I know nations like north Korea make money in the drug trade, and there is a lot of low and mid level bribery of public officials in places like Mexico.
What I am wondering is do nations attempt to flood enemy nations with low cost drugs to create instability? Did the US try to flood the ussr with cheap amphetamines and opiates, or vice versa? Would that even be effective (creating domestic problems to weaken an enemy or competitor nation)? Did any enemy nations look at the problems the crack epidemic was causing and say ‘how can we make this worse’?
Everyone knew that Fluoride in the public water supply, together with displays of Peace Symbols on T-shirts sold in head shops, was a Communist plot to rot the minds of American youth, thus to make them easy pushovers for the gleeful godless Commies.
I don’t know if that is the same thing. Was the UK trying to make Chinese people addicted to cheap Opium so it could take advantage of/gain control over China?
No, it was trying to ease the balance of payments. China sold tea, a drug the west wanted. They demanded silver in return, so all the silver was leaving Europe and North AMerica and landing in China. (why does this have a familiar ring?)
In order to earn back some of that silver, the British decided to find out what they could sell to the Chinese to earn back some of that silver, and of course mind-numbing addictive narcotics sprang to mind as a quick way to make hard cash by the boatload. (Why does this sound familiar too?)
Oddly enough, the Chinese for some reason objected, hence the war.
It wasn’t a deliberate attempt to subdue or distract, just an attempt to be capitalist.
If it feasible and doable it would be used to undermine countries. The Nazis had a plot to mint counterfeit American and the British Pound Note money to undermine our county. The Nazis ended up dropping their counterfeit money in a very deep lake.
The Taliban stopped production of poppy plants use to make opium in Afghanistan for a while. Then they realized that a large number of users were from places like the USA and Europe. Plus they could make a lot of money selling the stuff and buy weapons. Win-Win for them.
Also, something usually ignored, opium does have a therapeutic effect: it will halt the course of diarrhea, in the progression of dysentery. Which was an urban problem, worldwide. You could say the West was simply trying to bring ancient Greek and Roman medicine to backward nations (Japan never fell for it.)
You could say that, if opium wasn’t highly addictive. But even then, in those times, addiction was an ethical or moral failure. Hey, we’re just trying to sell them some syrup to cure a toothache or a case of the trots. No one told to them to smoke it. Funny, that attitude seems to have never died out, you hear it all the time, domestically, with regards to oxycodone.
'Course, people believed that morals and ethics were genetic traits as well back then, so the had to believe, for all the wrong reasons, that the opium addition would spread in China. In addition to washing their hands of the responsibility for it.
Still. Opium. Cough suppressant. Painkiller. Diarrhea cure. There’s no reason to hand-wave those away.
I don’t know if this counts exactly, but I remember learning that at times, settlers would ply the local tribes with liquor, knowing that alcoholism would be rampant and wreck the tribe’s society to the point where takeover would be easy. Most recently I read it in Zondervan’s history of Christianity, in reference to the Huron tribe.
That is a good example. I know George Jung said Pablo Escobar was trying to flood the US with cheap cocaine to help cause instability and domestic problems in the US. I don’t know what Escobar’s goal was or if he was just trying to get rich and was just making excuses. Possibly the latter.
Either way, if you flood a nation with cheap addictive drugs you end up increasing spending on law enforcement and prisons, increase organized crime, decrease worker productivity. In and of itself it may not destroy a society but it will weaken it.
Interestingly yesterday we were talking at length with DC’s police chief Kathy Lanier on the subject of the sudden influx of synthetic drugs on the major cities of the United States. She stated (and I cannot claim to know the source of this intel) that the drugs originated in China and are quite cheap to purchase and import.
Another reporter recently interviewed a crack & heroin dealer in DC who was bemoaning the synthetic drugs because they were putting him out of business…
With this in mind it certainly crossed my mind that this is an excellent way to mess with another nation’s economy & society rather effectively and inexpensively.