PART One

Image courtesy of the National Museum of American History – A British East India Trade Company coin struck in 1835, the firm that declared a monopoly on opium sales and distribution beginning in 1775, and which was very involved in opium production in Afghanistan.

PROVIDENCE – Rachel Maddow does not often miss capturing the nuance behind the news in her reporting. But when she retold the harrowing tale of Afghanistan interpreter, “Zak,” who finally found his way out of Afghanistan with his wife and four children, thanks to the intervention of a former marine, Major Thomas Shueman, now living in Newport, R.I., Maddow seemed to have missed the story behind the story, which was hiding in plain sight, to borrow a phrase from author Sarah Kendzior.

In 2010, the U.S. Marines had been sent in to relieve British forces, where the British had been fighting to maintain control of the Sangin province against the Taliban forces, sustaining heavy casualties. During the subsequent fighting, the interpreter “Zak” had proven his mettle numerous times, heroically fighting alongside Shueman and his fellow Marines.

The missing part of the story was the fact that Sangin was what was known as a “poppy” province, where the Taliban was defending its investment in growing opium and then refining it into heroin.

As The Washington Post documented in its Dec. 9, 2019, story, “Overwhelmed by Opium,” the Taliban controlled “a network of clandestine opium production labs that U.S. officials said was helping to generate $200 million a year in drug money for the Taliban.”

Since 2001, The Washington Post reported, “The United States had spent about $9 billion on a dizzying array of programs to deter Afghanistan from supplying the world with heroin,” without success.

The story laid out the hard-to-refute details: “Afghanistan dominates the global opium markets. Last year [in 2018], it produced 82 percent of the world’s supply, according to estimates by the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime.”

Further, the story continued: “Defying U.S. efforts to curtail it, Afghan opium production has skyrocketed over the course of the 18-year war. Last year [in 2018], Afghan farmers grew poppies – the plant from which opium is extracted to make heroin – on four times as much land as they did in 2002.”

The story laid out the consequences of the Taliban’s control of the heroin trade: “The booming industry tightened its stranglehold on the Afghan economy, corrupted large sectors of the Afghan government, and provided the Taliban with a rising source of revenue.”

Translated, the 20-year war in Afghanistan was being fought by the Taliban to maintain control of the lucrative drug trade in heroin, which fed the demand for heroin in Europe, Iran and other parts of Asia.

All of the previous U.S. administrations – including President Bush, President Obama, and President Trump, were complicit in the policies around turning a blind eye toward the heroin production, after some initial attempts to control it, according to the reporting. So, too, were the U.S. military and the U.S. Congress, it appears. By ending U.S. involvement in Afghanistan, the Biden administration was calling it quits on the illicit narcotics empire underwriting the flow of heroin.

To put it bluntly, the failure of American policy in Afghanistan was rooted in the financial rewards of drug trafficking and the corruption that sustained the Taliban and financed intelligence work by U.S. agencies and the military.

As Elizabeth Gould and Paul Fitzgerald, the authors of Invisible History: Afghanistan’s Untold Story, explained to ConvergenceRI in an interview, “The drug trade provided the financing for the black projects for intelligence.” [See PART Two.]

What history could tell us, if we were willing to listen
The inconvenient narrative about the economics of the heroin trade in Afghanistan eluded not just MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow but also WPRI’s Ted Nesi, who, in his recent “Newsmakers” interview with Sen. Jack Reed, attempted to explore the reasons about what went wrong with American policy during the 20-year war, begun in the aftermath of the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on Sept. 11, 2001.

Afghanistan was the lead item in Nesi’s Notes on Saturday, Aug. 21: What went wrong in Afghanistan? It’s a question that must be asked about not only the chaotic evacuation of the past week but also the entire American military commitment over the past two decades. Appearing on this week’s Newsmakers, Jack Reed offered this answer: “Very succinctly, the capacity of the Afghan government and the military forces – and they’re linked – was overestimated, and the capacity of the Taliban was underestimated.”

What was “missing” from the discussion was the role that heroin trade played in Afghanistan. Both Sen. Reed and Nesi are considered astute political observers. The question is: Why did the drugs get left out of the conversation?

I do not recall
The answer could perhaps be found in a federal courtroom in White Plains, N.Y., as the final stages of a bankruptcy trail were taking place before Judge Robert Drain, involving the attempts by the Sackler family, owners of Purdue Pharma, the manufacturers of OxyContin, an addictive prescription painkiller that many have alleged helped to fuel the opioid epidemic in the U.S., to escape future liability from civil lawsuits.

A wave of forgetfulness seemed to have afflicted the Sacklers throughout their time on the stand last week, a kind of selective memory, perhaps a diagnosable condition for those that pimped addictive painkillers for profit, similar to the forgetfulness that afflicted U.S. government officials in the way that they rationalized how the war in Afghanistan was prosecuted for two decades.

On Tuesday, Aug. 17, David Sackler testified that family members would contribute $4.5 billion in cash and control of a charity fund as part of pending settlement only if one provision stayed in place – providing protection from all present and future lawsuits over opioids and Purdue activity for family members, according to reporting by Geoff Mulvihill for the Associated Press.

The next day, Richard Sackler, who is David Sackler’s father, and who served at different times as president and chairman of Purdue’s board, told the court that he did not believe he, his family or the company had any responsibility for the opioid crisis in the U.S. To quote WPRO’s Steve Klamkin, “Really?”

The proceedings were carried live on a call, bad audio and all, with the best reporting being done in real time on Twitter, by insightful commentators such as Charlotte Bismuth, the author of Bad Medicine: Catching New York’s deadliest pill pusher, and Patrick Radden Keefe, author of Empire of Pain: The secret history of the Sackler Dynasty.

Here are some relevant moments they captured from the testimony on Thursday, Aug. 19:

• “Mr. [Richard] Sackler do you have any responsibility for the opioid crisis? [in a tweet by Keefe].

“No.”

“Does the Sackler family have any responsibility for the opioid crisis?”

“No.”

“Does Purdue Pharma have any responsibility for the opioid crisis?”

“No.”

• Ex-Purdue Pharma director Mortimer D.A. Sackler, testifying now, says he was shocked and disappointed when Purdue pled guilty in 2020 to federal felonies over marketing of OxyContin [from a retweet by Charlotte Bismuth of Wall Street Journal reporter Jonathan Randles].

He said management had been telling the board they were in compliance with relevant laws.

• This is quite a show. Sackler is mumbling, out of it, confused about the exhibits, “Dr. Sackler, we can’t hear you, can you move close to the mic?” [from another retweet by Charlotte Bismuth of Patrick Radden Keefe from the Wednesday, Aug. 18, court proceedings].

Now he’s complaining about laryngitis [?!] Shades of Vincent Gigante, the mafioso who went around in a bathrobe & feigned senility.

• I just want to nominate Dr. Richard Sackler for an Academy Award for his incredible performance of a man who knows nothing, recalls nothing and denies everything [from a tweet from Charlotte Bismuth from Thursday, Aug. 19].

• David Sackler confirms that his family will continue to market opioids through the companies they continue to own, in the countries where the products are approved… [from another tweet from Charlotte Bismuth from Wednesday, Aug. 18].

… until those companies are sold, despite all the deaths. “Yes, there are deaths from opioids in many jurisdictions around the world… that is one of the risks associated with opioid therapy.”

Truth without consequences?
If the Sackler family is successful in its quest to shield its wealth from further civil litigation, it would enable the Sacklers to preserve as much as $10 billion in assets that have been carefully stashed away.

R.I. Attorney General Peter Neronha is opposing the bankruptcy settlement with the Sacklers. [See links below to ConvergenceRI stories, “The high cost of consulting firms making policy,” and “Marking 50 years of the failed war on drugs.”

[That same kind of “immunity” seems to be the goal of former President Donald Trump and his administration, including former U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who crafted the give-away of Afghanistan to the Taliban following the November 2020 election, in which Trump was soundly defeated.]

A matter of faith
Here in Rhode Island, the battle against the ever-escalating drug overdose epidemic from opioids continues to be fought in the trenches by governmental agencies, with renewed “innovative” attempts to reframe the problem and adopt harm reduction strategies.

In the midst of the Sackler bankruptcy trial, while the situation in Afghanistan deteriorated, the R.I. Department of Behavioral Healthcare, Developmental Disabilities, and Hospitals [BHDDH] announced on Aug. 18 the launch of a new program to address the overdose epidemic, focused on communities of color.

Called the “Imani Breakthrough Recovery Project,” imani meaning faith in Swahili, the new initiative is a faith-based, person-centered, culturally informed harm reduction recovery program that takes place in churches, a program that was first developed three years ago in Connecticut.

In Connecticut, the Imani Breakthrough Recovery Program was described as a “culturally, spiritually, and trauma-informed, to assist individuals recovering from opioid use/abuse and other drug or alcohol problems.”

The Connecticut program had two parts:

• A group component, with 12 weeks of classes and mutual support focused on wellness enhancement and what is known as the five Rs – roles, resources, responsibilities, relationships, and rights, and their importance to recovery and community connection.

• A wellness coaching component, where coaches provide weekly check-ins to support you in your recovery goals during the initial 12 weeks, as well as up to a month afterward.

In the Rhode Island version, the Imani Breakthrough Recovery Program also includes SAMHSA’s “8 Dimensions of Wellness,” a recovery framework, as well as the concept of recovery capital, which provides metrics to create recovery outcome measurements.

Linda Mahoney, the state’s Opioid Treatment Authority and an administrator at R.I. BHDDH, learned of the Imani project and brought the concept to the Recovery Workgroup of Gov. McKee’s Overdose Prevention and Intervention Task Force, according to the news release announcing the initiative. The Recovery Workgroup then chose to pursue the strategy here in Rhode Island over the next several years.

The Imani recovery initiative in Rhode Island is being funded through $877,568 in federal funds from the Mental Health Block Grant COVID 19 supplemental funds, and Substance Abuse Prevention and Treatment Block Grant American Rescue Plan Supplemental Funds.

Keeping pace with the SUPERPAC RI
As if there were not already too much going on, amidst the Sackler bankruptcy trial, the disruptions in the forces in Afghanistan, the launch of the Imani recovery initiative, and the continuing struggle by Rhode Island to contain the contagious Delta variant of COVID-19, there was one more significant recovery event.

On Thursday, Aug. 18, the Substance Use Policy, Education & Recovery PAC in Rhode Island, or SUPERPAC, celebrated its third annual birthday at Layali on Weybosset Street in Providence. Uprise RI’s Steve Ahlquist received an award for his journalism, “The Watch Dog Award.”

Part Two

In Afghanistan, it was a war financed by heroin

The unwritten story of the U.S. military involvement in Afghanistan includes a willful blindness around heroin trafficking by the Taliban

It may be a bit risky to write this story; by reading it, you risk becoming complicit in understanding that there are suppressed facts about the U.S. involvement with drug trafficking in Afghanistan, specifically about the production of opium and refining it into heroin, run by the Taliban and allegedly financed by the Pakistani intelligence service, its military and its banks, that has functioned as the financial linchpin of the 20-year war in Afghanistan waged by the U.S., far different from all sorts of false policy and political goals that have been used to rationalize our military presence.

It might be wiser to follow the directive of Irish poet Seamus Heaney, who in a poem about the troubles in Northern Ireland, offered the advice: whatever you say, say nothing.

So, yes, writing this story may prove to be risky; my best protection is having you read the story and then share it.

As detailed in PART One, “Connecting the Sacklers, Afghanistan and addiction,” ConvergenceRI offered “a history lesson for those who still pretend to know nothing, recall nothing, and deny everything.”

The “I do not recall” approach by the Sackler family is more than just a legal strategy; it is a refusal to take responsibility for their greed in making billions of dollars in pushing and pimping OxyContin, a highly addictive prescription painkiller. Bankuptcy appears to be a deliberate corporate strategy to evade legal and financial accountability for their actions.

R.I. Attorney General Peter Neronha remains one of nine state attorneys general still seeking to hold the Sacklers accountable.

The willful “blindness” of the Sackler family strikes a resonant chord with the similar “I see nothing” strategy of the U.S. military and the State Department in ignoring the heroin trafficking business of the Taliban, a tradition of corruption that dates back hundreds of years to the British East India Company in pursuing a global monopoly in pushing opium.

In PART Two, ConvergenceRI conducted an interview with Elizabeth Gould and Paul Fitzgerald, authors of Invisible History: Afghanistan’s Untold Story, as a way to better understand the history of drug trafficking of heroin by the Taliban in Afghanistan. Stephen Kinzer, the author of The Brothers, about John Foster Dulles and Allen Dulles, had recommended that ConvergenceRI speak with Gould and Fitzgerald. [They are also the authors of Crossing Zero: The Af/Pak War at the Turning Point of the American Empire.]

In their recent article, “President Carter, Do You Swear To Tell the Truth, the Whole Truth, and Nothing But the Truth?” Gould and Fitzgerald lay out the historical framework detailing the strategy of Carter’s National Security Advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski, to launch a secret program, six months before the Russians invaded Afghanistan, in order to draw “the Russians into the Afghan trap.” [See link to story below.]

Here is the ConvergenceRI interview with Elizabeth Gould and Paul Fitzgerald, talking about the role of heroin trafficking as a geopolitical tactic of intelligence services in what Rudyard Kipling once described as “the great game” of espionage.

ConvergenceRI: Do you have any questions for me, about ConvergenceRI?
GOULD: What brings you to this particular type of story?

ConvergenceRI: I am the editor and publisher of ConvergenceRI, which is a digital news platform published weekly every Monday morning, launched in September of 2013, that covers the convergence of health, science, innovation, technology, research, education, and community, attempting to break down the silos and report on stories across the artificial barriers, the silos, that exist in most news coverage.

I have covered extensively the opioid epidemic, with a focus on the recovery community’s efforts to fashion a different approach around harm reduction.

I have been covering the ongoing legal bankruptcy proceedings against the Sacklers, the family that owns the privately held Purdue Pharma, and their efforts to preserve their wealth by evading future liability from civil litigation.

It struck me what was missing from the stories about what was occurring in Afghanistan, as the U.S. military prepares to leave the country after 20 years of war, was he fact that the Taliban run a huge heroin trafficking operation, which is the basis of their finances, and have done so for years. The Taliban was producing 80 percent of all the heroin supply for Europe and Asia, controlling the growing of opium and its refinement into heroin.

But nowhere has that become part of the story about what went wrong in Afghanistan. There appears to be a similar kind of blindness, if that it the right term, regarding the foreign policy and strategy, about the reasons why we got into Afghanistan, and the role that the CIA had played in the early 1980s in supporting the insurgency against the Russian invasion.

The way I initially found out about the State Department/CIA’s involvement was that when I lived in Washington, D.C., I was the editor of Environmental Action Magazine, and I had housemate who worked with the State Department/CIA in Pakistan, who was responsible for funneling weapons and money and who knows what else to the insurgent forces, including Osama Bin Laden in those days.
GOULD: What year would that have been?

ConvergenceRI: That would have been 1981, 1982, 1983. He was back in the states in 1984.
GOULD: Those were very hot years in that arena.

ConvergenceRI: I had reached out to Stephen Kinzer, because he has written a lot about the world that the CIA and the State Department had played in pushing an agenda overthrowing of governments, both in his book, Overthrow, and again, in The Brothers, looking at the strategic policies of the Dulles brothers.

I thought he might serve as an excellent source for this story. And he, in turn, referred me to you. So, that is how I got to from here to there, and here again.
GOULD: Right, right.

FITZGERALD: You know, the whole drug thing is at the core of our new book, the story about the assassination of Adolph Dubs, the American Ambassador to Afghanistan, back in 1979.

GOULD: We got the impression from your note that you were trying to get more details about what happened back in the 1980s.

ConvergenceRI: What is the title of the new book?
GOULD: Valediction. It is actually a memoir. But it does lay out the history associated the drug trade’s effects on  Ambassador Dubs trying to move the whole issue of the Soviet Union and the outcome of trying to stabilize the area.

The drug issue was really an underlying issue all along, but it has never been talked about.

ConvergenceRI: Why has it never been talked about? Is it blindness? Is it because too many people are making too much money?
GOULD: It is notorious for basically financing the black projects for the intelligence community.

That is an underlying problem of the whole nature of illegal drugs. That is the BCCI [the Bank of Credit and Commerce International, headquartered in Karachi and London], you know, the Pakistani bank, which was the bank that basically was managing all the drug money during that era. They were the money launderers.

FITZGERALD: They weren’t the only ones. They were the best known ones. It got to be so lucrative that so many people, at a high level, knew about it, and they just were able to quash any investigation. There were a couple of good books that were written about BCCI.

ConvergenceRI: I am somewhat familiar with those. When I go back into the history, when you look at Vietnam, and you look at the CIA and Air America and the transportation of refined heroin coming out of Laos, you have during the 1980s, in parallel, all the investments that were being made in the Contras were all funded by cocaine trafficking, apparently underwritten by the CIA and the U.S. government.

FITZGERALD: There was a major shift at the end of the Vietnam War for the drug industry from Southeast Asia to Southcentral Asia.

That was a major event that occurred. I am sure you have seen the movie, “American Gangster.” It showed the tail end of U.S. involvement there.

There was a movie made back in the 1980s, “Air America,” the guy who wrote that screenplay wrote it up beautifully, and then the studio bought it, paid him a million dollars, and told him, “We want you to walk away from it.”

They turned into a Robert Downey [romantic] fantasy with Mel Gibson.

So, there was very high-level stuff from the very beginning that has been going on in terms of [tamping] down on the real story about what is going on.

A couple of French journalists, back in the 1970s, wrote a very detailed book about how the drug trade was moving from Southeast Asia to Southcentral Asia. I am going to get some quotes; I will be right back.

GOULD: What I think, in terms of our analysis at this point, the drugs, basically, is about finance. No matter what, that is basically the purpose. And, of course, drug addiction is kind of a downstream effect.

You have to sell the drugs to get the money. And obviously, that is what happened.

But I think it is really the U.S. military role in basically facilitating all of the [drug trafficking] activities. That has been going on now for 20 years in Afghanistan.

That is part of the problem, that the [drug trafficking of heroin] is a function of the U.S. military.

ConvergenceRI: Can you assume that the U.S. military at the highest levels knew all about this?

GOULD: I cannot say for the record that yes, everyone knew. That I do not know. But the fact that… Paul brought up the movie, “American Gangster,” that was exactly what the point of the whole film was about. You know, that [Frank Lucas, the main character] had a contact in the military, which was helping him get the drugs he needed. That was the level that we are talking about.

How high up the food chain [did it go]? [Was it] on a need-to-know basis? I imagine that there were quite a few people who didn’t want to know so they can’t be held accountable.

FITZGERALD: We talked to Chuck Cogan, on a couple of occasions, who ran the operations for the CIA from 1979 to 1984 [serving as chief of the Near East and South Asian Division in the CIA’s Directorate of Operations], and we asked him about the drug trafficking. He said, of course, there were drugs there; everyone knew that there were drugs there.

Cogan said that that wasn’t their goal, and that wasn’t what they were directly involved in. The Pakistani ISI [intelligence services] were the ones that were actually running the drugs in the 1980s.

They set up a trucking company, actually. A correspondent from TIME magazine who covered these wars told us, he said, “Planes were never empty, flying in and out.” They would bring the guns in and they would fly out the heroin.

GOULD: That was one of the functions of the military.

FITZGERALD: There was a woman, Mary McGrory, who was a columnist for The Boston Globe.

Early on, after the Soviets invaded Afghanistan in 1979, she wrote a column for The Boston Globe, in which she said: “What is the United States doing supporting all these drug dealers in Afghanistan?” Because that is what these so-called freedom fighters are really all about.

And that was one of the few commentaries that was ever written about it, and they started to call her out, saying that she wasn’t in possession of her senses, and all kinds of things.

When the boom came down, it came down on us, too. We did a documentary in 1981, and we showed it at the Parker House, and some of the local media and some of the international media were there, too.

And, Theodore Eliot, who was the Ambassador to Afghanistan from the United States, from 1972 until 1978, he came to the event, and he was then the dean of the Fletcher School of Diplomacy at Tufts University, and he basically said, “You are not allowed; who gave you permission to say this? Who gave you permission to actually show this part of the story? You are not allowed to do that.”

Right in front of everybody, he embarrassed himself.

GOULD: That was at the end of 1981.

FITZGERALD: If any journalist came out and talked about anything other than the official story about what was really going on, which was basically a fabrication, then, you know, you were not allowed to profit from your journalism any more.

GOULD: The drugs were always viewed as secondary issues, which was very convenient for keeping a secret, or for keeping it as something not to focus on, as Chuck Cogan said. They knew all about the drugs. But they weren’t personally involved during the Soviet occupation.

But that, of course, wasn’t the case in Vietnam, during the Vietnam War, and it certainly wasn’t the case during the last 20 years in Afghanistan.

ConvergenceRI: What questions, as a journalist, need to be asked as we move forward? What investigations need to be done? What should journalists be focusing on?

GOULD: You are dealing with a problem and a level of corruption that is so total, that actually, the drug issue hasn’t really come up, partly because there are so many other complete misrepresentations. And that is part of what our research has been about, being able to track the reality of how the Soviets ended up in Afghanistan, and the role that the Carter administration played.

Yes, so the drug aspect was part of it, there is definitely evidence, in fact, we can send you a paper that we wrote last year, about the Carter administration’s active role, in guaranteeing that the Soviets were going to end up in Afghanistan, and ultimately, in what Zbigniew Brzezinski described as “their own Vietnam.”

The drug aspect is in there, too. It is the story about the Carter official who was trying to control the drugs, and was basically told by the Carter administration that he was not allowed to tinker with any of the issues around drugs. And, he was shot.

So, you have that kind of evidence, where there were officials who did not realize about what some of the underlying objectives were.

Those issues never seemed like the front-end issues. Because the politics, and the military-industrial complex, sucked up all the attention.

FITZGERALD: What you have to realize is that the British East India Company had a monopoly on the opium that they were shipping to China in 1775, before the United States was even a country. The [British] built their empire, Hong Kong was basically established as a banking empire to launder the drug money.

But the fact was, it wasn’t illegal at the time. And even when it became illegal, it wasn’t illegal because it was immoral, that they were destroying people’s lives, it was because they couldn’t tax it.

That is the way that the DEA was setting it up under President Nixon. You had this whole evolution of the anti-drug people, the war on drugs and the creation of the Drug Enforcement Agency under Nixon, you got this whole process at work, it is like the evolution of an idea, using the cover of morality and the whole chemical thing that drug addiction does to people, but it is really about business, and it is a big business. And it has been around for a long time.

GOULD: The drugs were used to finance black projects, completely with dark money.

To read sidebar commentaries, go to:

http://newsletter.convergenceri.com/stories/connecting-the-sacklers-afghanistan-and-addiction,6728

http://newsletter.convergenceri.com/stories/in-afghanistan-it-was-a-war-financed-by-heroin,6732

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Richard Asinof is the founder and editor of ConvergenceRI, an online subscription newsletter offering news and analysis at the convergence of health, science, technology and innovation in Rhode Island.