomintang was the major organizing
the opium trade into Northern Thailand
and organizing the heroin production.
And from there, on the heroin trade
in the region and internationally, of course, also.
Everybody knows this.
And the policy at the time was security first.
We feel that, as Americans would say
and the Thai government,
communism is a major threat in the region.
And if the Kuomintang government in turn could support itself
by doing opium business,
well, that was very convenient for them, of course.
That lasted for a long time.
(gentle ominous music)
- [Narrator] Opium transported from neighboring Burma
and Laos was refined in Northern Thailand.
The area across the shared borders became known
as the golden triangle.
The base heroin was transported to the port of Bangkok
and loaded onto ships heading for Hong Kong.
A century after the opium wars, Hong Kong,
still in British hands,
had the highest concentration of drug addicts in the world.
The Triads based in Hong Kong since fleeing
the Chinese communists refined the base
into heroin of rare purity.
The drugs itinerary continued to the West Coast
of the United States.
The international traffic in heroin
had never reached such a scale before.
And America, which had used the drug
as a tool during the Cold War
would now pay the ultimate price,
the sacrifice of its youth.
(eerie music)
In the mid 1960s, when the war in Vietnam broke out,
a large part of American youth was rebelling
against a patriarchal racist
and consumerist society in which it felt it had no place.
New drugs were on the market, LSD, mescaline, peyote.
It was the golden age of hallucinogens.
Experimenting was everything.
The body and soul craved for freedom.
- To fire up a joint was to make a political statement
that one was sympathetic to the goals of the counterculture
or one was opposed to the war in Vietnam.
Drugs are very potent symbols.
They're not just about getting high.
(suspenseful music)
- [Narrator] Part of this rebellious youth,
in search of increasingly intense experiences,
sought new highs with heroin.
Within months, the parks where the dreamers
of flower power once sang in unison were turned
into the Hangouts of gangs and dealers.
The number of overdoses skyrocketed.
The only flower scene now with a wreath laid on graves.
And then came another tragedy, in 1969,
more than half a million Americans were sent to fight
in the Vietnamese jungle.
When the soldiers came home,
a third of them were completely hooked on heroin.
- So the question was, who was supplying?
Where was it coming from?
And so, that's what set me off on an inquiry
that started in the library at Yale University,
and eventually took me to interviews
with former CIA operatives and to Southeast Asia itself.
- [Narrator] Alfred McCoy flew to Laos
and headed for the Hills
where the Hmong tribes grew poppys
to supply the local opium dens.
Still a young student, he was the first one,
locked the dark secrets of narco politics.
To drive back the communists,
the CIA had assembled a secret army of 30,000 men
in remote villages and set up a well-oiled logistics plan.
It chartered planes to transport men and supplies
and clear 200 landing strips.
The Hmong took advantage of the comings and goings
of these CIA planes to transport their opium.
- So, that the CIA couldn't have found out,
hadn't found out, wasn't aware,
that's improbable and extreme.
If a 26-year-old graduate student with no assets,
no authority can find this out in a conversation,
then I'm sure they could have done the same
should they have bothered to ask those questions?
Of course, they knew it, but it wasn't their priority.
Now, were they complicit in the traffic?
Were they principals in the traffic?
No, I don't think so.
- [Narrator] Continuing his investigation,
Alfred McCoy set out to meet the commander in chief
of the Laotian army, Major General Ouane Rattikone,
suspected of being the head of this opium traffic ring.
- I stood on a street corner in Vientiane.
I hailed a taxi.
I said, do you know where General Ouane lives?
The guy said, "Yeah, sure."
He took me there.
I got out, I knocked on his door.
I walked in, I introduced myself,
and I sat down with him.
He actually got out his ledger from the opium,
regime in Laos and to walk me through the accounts
and show me that he was running his accounts, honestly,
that he was buying opium in these areas
and he was exporting it to South Vietnam here,
and the money was being deposited in banks,
all run properly, you see.
(gentle ominous music)
- [Narrator] As long as Ouane's opium supplied
the local market, the CIA covered him.
But the next step was nonetheless obvious.
The major general turned to Hong Kong GIES chemists
to refine the opium into heroin, and the trap was set.
The heroin was dispatched to U.S. army bases,
customs officers, policemen,
and South Vietnamese politicians unscrupulously
profited from the traffic,
helping to poison the young American soldiers
who had come to fight at their side.
At the height of the Cold War,
heroin threatened to defeat the U.S. Army
while it was decimating the youth back home
on American soil.
On June the 17th, 1971,
President Richard Nixon took a radical U-turn
in American drug policy. - Take a seat
Ladies and gentlemen, (indistinct).
America's public enemy number one
in the United States is drug abuse.
In order to fight and defeat this enemy,
it is necessary to wage a new,
all out offensive.
(suspenseful music)
- [Narrator] The war on drugs had been declared.
(suspenseful music)