>> good afternoon. i'm the director of the washington institute for international and public affairs and i am so delighted to be here today to celebrate "killer high", the fantastic new book by peter andreas. as a student of chinese affairs i hardly need to be told about the importance of the relationship between drugs and war . i have course know that it tends to be feelings in china about thecentury of humiliation that began with the opium war , but at the same time it's easy for a lot

of people including myself to think about something like the opium war as maybe an anomaly or something very particular to a very particular time and place and i have to say i'm guilty of thinking about it that way but great scholarship, truly great scholarship like "killer high", like a lot of the work done at the washington institute forces me to see the world ina totally new way . this book has forced me and i think it forces all readers to really focus on the eternal and incredibly expensive relationship between drugs and war. that relationship extends from war conducted by people who are often on a form of drugs, some form of psychoactive substance. it extends to wars and conquest of drugs or the raw materials for drugs. it extends to wars for markets and outlets for drugs and of course we are all

familiar with warsagainst drugs but as peter argues so effectively , this phenomenon, this interaction between psychoactive substances and conflicts is leased throughout history and up to the present. peter makes a number of very interesting conclusions in this book but raises a number of questions and we will have an opportunity with this fantastic panel to delve into some of those questions which will again emphasize this entirely new lens that peter gives us to see the world . let me explain how we are going to proceed. i'm going to ask peter to come up and speak for 10 minutes about the book and i'm going to ask our panelists to comment or 10 minutes or so on the book and we will open it up for questions and answers let me briefly introduce peter and our panelists .

peter andreas is the john hay professor of international studies at the washington institute and at the department of political so science. he is the co-author of 11 books including "killer high" but also smuggler nation, of course my relevance today is we live in a world of trade frictions and talks about piracy and claims about a variety of countries and illicit activities. next to speak will be chris chivers who is a pulitzer prize winning longform writer and journalist for the new york times, i'm sort all of you are familiar with his work, i'm a big fan. he's worked at the new york times says 1999, his career as a foreign correspondent as focused on conflict regions spanning afghanistan, iraq, chechnya, libya and syria and others. chris also served in the marine corps infantryman and a combat veteran from the first persian gulf war. the next to speak will be

angelica duran-martinez who is associate professor of political science at the university of massachusetts global, angelica is a phd recipient from brown and she is a noted expert on latin american and comparative politics but with a particular emphasis on organized crime and criminality, illicit markets and the relationship between the actors and non-state actors, she is the author of the award-winning 2018 book the politics of drug violence, criminal cops and politicians in colombia and mexico that was from oxford university press and stephen duran-martinez kinzer is a senior fellow at the washington institute and in an award-winning journalist who over the course of his career covered 50 countrieson five continents . stephen spent more than 20

years working for the new york times as foreign correspondent bureau chief and among his numerous acclaimed books include the 2019 volume poison or in chief: signy gottlieb and the cia search for mind control, topical for the discussion today with that let me turn the microphone over to peter andreas. [applause] >> okay. thank you all for coming. if you are here because you think this is about the made for tv dvd "killer high", sorry to disappoint you. i'm sure that dvd has and will outsell my book. the genre for that ibelieve on amazon's horror/comedy . so my book is definitely horror. there's no comedy in it.

the title "killer high" has grown on me. it wasn't my selection. my choice was originally the subtitle for the book, a history of war in six drugs. what i tried to do in a mere 300 something pages is retail the history of warfare through the lens of drugs . and retail the history of drugs through the lens of war and hopefully for those of you who end up reading the book you will not think of war again in the same way and you won't quite think of drugs in the same way. in fact i'd like to mention that drugs and war work together and overtime came became quite addicted to each other. my one line would be drugs made war and war made drugs. these two things tend to be treated quite separately and in the literature on drugs

and war, i tried to tie them together across time, across place and across the psychoactive substance. the motivation for the book was not history, it was to bring history into what i consider a policy debate that suffers from a severe case of historical amnesia, a debate about the so-called nexus between drugs and conflict. we talked today about narco states. the first thing that comes to mind is afghanistan when we think about narco insurgents or narco terrorism we talk about afghanistan but looked at this issue from a much deeper historical sweep coming back not just years and decades centuries, the first true narco state is probably great britain. the first in fact great britain is probably the first narco empire, if you think about the sheer importance of alcohol taxes, the importance

of the t trade. the powerful drug, i'm addicted to it, it's called caffeine, not nicotine. don't touch the stuff. for the importance of the opium trade . for the rise of britain as the world's foremostmaritime power . in fact, narco insurgents, yes, it's the taliban, but it was also george washington, why do i say george washington? that conflict very much depended on revenue generated by tobacco. in fact, that alone from france based on tobacco revenue and the brits were so upset about it a bird tobacco field whenever they found them. including tobacco fields owned by thomas jefferson. so i try to do is systematically unravel and interrogate, unpack the relationship between drugs and war. and i find there's five

relationships, what is war while on drugs literally combat and drug use in wartime not just combatants but also on the homefront as well, drug use by civilians dealing with coping with wartime, obviously war is stressful work. no surprise that drugs help soldiers cope, they also help them celebrate victories, help them prepare for battle, they give him liquid courage after all.i also talk about more through drugs. totally different than war while on drugs, word through the drugs meeting using drugs to fund war. that ranges from alcohol and tobacco taxes to cocaine and opium revenue, the full gamut from illicit to illicit drugs. natural to semi synthetic to police impact drugs. from the most benign to the

most dangerous psychoactive substances . then there's war for drugs. which is actually distinct from the first two were at war for drugs is going to war over markets and as ed mentioned, the most famous case of this of course are the opium wars of the mid-19th century where britain forced opium onto china through the barrel of a gun. but it goes all the way up to the present, if we think about going on in mexico today. more people have died in mexico since late 2006 and have died in iraq and afghanistan combined. drug violence that although security analysts are reluctant to call it war, if you actually look at the sheer number of casualties, if you look at how well armed the perpetrators are using military grade equipment, the

actors themselves are often militarily trained, often defectors from the military and in one case us trained anti-drug force turned into a drug squad for drug trafficking organizations. and then you think about the state itself has deployed its military and a front-line role in fighting drugs, the mexican military is essentially an anti-drug course at this point and then you say it's not just mexico but also colombia to some extent and brazil to some extent and even the united states in the 1980s as loosened the policy, thomas restricted the use of the us military or law enforcement purposes, now very much indebted in the war on drugs. at the border and beyond and just proliferation also of militarized policing in our own community, swat teams invented before the war on drugs but really took off thanks to the war on drugs and this is using military technologies, ex-military personnel and approaches to fighting a substance.

there is a war against drugs, which is closely related but distinct than war for drugs. war against drugs started as a metaphor, nixon declared war against drugs, he didn't actually send in troops to fight drugs . but since the 1980s, it's become progressively more militarized so that we could actually call it an outright war. and last but not least, this is probably the research in the book that most surprised me is drugs after war. how much war and war itself the lasting legacy in terms of drug production, trafficking, regulation, drug tastes have been fundamentally altered. thanks to wars in ways that we often don't give more credit for. just to give youa few examples , why are we a coffee drinking rather than a tea drinkingnation ? because we won the american

revolution. the brits went on with tea, we turned to coffee. we not only turned the coffee, we turned to whiskey. one was the drink of choice produced in long island before the american revolution but it still arrives which is what kept much of the nation going including massachusetts and whiskey became the i'll call it beverage of choice, it was a national drink, it was no longer needed for imports from abroad, it was considered patriotic to turn against whiskey and turn against that british strength t cells are very take that we now take for granted were actually a result of war. the very criminalization of cocaine is a product of world war ii. very few people remember that cocaine was legally produced by japanese pharmaceutical companies , coat was thrown in job. the destruction of those

fields and destruction of the japanese army suitable cocaine industry is part of the us victory in world war ii. the us had turned against cocaine earlier of course it wasn't only with the victory of japan that the us was able to globalize its preference for cocaine prohibition so cocaine was one of the biggest losers of world war ii. illegal cocaine, decades later was arguably one of the biggest winners. so there's five relationships, now i want to tell you a little bit in the few minutes that i have about the six he drugs and i've already given you hints because i mentioned some of them . the oldest, most multipurpose and arguably double-edged of thedrugs is alcohol . it goes back, it's to beer and wine. and then the distilling

revolution really did indeed revolutionize things. think about why france is the world's most famous wine producing region in the world. it's the roman conquest is what brought wine to france. bordeaux was set up as a port by the romans after the romans retreated and were pushed back, wind indoors in france. the distilling revolution was absolutely essential to the conquest of the new world. think about theimportance of alcohol and ethnic cleanser in westward expansion . in fact, part alcohol become so important that it was actually rations on both sides of the american revolution. after the revolution whiskey became part of us military rations. in fact, the british to leave

it or not had runrations until the early 1970s on their naval ships . the second drug, tobacco arrives much later than alcohol but once it arrives, equally potent and in fact, some of the downsides of alcohol, alcohol basically can raise a lot of revenue but you also might have a drunk military. the czar was able to finance the largest standing army in europe with vodka revenue but his soldiers were drunk. tobacco is the ideal war drug, highly portable, fights both anxiety and boredom, relieves, is highly taxable and doesn't impede performance even if it might eventually kill you . the globalization of tobacco is intimately also about the spread of warfare, soldiers globalize warfare and the very mode of tobacco

consumption was closely influenced by war so why did we turn away from lucas and pipes to cigars and then cigarettes, to increasingly portable, easily produced to move, this was the intimate story of war. in fact, cigarettes by the time world war ii came around was the most valued ration in cigarette soldier rations. third, being. my drug of choice and i'm completely addicted to the stuff. it's the most, world most popular psychoactive substance. but certainly far from a benign relationship to war, arguably stimulated imperial expansion, i already mentioned the british empire of tea but then we also have the rise of caffeinated soldiers. it's fascinating in the rise

of the us civil war, is mentioned in soldier diaries were often been done, cannon or rifle. coffee is just this essential ingredient to keep soldiers going area and since coffee was an instant hit on the battlefield in world war ii and then outlived world war ii . the coffee break was actually introduced for defense workers during world war ii and then outlived world war ii and institutionalized in theworkplace in the 1950s . and then all the way up to today, the favorite beverage of military bases across the world are hyper caffeinated beverages like red bull and monster and so on.

fourth, opium. i had already mentioned opium wars are an extreme case of the relationship between war and drugs which is more for drugs, imperial wars but also for example the japanese imperial occupation of china. there's no way japan in the late 1930s could fund its occupation of china without narcotics. and amphetamines in extreme case of war while on drugs, sun tzu since the is the essence of war, he did not mean amphetamine but maybe pretty impressed at how important amphetamines were to keep soldiers on many sides going during world war ii. and the last but not least, cocaine. the extreme case of war against drugs which i've already said a few things about . i'll stop there and turn things over to chris. [applause]

>> thank you peter. i'm open to compliments, if you look at my copy all the way through, you can tell i was engaged. when i get to the end of the book and i've used up to independence, it's probably a sign it's a hell of a book. i was early lucky reader, peter got me a copy over christmas and i spent the holidays with. it's a work of history asyou just heard . and it, history is an act of making diverse and sometimes divergent sources over here into an understanding and maybe a set of narratives that are relatable and analysis that can make you as you said, reimagine the world and understand a new, in this case the world of war and that was my experience that i don't want to talk about history, at least notdistant history . i want to talk more about now and the more recent observations since the

persian gulf war of 1990 and 91 and the so-called, as the military calls it global war on terror since 2001 and bring events that peter has related up to the present time. are there any recent veterans in the room? any? 1? hopefully there will be some on c-span and you can fact check me so i welcome you to comment afterwards but peter talks about in the book and in his remarks the place, but that various substances have on the battlefield and the battlefield of this era that we live in now have changed a bit through modern conventional militaries, wars become so technical and the military commands have become in some cases so politically sensitive at some of the long-standing drugs of the battlefield are now

prohibited. alcohol most notably. for a varietyof reasons , although military is a heavy user at the personal level of alcohol, at the individual level, at the unit level when deployed, alcohol, i'm not going to call it nonexistent is not but it's almost invisible, it's quite rare. it's very unusual to see alcohol on thebattlefield . some of this is because of the worst, we have been since 2001 and since the gulf war in fact often played out among islamic populations. there is a sensitivity to having the military make the social faux pas of ingesting alcohol in a country where they have been in some cases invited, in other cases occupied but in any case are hoping to get along with the population better than what the they otherwise might so there is still alcohol on the battlefield. you won't see much of it, you've got to look.

when i was in the 80s and 90s, there were among the troops, i was in the marine infantry these things called snakebite gets which was a euphemism, a jump and it was people would have sent to them shampoo ballsperhaps with a little in it .but it was quite guarded, it's very obvious if you know as most everyone here as some sort of relationship with alcohol, very hard to hide alcohol use so i remember one snakebite get being broken out on a worship that i was on but they literally lock the doors and someone said i just got bit by a snake and pulled out a bottle and everyone got like a couple of shots and that was it. and in a 10 monthdeployment. it wasn't much alcohol that at all . but there are many other drugs out there. and there's 80 hypocrisy that you will see in how the military, our military and western militaries in general relate with drugs in their

own forces versus into their at satellite forces and what i mean by that is since the failed hostage rescue attempt late in the carter administration in which drug use was given part of the blame, for the failure, the mechanical failure of the aircraft. there was a story that circulated in the military the years after that the sailor had been smoking pot in a hangar deck and had caused a small fire in a garbage can and this activated the sprinkler system which had raised some saltwater on some of the aircraft and this was considered perhaps a culprit in one of aircraft failures on the mission. whether the story is apocryphal i haven't done the dive research to tell youbut it was widely traffic when i was in and we had as a result , had gone to a service that coming out of vietnam, using marijuana very heavily now had drug testing, routine, regular urinalysis, sometimes randomized.

you know, they would do things like take a unit and poll numbers out of a hat and say if your social security ends in five or seven, you all have to report to the birth budget for urinalysis and it was not quite zero-tolerance, you were given few chances but you would be prosecuted on the first chance and discharged on the 30th and discharged on the second with a negative discharge that affected you for the rest of your life so the use of marijuana really fell off in the 80s. and in our course, in the western forces, but when you go to the battlefield now you will find allies maybe heavily using and some of you said that your book is horror over comedy, some of the scenes i saw in afghanistan would qualify as comedy. there would be tense alongside each other and americans or western forces in one and the afghan partners in the other and the americans would all be given

copenhagen which is a tobacco snuff that basically tastes like auschwitz but it's popular and it's very useful but it's hands-free and it's smokeless so people can take it on patrols or you can operate a vehicle or rifle, a radio, any number of things and you don't have to fumble with matches so it's popular. everyone in the american tent is likely using tobacco and some caffeine. monster is immensely popular in the afghan tent, literally smoke billowing out of it, from hashish or marijuana, hashish was universal among the afghan units, maybe not among every afghan but in every unit it was impossible not to smell it, not to see it and it was openly used and this traffic between the two tents so many americans were going into the afghan tent and getting high and episodically , we will call it provincially, and american

servicemember might be assigned to the agriculture, afghanistan has many different climates with many different agricultural products and in some areas, some regions of afghanistan marijuana is grown extensively. so if you are in the mountains you wouldn't see this marijuana growing but if you were down in this irrigated step you would see massive marijuana fields and many of them would smoke it and i know some units that had heavy marijuana use, so heavy that the commanders had to win at it and be careful about not having drug tests because they would have had to discharge the entire unit or punish the entire unit and there's one story that's related, a close friend of mine who was in the corner, i was a journalist at this point often with the marine corps but this former marine was a urine donor when the test came along.

he would claim that you would donate urine to his friends, particularly in the mortar, the mortar unit was high all the time, basically a big mortar unit and he would donate his urine so that his friends wouldn't get hammered by the rules. but cash and pot while they were very common on the battlefield were mostly isolated to the afghans and this creates a situation of hypocrisy where we have on the one hand something like a zero-tolerance policy for our fourth but our allies are openly, actively, extensively usingit . when you bring it forward, you talked about drugs after the war. arizona had a significant place in the conversation now. the government again as a set of policies that don't align with the human behaviors of the population, the

government serves and what i mean by that is veterans come home and they would go to the va and many of the veterans have a number of problems in which substances, whether illicitly obtained or legally prescribed are seen as part of the common remedy. and the va will prescribe all manner of drugs to the former rank-and-file, to the veterans. antidepressants, opiates for pain but because marijuana is a schedule one controlled substance by the a, federally the va cannot administer marijuana. even though jurisdiction only , many veterans within states like rhode island that have medical marijuanaprograms , obtain marijuana legally and the va will deny using marijuana but they cannot be involved in the prescription which creates pretty disheartening circumstances for manyveterans . i know veterans live in

states that don't have medical marijuana and the rest legal action going out and getting it on the street. i'm not here to say marijuana is necessarily universal panacea, for many of the afflictions that veterans suffer when they come home because i think the science on that is mixed and individual experiences barry and some people find it helps and others don't and self prescription has its pitfalls, it's very hard to get it regulated just right in a way that consistently produce pharmaceutical product is more easy to regulate because the product is the same event to event. so i'm not here to advocate marijuana position but i am here to say that it's deeply confusing for veterans that they are heavily prescribed with opiates and other drugs but do not have any formal counseling on the use of medical marijuana with which

many of them find alleviate their symptoms andi would add that opiates and veterans , some of the studies have shown is linked to twice the rate of overdose among the veteran population so it's a fair question to say how responsible this policy is for the administration for the medical care of our veterans when they have this access and you can argue encouragement to use opiates which they feel with some justification and the data in their corner is much more dangerous and marijuana and my 10 minutesare up. and it's your turn . [applause] >> first of all i have to say that i'm happy to be here today so i graduated and it's just fantastic to be home. i was here as a student so i'm honored to be commenting on your book today. he had an enormous intellectual influence on me and on the work i do so needless to say, i have enjoyed his other books but i have always admired serious

intellectual rigor and he has to tackle big questions but in clear simple language and i think this is very clear, this is presented for a wider audience and i think that like it says on the jacket of the book because i work for a public intellectual but it is great intellectual rigor and i think that's something that makes it fabulous. i think this book also builds out on and continues things that you have already explored in his work and i will say he mentions it at the end of the book but there are like three main blocks that i think in this book, that in appearing in the rest of his book and the first one is this call to basically go back to history, to think of problems of violence so elicit markets and i think that's a big, that's an important, such an important thing because we tend to

exaggerate anything that has to do with violence and i think that has to do with markets and drugs so go back to history and show us that problems that we tend to consider that our new, actually our deep rooted. history is very important. the second point that i think is part of his work and appears here again is how this plays such an important role in re-creating the problems. so the state is very important, as it has been in serious works which is essentially again because when we think how elicit markets, when we think of specially especially today we think of nonstate actors and the state tends to talk about something that is isolated and peter's work has been i think influential for many people like me who really think about the state as deeply immersed in the economics of elicit markets and in the dynamics of

violence. i think that the third element that is clear in this book that has been clear in other of peter's works is that he really has the ability to question simple and exaggerated ideas and he has done it very effectively. and all those elements are present in this book. i think this book is taking on, questioning conventional wisdom and peter mentioned it at the beginning , which is this history of the weight we think about wars and i think he's simply thinking with this researcher and i'm sure probably you would want to take something in political science but i think outside of political science, the influential leaders you are talking about new wars and how through the end of the collapse of the soviet union to have seen the emergence of this kind of work that are mostly nonstate, that things tend to be unregulated,

irrational and that they tend to be mostly motivated by profit and in this whole grievance which is basically the idea that many of the words we see inside the state are mostly materially because of profit and i think that peter is taking on again this literature by telling us a, this relationship between illicit drugs and war is not just about nonstate actors read and it's not just about crazy armies in the underlying countries and i think that the key part of this book. and so peter is showing us this connection between wars and drugs is very old, is multifaceted and that it permeates not only illicit drugs of today but of course the drugs that we probably will never need to talk about drugs and peter really i think challenges us to think of coffee alongside these other more negatively seen

drugs. i would take cocaine or methamphetamines or opium and in some ways off the is the one that seems to be like the odd bird in this book because just because we think about alcohol, nicotine, amphetamines and cocaine, those are drugs that have bigger psychoactive effects and they are not as widely used but i think peter really is able to convince us that coffee does belong in this group and that it does belong the cause of the way that he expanded is highly connected to war and to warmaking. and that the history of war, of coffee drinking really coming and taking, becoming widespread after war is fascinating. the history of coca-cola in the book is so fascinating, how basically the brand really becomes much more popular because of war and i

think that's a fascinating story and it's one that really kind of pushes coffee as really belonging in this history because it's a psychoactive substance and a substance that has expanded through war in that has influenced the behavior of people in wars so i think it's interesting and there is a center in america which is important to, showing that in certain places, the way that these drugs are being produced and the way that they are being, the property around the production of these drugs and be a source of war, what he calls the war through drugs. and so i have to say that in thatregard , one of the most fascinating chapters, every chapter in this book is fascinating but i love the chapter on methamphetamines because there is so much there that is new and is interesting . and so basically just peter

telling us this story of how amphetamines and the use of methamphetamine was really spread through wars, especially world war ii, and in that history i think hasn't been told well until now , and thinking of how we compare and think out these drugs, i think the comparison betweencocaine , methamphetamines is really interesting so one thing and one contrast that i found fascinating when reading the book is the fact that cocaine and methamphetamines are similar in many regards. they have you can say in some ways compatible in the effect they create on the users and they are also powerful in the sense that there is not as much widespread use as you willsee an alcohol or tobacco , yet they end up having different benefits.

amphetamines takes off after world war ii but the fate of cocaine is being illegal and becoming successful as an illegal market but with participation from the states and the discussion it would be interesting to hear more from you about why you think that case is i don't think, i think there's some potential explanations but is not straightforward. you will see maybe there was more influence from the pharmaceutical companies in methamphetamine production and there was the story but from the pharmaceutical company played an important role with cocaine, especially at the beginning of the century so i think that's a really interesting question. that came up to me as i was reading the book. i think another comment spread throughout the book is and again, this is something that i think influences peter's work is the role of the state in regulating these markets and in interviewing here, and i think it shows

really well that there is not a clear black and white story also in the stories and i think that's also very useful when we're thinking about war and when were thinking about elicit markets so he chose in many ways how the wars have been very unsuccessful, we think about the bands on the war and on drugs but it's more than that and he shows that the band of tobacco in persia and in japan in the 1600s to the ban on opium houses in 1675 for different reasons and all those and up being unsuccessful because their use as strong pushback from the users but also from the people who are profiting from those markets. and of course it takes us to today in thinking there is so much right now about drug reforms but we talked mostly about marijuana and i think there is a reason for that and in the fact that there's

more widespread use. like the constituencies are different and as much as i was yes, we have an entire history of man's failing to do what they intend to and that can be applied to the war on drugs today but at the same time it doesn't seem that whatever brought those bands to an end before can be applied for illicit drugs to heroin and cocaine today so i was just again, another idea for thinking about like, knowing what we know from the history of wars on drugs, and knowing what we know about how basically what ends up happening is that there's a push for them to move forward because there is not enough forces to keep them in control but that doesn't seem to escape us and that doesn't happen to cocaine. or to heroin so it will be just interesting to hear about it. i think, i don't know how i'm doing on time i'm just going

to be close to finishing here. another thing was very interesting from this book and i think peter has said openly, this is what i tend to do but he doesn't i think for a different reason which is thefocus on major powers . in history but basically on major wars and major powers are some references to developing countries throughout the book but it's really just a history of how major powers, western powers but not only western, china and russia make the major powers have been a central part of this story and i think this is essential because this is what challenges the narrative that we have that is created by what has happened in the last two or three decades which is the story of nonstate actors in developing companies really in the long run of history so talking about major powers in major wars and wars between states so i think that is a very, i think that the driving force of how

peter chose the cases that appear in this book but i'm curious also to hear more about how you ended up choosing the stories that appear in this book as i'm sure you had a lot of stories to choose from and one thing that is fascinating about this book is that i'm highlighting ideas but i'm also highlighting stories of the pieces of the stories that appear in this book is the kind of thing that i don't want to tell in a class, saying this is what will lead you to think differently about the relationship between war and drugs . and so yes, i would have to say that i love the idea of calling great britain the first narco state, it's a statement i think, it's an important statement and i want to close with one last question and one last reflection which is that i said at the beginning one of the major contribution peter's work is this push to look back to history and

rethink and question some of the ways in which we think about foreign problems. and i think personally, i see how we go back to history and see the things that we think are new are not so new to us a lot of elements to think what mistakes we can make again or provides food for thought but also a lot of elements to rethink how we think our problems are major today and at the same time i'd say the skepticism from people saying yes, we can look back to history but we don't care about history, we care about what's in the future but when you look back to the history you are engaged in policy discussions and i want to hear reactions about how people try to connect this when you're asked to provide policy recommendations or policy ideas and i will stop there, thank you. [applause]

>> i'm eager to hear more from peter as i'm sure mostof you are so let me make a few brief comments . what i was most impressed about in this book even though it's beyond the subject matter which is the whole approach of trying to look at history in a new way. that's one of the most exciting parts of the business we are in. facts don't change but we understand the facts differently as time passes and we get to rearrange facts, that's one of the important parts of our job and i think that's the great category of research into which this book fits. it gives us a new way to understand where we'vebeen and where we are now . we understand this book a drugs are both a tool of war and also a reason for work. i think the combination of those two, highlights the importance of this the. i want to pick up on some of

something that chris said, he used the word hypocrisy and that's a theme that shines right through this book in so many different ways . i would go, build on what chris said that there's tremendous hypocrisy in the way governments deal with drugs on the one hand, announcing and condemning them on the other hand, using them as tools for their own politicalpurposes internationally . we use those drugs not only as motivations but as inspirations for what we can get. what's out there for us and how we can get. this hypocrisy extends to our tolerance of drug traffickers from other countries. just as we decide which countries we don't like and we figure out that mostly a terrorist and we find ways to make them into terrorists and other terrorists who we like we and over backwards to try to pretend that they are valid and a democracy and the

same thing happens with druglords. i had a vivid experience with one of my favorite druglords, one of the only ones i got to know and that was manuel noriega in the 1980s. i'll never forget having an interview with noriega and telling him a little bit uncomfortably but that's my job as a reporter that there had been reports that if you had been deeply involved in drug trafficking and therefore i have to ask you how do you respond to those reports? he kind of smiled and he gestured to one of his aides and the aide had a briefcase and noriega looks through it and pulls out a folder and a letter and he handed it to me and the letter is on the letterhead of the drug enforcement administration and it says dear general noriega, we want to thank you so much for all the help you've given us in controlling the drug traffic in the caribbeanbasin , signed john locke, director

of the drug and enforcement administration. we all knew noriega was a drug traffic or the dea certainly knew but he had a great game going, he was working for one cartel and he would find out about it and call the dea and they were able be able to boast of a great big bust and noriega was funneling large amounts of cocaine the following i'm sure of the dea through other channels. also in the 1980s as i remember sitting in nicaragua where i was living that there were reports that the sandinistas were financing their war in part by shipping cocaine and that the contras were doing the same thing we didn't have the detailed information to speculate or to report on that but when we spoke amongourselves , our . [bleep] always was how can they not? it's a poor country, you need lots of money. you got fantastic market with piles of money a few miles away on a ellis plane flight so i got no doubt was a substantial contributor to

the wars in centralamerica . i think those of us that have seen, understand that war is much more chaotic than it sometimes seems to be when you're watching it in movies or when you're reading about it . the act of going out and participating in a war violates so many deep instincts and impulses and principles inside every human being . i do think this might be one of the reasons why drugs become important. the reality of war is too awful to face so these drugs actually help people face something that normal life you wouldn't want to face and you wouldn't want to be able to face but it's very important for governments, that soldiers be able to face this so i think that helps wipe away any objections that governing forces might have

to the use of those drugs. chris also mentioned vietnam and it's absolutely true, that was a turning point in the us military when we not only went from a very drug fueled military to one that was drawn controlled through your analysis but i was also not coincidentally time when we moved away from a volunteer army, from a drafty army to a voluntary army. this is another big result of drug use in the military and the fact that we now have an all volunteer army is definitely a great enabling factor for our government when it wants to prosecute wars because it's a lot easier to do so is to saywhen people are not worried about the draft . when i first part of the book wondering why he didn't use sugar as one of his drug but with the wrong part, i realize it was wrapped up in an even larger drug. in my last book, i wrote about the u.s. army effort to

develop lsd as a weapon of war and they had the idea that they could dump huge amounts of it on enemy populations and everybody would love them and they would think their rifles were hydrangeas and the enemy was there blood relative and they wouldn't shoot them but this turned out not towork, that's the reason it's not in this book . the effects of lsd are too unpredictable be used effectively as a weapon of war. i also think that this combination of factors that the are as so brilliantly highlighted in this book still play out today in many ways . from very small to very vague. i've been told by intelligence officers work in afghanistan trying to pick out which are the thoughts that they have to have night rage against because somebody is living there we have to get rid one of the things

they tell them is as her intelligence five is walking through the village if there's spots where there is no cigarette butts outside as probably somebody in the taliban . so, that might have picked up on that by now, maybe they distribute cigarette butts to people to drop outside their homes but that was certainly a factor and i want to go on and mention the fact that one of our principal foreign policy tools now has been for several decades our sanctions . we like to sanction governments so they can't freely export or import. their economies aregreatly constricted . though i've lived personally through 2 strong episodes i've covered this in yugoslavia then again in iraq . those were both situations in which governments were pressed to move towards the legal sources of income and because of sanctions, those governments turned in part to drug trafficking and there's no better example of this and

north korea which is a major industrial exporter of illegal drugs and does so largely because it's not able to have other kinds of economic activities. we certainly wouldn't want to ignore the role of opium and other drugs in building up new england and building up our economy. it was the trade new england merchants with all factories and made new england such a world power so from this book i take away a new lens and looking at history. i spend some time thinking and writing about iran. why does iran have a government like it does today west and mark there was a revolution 40 years ago. why did that happen to mark people felt the old government was not respecting their democracy. where did the idea come from western mark it came from the constitutional revolution in iran read what set off the constitutional revolution in iran ? the tobacco google. was when the british insisted

and the shah of iran being bought by the british agreed to monopolize, to give the british company, a british tobacco company monopoly control over the entire tobacco industry, to forbid every iranian from growing or producing or selling tobacco rent then an explosion happened, even the iran women , refused to smoke as a result of the fossil handed down by the leading religious figure so if you trace all back, the entire crisis in iran was set off by rebellion about tobacco. once you begin to realize that you understand how much of history remains to be explained in the new way and how valuable our people heart whose insights are such that they allow us to find a new lens to understand circumstances that we thought we already understood read and for that i applaud you peter, thank you .

>> floor is open. >> no one mentioned it, lavishly illustrated. >> no one told us on the panel, that's it, how lavishly illustrated this book. but this is a point that several people mentioned in implicitly . incredible irony, complexity and history is that you want us to take home the message read only message i can get our don't go to war and stop the hypocrisy but you might have something alittle bit more . what would you advise countries having learned and studied so deeply this history? >> right to the policy implications. so i go ahead and translate

to i have to say of all the things i've written, this is the book where i'm more stumped than usual on what the actual direct explicit policy recommendation is because the radical one would be if you actually take seriously that you don't want illicit drugs funding terrorists and insurgents and traffickers who have private parties, there's drug legalization. i mean, that's a logical conclusion one can reach from this book. i don't go there but it's understandable avenue of inquiry because the source of the funding today is illicit drugs. drugs that one point in history work illicit but the more illicit drug becomes, the more it's the domain of

profiteering by nonstate actors and the less it's taxable by authorities. historically authorities have drug revenue to pay for armies and all sorts of things but now warlords, metallic, terrorists and so on so if that's your priority, you want the war on terror, the war on traffickers, legalization but obviously the legalization debate is much more complicated than that and so for example, canada's legalization which is as the furthest including places like rhode island but especially massachusetts and elsewhere, it helps but it's not the major funder of violence and insurgents in the way that cocaine andopium is . >>.

>> i read a book, i'm sorry. i haven't read the book, so i don't know everything that's in there but i do want to pick, i do want to congratulate you on parsing the myriad ways in which wars and drugs intersects. but i have a comment and the question. a comment, i was surprised nobody mentioned the basis of the worst assassin and assassination with high heat, it's probably in your book but my question goes back to how often, the opium wars are a prime example of how often are drugs either over or covert reason for a particular war and i'm not talking about nonstate entities but actual nationstates or the equivalent.

>> just on the first thing you mentioned, hashish and assassins, it's a famous story. i don't include it partly because there's actually debate whether it'speriod, that it's just part of folklore. so i don't go there because the evidence and much of the discussion of it is the fact that it's a mythical story like to tell you the second question or actually your main question is one of the relationships that i unpacked and identify as more for drugs and this is why i think it's very important to distinguish between war for drugs versus war through drugs because in the current current policy debate and that's this gets to jim's discussion of policy, i think war through drugs overwhelms the importance of war for

drugs. historically and today. there's always extensions and exceptions but for the most part drugs have been this potent literally facilitator of warfare. >> .. but all the went to the present i think today it's, the war for drug is in the realm of illicit drugs and it's largely in places such as mexico. >> peter, also the question about the talk this morning. not the china side of it as much

as that t opm connection and your description that british maritime power was mobilized to support a private company so that was an interesting combination here between state power and private power. and for the opium wars. the question is this, what has emerged from economic history over the last 40 years and most of it out of economic history of the subdiscipline in america but economic history continues to be a vibrant discipline injured. so there are new estimates that emerged about the proportion of let's say manufacturing, integral parts of the world. agricultural data from 1700 or 1600 is hundred is virtually impossible to estimate. manufacturing has been estimated. here is what we have about what happened to china after opium

wars. i'm not claiming opium wars led to the decline of chinese economy, but just to give some sense of what the correlations are. until 1800, china produced one-third of the world entire manufacturing output. what we call the west today had only one-fourth of the world manufacturing output. i 1860 which is when the second opium war was anti-china enters down to 19.7 and then there's a speed decline after the second opium war and china shared the manufacturing by 1900, down from 33% in 1800 to 6.2 in 1900. there's what you call the western gate which arises from 77.4 in 1900. the question is this. are there other examples you

know where wars over drugs, they have led to or collated with such steep economic declines as we saw in china? noticed even in the chinese literature, the selective 100 years of humiliation against the opium wars and the decline that china saw after the opium wars. other of the such cases of steep economic decline correlated with if not caused by wars or drugs? >> there may be but i can't think of a case that's remotely close to or as extreme case. having said that, i'm wary of pointing to a unitary calls relationship between those outcomes that you point to in opium. correlation as you teach a note is not causation. opium is a corporate.

but one of the lessons of this book -- the book kitchen overhead on the importance of drugs in relationship to war. at the end of the day there is a warning to readers saying i also don't want you to drug the analysis. it's not drugs drugs drugs i wary of this accusing look what happened to china after the opium wars because opium, it's a lot more complicated but opium is a culprit and an important culprit. one thing fascinating about the opium wars is after the second opium war china, it basically did import substitution. it became itself the largest producer of opium in the world. we can't beat -- we can't keep up and get imports, of opium, we will just legalize the stuff and produce at ourselves so at the turn-of-the-century by 1900 china is a world largest consumer and producer of opium

here the economic decline you point to, first of all, it's relative to other places rising. so that's also problematic. but opium certainly is the culprit but the most important fact, opium and china, chinese identity, psychology of thinking of being poisoned by the outside world and anti-imperialism is basically paved the way for the chinese revolution in a substantial way. >> oh, i should add one of the biggest loser of the chinese revolution is opium. china made the most sweeping come to coding the most war against drugs the world has ever seen. basically virtually wiped out opium from china, given its previous 100 your history and it is precisely for that reason the drug moved south into the golden triangle of southeast asia.

>> thank you all for sharing. i personally immediately jumped when i started hearing about "killer high" to the '60s and the role of especially lsd and after drug movement, and i think today we are seeing a resurgence a lot of those ideas of the '60s especially one comes to hallucinogenic drugs, both marijuana, mushrooms as well as mdma. i just love your perspective on how to hallucinogenic drugs of the '60s at all the way up to today fit into that discussion? >> great question. i explained in the introduction what i picked certain drugs at f what i actually largely ignored other drugs. it is the history of the six

drugs, at seven or eight or nine. hallucinogenic drugs don't make the cut for all sorts of reasons some of you might imagine. they're not tickle effective on the battlefield. states have never figured out to tax them and make revenue from the very niche drugs. as you mentioned in some cases, kind of considered an antiwar drug. that was true of cannabis in the '60s. it was researched and expended on as the mind control drug and as a weapon of war by the cia, but that still didn't rise it to the status of a globally commercialize mass consumption popular profitable drug way these others are. one thing that a think is going to grow in importance is chris mentioned returning gis and turning to various drugs and coping with the aftermath of

war, well, there's growing research showing one of the most effective treatments for ptsd is basically micro-dosing of mdma. there's a push to get the da to reschedule it and be able to use for medical purposes. i don't know how far that's going to get to whether we can in the future, frankly sitting here ten years ago no one would've predicted the legalization of marijuana. so it's possible that actually will see a proliferation of what you just described as the present moment. >> again, peter, it's such provocative work. i really love it, and ask you to make some comparisons to two of the kind of addictions that don't involve psychoactive substances as far as i know. what we do talk about the

addiction to oil and conflict around oil and what are the parallels? maybe they don't exist between drug wars and oil related wars but, of course, their post under both resource related. maybe different kind of addiction, social media, facebook, the jews you get from the building of that kind of commerce to medical people and forcing that now cause conflict between countries. can you draw parallels across psychoactive substances and war, energy resource of oil and war in in a different kind of commercial product? >> great question. i don't go there in the book. i could perhaps in the conclusion make these kind of linkages and perhaps i should have. one dimension of the relationship between war and drugs is what i emphasize through drugs and the other is

for drugs. those you can clearly see well. just yet another example of resource wars. so war for oil or war through oil, right? in that regard is part of a larger universe of using profitable commodities to generate revenue for warmaking, not a take an unfamiliar story but a huge of important one, right? in central america, the most profitable thing going, that's what we use in the 1980s. so why wouldn't they? there's a pragmatism to use whatever revenue on whatever commodity is available regardless of the legal status. comparing it to the other things you mention, social media, there's a terrific -- [inaudible] >> yeah. i'll punt a little bit and say

david, a drug or storing, has a new book out the less your so-called the age of addiction, and it basically does take this big ambitious wheat that sort of the modern world in terms of various things we're addicted to including video games and so on. i don't go there, but it's provocative reading and i recommend it. i do conclude the book, one think i did go out on the limb of a bit on the last page of the book is to say i talked about all these relations wars and drugs but maybe we should also think of war itself, war as drug, right, because actually similar psychoactive effects of the war can be considered drug like, the adrenaline rush. has anyone seen the hurt locker? that is a case of addiction,

right? he basically -- at the end of the movie he is back in suburbia shopping at the store, you know, goes and reenlist, right? war journalists who have gone out, chris hedges has wrote the book for basically literally describes the rush of war as a drug, and there's plenty of memoirs and diaries from soldiers to generals sort of describing the effect as the equivalent of addiction. >> time for maybe one or two more questions. >> thank you. okay, so i guess to give a brief, the question was holding onto was if there's anybody that

was doing anything with addiction sites? i kid you had to name one person who's doing something revolutionary there, you know, where you find something else, like some of the approach to the idea of addiction and you find maybe clinically or just generally written about i guess. >> david cortright, the age of addiction. he's a historian but he takes it all the way back centuries, what he brings it back to the present. i would not point to one person as sort of the addiction expert. there's enormous literature on this. i do know that there is a considerable amount of research going on and the should be about more fun in terms of nature of addiction, and the very idea of an addiction vaccine interesting enough for some drugs is a possibility down the road, but i don't have a name for you, unfortunately.

>> right on. i guess i meant to recognize already an answer in the last question, which is sort of satisfying. and very grateful for that. there was one other, i guess the effect of the opium war on china and looking at the causality of opium, i guess it's a comet, just seems like if anything was the cause it would even the war. it would've been war, not drugs that would've been the cause, war through drugs and it seems like almost drugged war, looking at war as a drug. i just been a comet, try not to drug, a b drug the analysis. i found it interesting, i don't know. thank you so much. [inaudible] >> i'm just curious also if there's an explanation in middle 70s about the cocaine story? >> maybe we should conclude by letting the panelists say something. i appreciate you pushing on that.

great question, why cocaine did not take off on the battlefield. it made an appearance in world war ii. there's plenty of evidence of it, but then major states turned against cocaine, , led by the u.s., but britain did, too, to basically move against cocaine, colluding soldier use. the germans were testing it on soldiers and thought it was this magical wonder drug. it's a perfect example, much easier to identify how something changed, and that they changed actually versus why exactly. because cocaine basically, because it becomes more criminalize status in the 20th century, therefore, much less used for functional purposes on the battlefield.

in fact, now that you asked me about this, there were efforts, suggestions that the u.s. military study the positive effects of coca on mild come basically the raw material for cocaine but it's very mild stimulant. the use of the anti-drug mode squat any such research even though many centuries peruvian the soldiers had found it to be incredible energy boosting and hunger reducing. it does open the door for amphetamines because basically amphetamines, you know, in fact, what's interesting is when amphetamines become criminalized in the u.s. in the 1960s, that's actually when cocaine takes off he goes a lot of people do turn to cocaine

recreationally went amphetamines, much less available. >> my one comment is something you mentioned. tonight when the book has its high point on the last page, and i agree with that observation that war is a a drug. but i would say from my perspective, yeah, it is a drug, it is addictive for some people on the battlefield including people that are fighting and people that are watching the fighting. but i also think it's addictive at a higher level. it's addictive for the jungles. it's addictive for the politicians. it's such a great political benefit. it pays off in so many ways, the promotion of war. so i i feel that that addictioo war at that level is actually more pernicious even than the individual addiction for to people that are actually seeing it unfold. >> it also depends on how we

define addiction of coursework and from the public. i which is say, inviting everybody to read it, is that i didn't say this was talking but -- [inaudible] i assigned this students get a very deep understanding of things and alas, to my question made me think geopolitics to play such an important role in maybe a reason why cocaine ended up the weight did because coca was coming from latin america. >> so i'm not a historian, but i'm an observer and chronicler of modern military activity. and this book is very valuable for that and sort of underlined some of my own experiences. if you really want to see many angles of inquiry to observe and document the failures of the

modern military, one of the sure fireplaces, one of the things to look at is in its work against drugs in afghanistan. it was astonishing, one of the surest ways to get in a gunfight in afghanistan was to go out with the unit doing counter-narcotics work. this is not ideological. it was practical because go with try to a poppy field is to essentially impact a hillbilly economy with top cover. so the american military realized this pretty quickly at the operational level down at the field commanders at the stop doing it. they tolerated it although there still was officially an effort to reduce the amount of opium poppy production in afghanistan at the festival of the most units new benefits to try. they didn't want to lose people to this and lose a lot of people. and there was a doctrinal

contradiction in that counterinsurgency you're supposed to get along with the local population, but if you are attacking the local populations wartime economy which is often opium-based because opium unlike tomatoes or melons is an enduring product that you can hold onto it until the road is open. it's not perishable. and so natural and it worked climate opium was being grown very heavily in the areas that could go opium because of climate and water access. the americans just left it alone, or they would engage in is as a commissioner often does, activities that look like accomplishment that actually are not. so you could go see opium fields being burned, but the field would've been harvested. there there would be no gunfight because they would pay the farmer to let the pharmacy birth already renewed his product and your burning the stubble and that was a very safe patrol to go on. it was also a farce, and

absolute farce if it was a common one. you also find very reliably in the areas where opium was being grown places where it would be almost certainly grown, and that was inside the grounds of an afghan police station. that's just kind of what it was in this book brings at home really well, and i commend and recommend it both. >> thank you. there are books outside. [applause] >> i also want to think everybody. just remind you a reception outside, so again chris chivers, all of you, thank you. [applause] [inaudible conversations] >> booktv continue a c-span2, television for serious readers.