tonight global history. first, brown universities peter andreas talks about the relationship between and drugs. then harvard university history professor vincent brown chronicles the 18th century slave revolt that took place in jamaica. later, we provide a history of latin america at the wisconsin book festival in madison. enjoy the book tv now in over the weekend on c-span2. >> good afternoon. part of me. 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", this 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 of course, i know that the intensity of feelings in china about the century of humiliation that began with opium war t butt the same time it's easy for a lot of people, including myself, to think of something like the opium ware as may be an anomaly or something very particular to a very particular time and place and i have to say i'm guilty of thinking about the opium war that way but great scholarship, truly great scholarship, like "killer high" and a lot of the work done here at the washington institute forces us, forces me to see the world in a totally new way this book has forced me and i think it forces all readers to focus on the eternal and incredibly expansive relationship between drugs and war. that relationship extends from

war conducted by people who are often on a form of drug and some kind of psychoactive substance and it extends to wars and conquest of drugs or the raw materials and extends to wars for markets and for outlets for drugs and of course, as we are all familiar with, wars against drugs but as peter argues so effectively this phenomenon and this interaction between psycho active substances and conflict is laced throughout historynf ad right up to the present. peter, he makes interesting clnclusions in this book but also raises the number of questions and i think we will have an opportunity to date witt this fantastic panel to delve into some of those questions welch will again emphasize this entirely new lens that peter gives us to see the world. let me quickly explain how we will proceed and i will ask peter to come up and speak for i

ten minutes or so about the book and then i will ask our panelists to comment for ten minutes or so each of the book and then we will open it up in questions and answers. if you will, let me briefly introduce peter and our panelists. peter andreas is the john hay professor of international studies here at the washington institute and the department of political science. he is the author or co-author, coeditorsh of 11 books and that includes of course, "killer high" but also the 2013 book smuggler nation how illicit trade made america or as quite relevant today, as we talk about we live in a world of trade frictions and talk about piracy and make claims about a variety of countries v, illicit activities. next to speak will be chris [inaudible] pulitzer prize-winning longform writer and journalist from "the new york times" and i'm sure all of you are familiar with his work in a big fan and he smirked at

"the new york times" since 1999 in his career as a foreign correspondent has focused on conflict regions, spanning afghanistan, iraq, palestinian territories, chechnya,ni libya d syria amonger others. chris also served as marine corps infantry man, combat veteran from the first gulf war, persian gulf war and next to speak will be [inaudible] martin is who is associate professor of political science at the university of massachusetts lowell. she is the 2013 phdic recipients from brown and she is a noted expert on latin american and comparative politics but with a particular emphasis on organized crime and criminality and illicit markets and the relationship between state actors and nonstate actors, often nonstate actors. she's the author of the award-winning 2018 book, the politics and drug violence criminal cops and politicians in columbia and mexico that was

from oxford university press. steven kinzer, well known to everyone here, senior fellow at the washington institute and of course, an award-winning journalist whogt over the course of his career covered more than 50 countries on five continents and steven spent more than 20 years working for "the new york times" and is a foreign correspondent bureau chief and among his numerous claim books include the 2019 volume poison are in chief. obviously topical for the discussion today. with that, let me turn the microphone over to peter andreas. [applause] >> thank you all for coming. if you aree here because you think this is about the made for tv dvd, killer hi, sorry to

disappoint you. i am sure that dvd has and will outsell my book tradeha genre fr that i believe listed on amazon is horror / comedy so my book is definitely horror and there's not a lot of b comedy in it andn fact, the title was not my selection but my choice for title originally was the subtitle of the book, a history of waras in a six drugs but let me give you a few highlights of the book. when i try to do in the mirror 300 some pages is retell the history of warfare through the lens of drugs and retell the history of drugs through the lens of war and hopefully for those who end up reading the book will not quite 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 get into

the drugs and war together and over time it became quite addicted to each other. a one-liner made drugs made war and drugs -- [inaudible] they seem to be treated separately so i systematically try to tie them together across time and across place and across psychoactive substance and the motivation for the book was not history but to bring history into what i consider a policy debate that suffers from a severe case of historical amnesia c, a debate about the so-called nexus between drugs and conflict. we talked today about narco states in the first thing that comes to mind is afghanistan. we think about narco insurgents or narco terrorists and we think about columbia and afghanistan iaagain. look at this issue from a much deeperer historical sweep, going

back not just years and decades but centuries and the first true narco state was probably great britain. the first, in fact, great britain was the first narco empire if you think about the sheer importance of alcohol taxes and the importance of the tea trade and that's a powerful drug and i'm addicted to it and i mean caffeine. with the importance of the opioid tradeff for the rise of britain as the world's most maritime power. in fact, narco insurgents, yes, it's the tale of man but it was also george washington. why do i say george washington? well, that conflict very much depended on revenueon generatedy tobacco. in fact, got a loan from france based on tobacco revenue and the

brits were so upset about it they burned tobacco fields whenever they found them. i including tobacco fields owned by thomas jefferson. so what i tried to do in this book is systematically unraveled and interrogate, unpack the relationship between drugs and war and i find there are five relationships. what is more while on drugs literally combating drug use in wartime? but not just combatants but also on the homefront as well drug use by civilians dealing with the coping with wartime. obviously war is stressful work and no surprise that drugs help soldiers cope and they also help them celebrate victories and prepare for battle and give them liquid courage after all. i also talk about more through drugs my totally different than the war on drugs but more

through drugs means using drugs primarily 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 fully synthetic drugs from the most benign to the most dangerous psychoactive substances. then there is war for drugsth which is distinct from the first tto breed more for drugs is goig to war over drug markets and as ed mentioned the most famous case of this, of course, 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 what's going on in mexico today. more people have died in mexico since late 2006 that have died in iraq and afghanistan combin combined.. drug violence that although

security analysts are reluctant to call it orta, if you look at the sheer number of casualties and if you look at how well armed the perpetrators are using military grade equipment the actors themselves are often militarily trained and often defectors from the military and in one case, u.s. trained antidrug force turned into a drug hit squad. drug trafficking organizations and then you think about the state itself has deployed this military and a front-line role in fighting drugs with mexican military is essentially a an antidrug force at this point. then it's not just mexico but columbia to some extent and brazil to some extent and even the united states since the 1980s has loosened the [inaudible] act which restricted the use of u.s. military for long% purposes and very much embedded in the war on drugs.

at the border and beyond and through militarized policing in our own communities, swat teams were exempted before the war on drugs but it really took off and this is using military technologies often ask military personnel and approaches to fighting a substance. then there is the war against drugs which is closely related than the war for drugs but we are against drugs and it started as a metaphor. nixon declared war against drugs but he did not actually send in troops to fight drugs but since the 1980s it's become progressively more militarized so we could call it an outrage war. last but not least and this is probably the research of the book the most surprised me is drugs after war, how much war

itself left a lasting legacy in terms of drug production, trafficking, regulation and drug tastes have been fundamentally altered thanks to wars in ways we often don't give war credit for. just to give you a few examples, why are we a a coffee drinker rather than 18 drinking nation? because we want the american revolution and the brits went on with tea and we turn to coffee. we not c only turn to coffee but turned to whiskey. rum was thefe drink of choice produced here and rum long island -- rhode island and it kept things going in massachusetts and whiskey became the alcoholic beverage of choice and was a national drink and no longer needed imports from abroad but considered patriotic to turn to whiskey. turn against that british drink, ron. turn against that british rink, t.

that drinks we take for granted a result of war. the very criminalization of cocainehe is a product of world war ii, very few people remember that cocaine is legally produced by japanese pharmaceutical companies. the destruction of those fields and the destruction of the japanese pharmaceuticale is a part of the u.s. victory. u.s. turned against cocaine much earlier of course but wasn't only with the victory of japan that the u.s. [inaudible] but the globalized's preference for cocaine prohibitions so cocaine was one of the biggest losers, legal cocaine was one of the biggest losers of world war ii. illegal cocaine decades later was arguably one of the biggest winners. so there is the five relationships. i want to tell you a bit in the few minutes i have what the six key drugs are and i've already

given you hints because i mentioned some of them. the oldest most multipurpose and arguably double edged of the drugs is alcohol. it goes back and it's too dear and wine and then the distilling revolution really did indeed revolutionize things. about just think about why france is the world's most famous wine producing region in the world? the roman conquest brought wine to france. bordeaux was set up as a port by the romans and after the romans retreated and pushed back wine endured in france. the distilling resolution was absolutely essential to the conquest of the new world and think about the importance of alcohol as an ethnic cleanser and westward expansion.

i fact, alcohol became so important that it was actually no rations on both sides of the american revolution paid after the revolution whiskey became part of u.s. military rations. in fact, the british, believe it or not, had rum at rations until hee early 1970s on their naval ships. second drug, tobacco. once it arrivediv equally potent and in fact, not only the downsides of alcohol but alcohol basically you can raise revenue but you also might have a drunk military. the czar was able to finance the largest army in europe with vodka revenue but his soldiers were drunk. tobacco is the ideal war drug. highly affordable, fights both anxiety and boredom, relieves,

is highly taxable and does not impede performance, even if it might eventually kill you. the globalization of tobacco is intimately also about the spread of warfare. soldiers globalized warfare and the very motive of tobacco consumption was closely influenced by war so wide to be turned away from hookahs and pipes to cigars and cigarettes to increasingly portable, easy to produce to move and this was intimate story of war. in fact, cigarettes by the time world war iie came around was te most valued ration in cigarette or soldier rations. third, caffeine. my drug of choice and i'm

completely addicted to the stuff. it's the most world's most popular psychoactive substance and but certainly far from a benign relationship to war arguably stimulated imperial expansion and i mentioned the british empire of tea but then we have the rise of caffeinated soldiers and it's fascinating but in thedi case of the u.s. civil war coffee is mentioned in soldier diaries more often than gone, cannon or rifle coffee is this essential ingredient to keep soldiers going. instant coffee was an instant hit on the battlefield in world war ii and then outlived world war ii. the coffee -- the coffee break was introduced for defense workers through world war ii and then outlived world war ii and institutionalized the workplace in the 1950s.

and then all the way up to today the favorite beverage at military bases across the world are hyper caffeinated beverages like red bull and monster and so on. fourth, opium. ed mentioned opium wars are an extreme case of the relationship between war and drugs which is more for drugs. imperial wars but also the japanese imperial occupational of china. there is no way japan in the late 1930s it could its occupation of china without narcotics. amphetamines and extreme case of war while on drugs and some said speed is the essence of war but he did not mean and petty means. he would be pretty impressed at how important amphetamines were

to keep soldiers on many sides going during world war ii. in the last but not least cocaine. the extreme case of war against drugs which i've already said a few things about. i will start -- stop there and turn things over to chris. [applause] >> thank you, peter. i would open with complements. 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 two ink pens is probably a sign it's a hell of a book. i was in a lucky reader and peter got me a copy over smith's and i spent the holidays with it. it's a work of history as you just heard. history is an act of making diverse and sometimes divergent sources go here and don't understand and maybe a set of narratives that are relatablesi

and analyses that can make you as you said, we imagine the world and understand it a new and in this case the world of wr and that was my experience of it but i don't want to talk about history, at least not distant history.ot i want to talk more about now and some more recent observations since the persian gulf war of the 1990s, 91 and the so-called as the military calls it, global war on terror since 2001 and bringing the events that peter has related up to the present time. are there any recent veterans in the room? any? no, maybe well good, one? hopefully there will be some on c-span and you can fact check to me. i welcome you to comment afterward. we talk about or peter talks about the book and in his remarks the place that various substances have on the battlefield in the battlefield

of the era we live in now have changed a bit from modern conventional military speed wars become so technical and the military commands have become, in some cases, so politically sensitive that some of the long-standing drugs on the battlefield are now prohibited. alcohol most notably for a variety of reasons although the military is a heavy user at the personal level of alcohol at the individual level but at the unit level when deployed in alcohol i will not call it nonexistent because it's not but it's almost invisible and it's quite rare and very unusual to see alcohol on the battlefield did some of this is because of the words as we have had them since 2001 and since gulf war in fact have often played out among islamic populations and there is a sensitivity to having the military make the social faux

pas of just call in a country where they have been tough cases invited and in other cases occupied but in any case hoping to get along with the population better than what the otherwise might. there is still alcohol on the battlefield but you won't see much of it. you've got to look great when i was in the 80s and 90s there were among the troops i was in the marine infantry these things called snakebite kids. it was a euphemism and a joke and it was people would have sent it to them as perhaps with a little bourbon in it but it was quite guarded and very obvious because as you know, most everyone here has some sort of relationship with alcohol and it's hard to hide alcohol use. the odor. i remember one snakebite kit being broken out on a warship i was on but they literally locked the doors and someone said i just got bit by a snake and pulled out a bottle and everyone got shots and thatot was it.

in a ten month deployment but there was not much alcohol there ll all. but, there are many other drugs out there and there's a deep hypocrisy that you would see in how the military, our military and western military in general relate with drugs in their own forces versus into their allied forces in 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 for the mechanical failure of the aircraft and there was a story that circulated in the military in the years after that a sailor had been smoking pot in a hangar deck and it caused a small fire in a garbage can and this activated the spengler system which had sprayed saltwater on some of the aircraft and this was considered perhaps the culprit in one of the aircraft failures on the mission but

whether the story is apocryphal i have not done the deep dive research to tell you but it was widely trafficked when i was in and as a result we had gone to a service that coming out of vietnam used marijuana very heavily now had drug testing routine regular urine analysis and sometimes randomized and they would do things like take a unit and pull numbers out of a hat and say if your social security and then five or seven you have to report to the first sergeant for your analysis today and it was not quite zero-tolerance. you were given two chances but you would be prosecuted on the first chance and discharged or on the first hit and discharged on the second when a negative discharge affects you for the rest of your life. the use of marijuana really fell off in the 80s. in our force, in the western forces, but when you go to the battlefield and now you will find the allies may be heavily

using and some of you -- you say your book is horror over comedy but some of the scene sign saw in afghanistan would qualify as comedy. there would be tense alongside each other with americans or western forces in onear and the afghan partners in the other and the americans would all be dipping copenhagen which is a tobacco snuff that basically tastes lik cow as hit but it's incredibly popular because it's very useful and it's hands-free and smokeless so people can take it on patrols and operate a vehicle or a rifle and a radio and any number of things with it and you don't have to fumble with matches and so it's immensely popular. everyone in the american tent would likely use tobacco and some caffeine, monsters were immensely popular. in the afghan tent literally smoke billowing out of it was marijuana. hashish was even universal i

would say among the afghan units may be not among every afghan but in every unit it was impossible not to smell it and not to see it and was openly used. of course, there was traffic between the two tents of many of the americans were going into the afghan tent and getting high. episodically call it eventually depending on where you might be assigned to the agricultural afghans is many different climates and has many different agricultural products and in some areas, some regions of afghanistan, marijuana is grown extensively. if you are in the mountains you would not see this marijuana growing but if you were down in the steps you would see massive marijuana fields and they would patrol it and pick it and many of them wouldn't smoke it and i know some units that had heavy marijuana use, so heavy that the commanders had to wink at it and be careful about not having drug

tests because they would've had to discharge the entire unit or punish the entire unit. one story related to mee by a close friend of mine that was in the corps 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 but he was clean and he would donate urine to his friends particularly in the mortar pit, mortar unit was high all the time basically they had a baked motor unit and he would donate his euros was friends will not get hammered by the rules. but jesus pot while they wereef very common on the battlefield are mostly isolated to the afghans and this creates a situation of hypocrisy. on one hand of something like the zero-tolerance policy and for our force but our alliesto e openly actively extensively a using it.

we bring them forward and you talk about drugs after work but marijuana has a significant place in the conversation now.ic the government, again, has a set of policies that don't align with the human behaviors of the population that the government serves. what i mean by that is veterans come home and they 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. the va will prescribe all manner of drugs to the former rank and file, antidepressants, mood stabilizer, opiates for pain, but because marijuana is a stage or i'm sorry, scheduled controlled substance one federally the va cannot administer marijuana, even

though jurisdiction only many veterans live in states like rhode island that have medical marijuana programs and makeib marijuana quite accessible legally. the va won't deny care to someone who is using marijuana but they cannot be involved in the prescription which creates pretty disheartening circumstances for many veterans. i know veterans who live in states that don't have medical marijuana and they risk legal action going out and getting it on the street but not here to say marijuana isn't necessarily, you know, a universal panacea for many of the afflictions the veterans suffered when they come home because i think the science on that is mixed and individual experiences vary. some people find it awful and others don't. it's hard to get a regulated just write in a way that consistently produces pharmaceutical products. because the product is the same from event to event or booster

dose. it's deeply confusing for veterans that they are heavily prescribed for the opiates and other drugs but they do not have counseling on the use of medical marijuana with many that alleviate the symptoms and i would add t that opiates and veterans have shown that can lead to twice the rate of over so it is a fair question to say how responsible it is for the medical administration and care of the veterans when they have this access and you could argue encouragement to use opiates that they feel a justification and data in their corner is much more dangerous than marijuana. and my ten minutes are up. [applause] i'm happy to be here today. i graduated here and it's a

fantastic home. i've enjoyed the books and i've always admired and he tackles big questions but in simple language and it's clear it is a book that is presented for the audience and it's the work of the a public intellectual and i think that makes it fabulous. i think it also builds on and continues things and i would say

naturally there are three that are in this book and appear in the rest of the work. the rest is the call to go back to history. the it is exciting and anything that has to do with violence or the markets and drugs. so to go back and show a the problems that are deep-rooted. the edges creating and re-creating the problems that the default, so this is important. it's essential again because when we think of the markets and

especially today we think of nonstate actors to follow but something that is isolated to think about the state has emerged in the markets. the third element that has been created key questions the ideas very effectively in all of those elements are present in the book. i think that it's taking on the wisdom and how we think of the new war and i'm sure they also

want to take a leap in science and how after the end of the collapse of the soviet union what they have seen the emergence they tend to be irrational and motivated by profit. it's basically the idea that many of the wars that we see inside of the state are because of the profits. it isn't just a loud and the key part of this is the disconnection between the

multifaceted and of course to try to think of more like cocaine and methamphetamine. kobe is thell one that is the oy bird in the buck just because we think of caffeine and such and those drugs have bigger psychoactive effects. it is tightly connected to the war and the warmaking.

it really becomes much more popular because of the war and i think that is a fascinating story and one that pushes us to think that it does belong in this history because it is a psychoactive substance.

[inaudible] through drugs and so i have to say that in that regard, one of the most fascinating chapters because there' there is so muche that's new and interesting and so basically it's telling us the use of methamphetamine has really spread through the water especially world war ii and in that history i think it hasn't been told well until now. between cocaine, methamphetamine and it is really interesting. one thing i found fascinating is the fact they are very similar in many regards.

it's in the typees of effect and they are also compatible in the defense that there is as muches widespread use as you see in alcohol or tobacco but they have different destinies, so the methamphetamines after world war ii but the fate of cocaine is an illegal market from the state and i think the discussion would be interesting to hear more from you why do you think that is the case because i don't think, there are some potential explanations but it's not straightforward. you would see there's more influence from the pharmaceutical companies and that's part of the story but the pharmaceutical companies also play an important role with cocaine. i think i that is an interesting

question thatt came up. the threats throughout the book again this is something that echoes the paradox of the role of the state regulating. he chose in many ways how they were successful so they chose the ultimate failure for the different reasons in thinking

there is so much right now in the reform that we talked mostly about marijuana and there is a reason for that and there's more widespread use, like the constituents and as much as i was reading and think we have an entire history and that can be applied to the war on drugs today but it doesn't seem. it's another idea what happens

is there is a push for them to h move forward because there's not enough forces to keep them controlled. it's interesting to hear about it. i think, i don't know how i'm doing on time but i am close to finishing here. another thing that is interesting reading for the reason this is the focus on major powers but the danger wars and major powers there are some differences and different points throughout the book but it's how the major powers in china and russia like the major powers in the world have been kind of the central part of the story. this is essential because this is what challenges what has

happened in the last two to three decades which is the story of the nonstate actors but in the long runy if history and the war between the state so i think that is a driving force of how they chose the cases that appear in the book but i'm curious also to hear more about how you ended up choosing the stories that are in the book because you had a love of stories to choose from and what is fascinating about this book is i'm highlighting ideas and also highlighting stories, because the pieces of stories that appearres in the bk are the ones that say this is what will lead you to think differently about the relationship and more with dru

drugs. it is a statement and it is an important statement and i want to close with one last question and reflection. as iit said at the beginning one of the major contributions is the push to look back at history to rethink the ways we think of the current problems. personally when we thin rethinko go back to history and things we think that are new or not so new and give the woman is to think it provides a little food for thought. at the same time i kind of facing skepticism we can look back at history and you look

back at the policy discussions and i just want to hear a little bit of how people reacted on what they are talking about on the policy recommendations of policy ideas and i will stop there. thank you. t> what i was most impressed about beyond the subject matter trying to look at history in a new way to you that one of the most exciting parts of the business they are in. facts don't change. when we under understand the facts differently and get to rearrange the facts that's part of the job and for the great category of research. it gives us a new way to understand where we've been and where we are now.

we understand from the look that drugs are both a tool of the war and also a reason for a the war. i think that combination of those two highlights the importance of theme. the term hypocrisy shines in so many different ways and there's also the tremendous hypocrisy in the way the governments do with drugs on the one hand, the announcing and condemning them on the other hand and using them as tools to their political purposes internationally we use those drugs not only as a motivation but as the inspirations for what they can get, what's out there and how we can get it.

this hypocrisy extends to our tolerance of drug traffickers and some other countries just as we decide which ones we don't like and that must be a terrorist and then we find a way to make them intoe a terrorist and others that we'll likely go out andtr bend over backwards to try to pretend they are actually in the democracy. the same thing happens druglords. i had a busy experience i will never forget with one of my favorite, one of the only ones i got to know andne that was manul noriega, the leader inw the 1980s. i will never forget having the interview with noriega and telling him little bit uncomfortably but that is my job as a reporter, there've been many reports deeply involved in drug trafficking and therefore how do you respond.

there was a letter and he hands it over to me that the letter is on the drug enforcement administration. he said they want to thank you for all the help you've given us in controlling the drug trafficking in the caribbean basin signed the director of the drug enforcement administration. if we all knew he was a drug trafficker, the dea certainly knew that heic had a great game going. he was working for one cartel and when the other would try to use panel he would find out about it and they would then be able to bust and in the meanwhile he was funneling large amounts of cocaine with full knowledge i'm sure through other channels. also in the 1980s i remember there were a lot of reports financing and the contras were doing the same thing.

we didn't have the detailed information to speculate or report on that, but when we spoke among ourselves, there is a fantastic. i think those of us that have seen combat understand it's much more chaotic than it sometimes seems to be when they are watching it in movies or b readg about it. the act of going out and participating in thehe war violates so many deep instinctive impulses and principles in spite of every human being, i do think that this is one of the reasons why drugs become important. the realityom is too awful to face. so, these drugs actually help

people face something that in normal life you wouldn't want to face with people face. it helps wipe away any objections the governing forces might have to the use of those drugs. chris also mentioned vietnam and it's true that was a turning point in the u.s. military. that is when we not only went from very drug fueled military to one that was drug controlled, but it was also not coincidentally the time we moved away from the volunteer army, i'm sorry, the draft to the voluntary army. this is another big result of drug use in the military can and thcomeand the fact that we now n all volunteer army is definitely a great enabling factor for the government when it wants to prosecute the war because it is ath lot easier to do so, needles

to say when people are not worried about theeo draft. when i first started the book i was wondering why he didn't use sugar as one of the drugs but then i realized he did, yocome t just got wrapped up into an even larger drug. in my last book i wrote about the u.s. army efforts to develop a weapon of war and they had the idea that they could dump huge amounts on enemy populations and everybody would love them and they would think it was high energy and they were just irrelevant and they wouldn't shoot at them but it turned out not to work. that is the reason it isn't in the book. it is the reaction, the effect that is too unpredictable to be used effectively as a weapon of the war. i also think this combination of factors peter has brilliantly

highlighted in the book i still plays out today in many ways. from very small to very big. i've been told by intelligence officers because there's somebody living in there that we want to get. something we tell them ask your intelligence guys are walking through the village, looking to see if there was a no cigarette butts outside. that's probably somebody in the taliban. one of the principal foreign-policy tools now. i've lived personally through two episodes i covered in yugoslavia and then again in

iraq. those are both situations the government was pressed to move towards a legal sources of income and because of the sanctions, those governments turned in part to drug trafficking and there's no better example of this in p norh korea. in building up the economy was the trade from new england merchants thatmy provided the capital for all factories that made new england such a real power. so, in this book i take away a new lens and lookingng at histoy just to give one example i spent some time thinking and writing about iran and why do they have a government like it is today, because of the revolution 40

years ago. why did that happen clicks as people felt that the government wasn't respecting their democracy. where did the idea come from? it came from the 1906 revolution in iran. what is off the constitutional revolution in iran backs tobacco revolt. it is when the british insisted and the shawl of iran being run by the british agreed to give the british company of the british tobacco company monopoly control over the entire tobacco industry and forget every iranian from growing and lioducing or selling tobacco that an explosion happened. an entire crisis in iran was set off by the prevailing in and

once you begin to realize how much of history remains to be explained in a new way and how valuable people whose insights are such that they allow us to find a new lens to understand circumstances that we thought we already understood. [applause] the floor is open. a lavishly illustrated look through the pictures and if the point that several people mentioned incredible irony and complexity and history. the only messages i can get that don't go to war and stop the

hypocrisy. this is the book where i'm more stunned than usual. if it takes seriously you don't want illicit drugs funding terrorists and insurgents and traffickers that is a logical

conclusion one can reach from the book. i don't go there, but it's an understandable avenue of inquiry because the source of the funding today is illicit drugs, drugs that at one point in history were not illicit some of the more illicit it becomes the more profiteering by nonstate actors. historically they've used drug revenue and all sorts of things but now the taliban insurgents and terrorists and so on. so if that is the priority. obviously the legalization would be more complicated than that so for example cannabis which is moved to the furthest including massachusetts and elsewhere it helps, but it's not a major

funder of violence and insurgents in a way that cocaine and opium is. >> i haven't read the book, so i don't know everything that's in there but i do want to congratulate you on parsing the myriad ways in which the war and the drugs that affect but i have a comment and a question, comment i was a little surprisec no one mentioned the basis of the word assassin and assassination. my question goes back to how

often are drugs either overt or covert and i'm talking about actual nationstate or the equivalent. >> it is a famous story. i don't include it partially because there is debate over whether it is a myth that it's just part of the folklore so i don't go there because much of the discussion is a mythical story people like to tell. the second question is one of the relationships i unpack and

identify is the war for drugs and this is why i think it is important distinguished the war of drugs and free drugs because othrew drugs becauseof the currd biscuits into the policy discussions, i think the war through the drugs overwhelms the importance of that for drugs but historically there's always exceptions and it varies as this facilitator of warfare. the cases you can point to an explicit that's why they went to war was drugs was rare so it is the first thing that comes to mind.

it was largely in the realm of illicit drugs and in places such as mexico. as much as the opium connection in the company into the description that the british maritime borrowers mobilized to support a private company so there was an interesting combination between the state power and n private power. now the question that has emerged from economic history over the last 40 years and most of it out of economic history.

agricultural data for 1700 to 1600 what's happened to china i'm not claiming that to give you the sense of the causality they produced one part outward. by 1861 it is more or less ending they don't 19.7 and then there was a steep decline and china shared by 1900 or 6.2 down

from 33% to 6.2% in 1900. and the chinese literature does this whole idea of the hundred years of humiliation.

there is the relationship that you pointed to with opium and of correlation as you teach and no opium is a culprit, but one of the lessons of the book it hits you over the head of the importance of drugs int and ther relationship to the war and at the end of the day there is a warning to readers saying i don't want you to click the analysis. so look out it is more complicated than that but it's certainly the culprit and one thing that is fascinating about this is that after the second opium war, china tells so much that they basically did until

substitution and basically became itself the largest producer of opium in the world and said we can't keep out imports of opium we will just legalize and produce it ourselves so it's the world's largest consumer and producer. but the economic decline is relative to other places rising so that isis also problematic. the most important impact is the psychology of thinking about the outside world and anti-imperialism is basically to pave the way for the chinese revolution in a substantial way. >> i should add one of the biggest losers in the revolution

is over young. china led the most sweeping draconian list of active war against drugs the world has ever seen a. basically wiped out from china defendant's history and precisely for that reason i moved south into the golden triangle. >> thank you all for sharing. i personally jumped when i started hearing about the killer high to the 60s and the antidrug movement and i think today we are seeing a resurgence when it comes to hallucinogenic drugs. marijuana can breakthrough status and thereby your

perspective on how. i explained in the introduction why the decision drugs and largely ignored others they do not make the cut and for all sorts of reasons some of which you might imagine they do not particularly do very effective on the battlefield the seats haven't figured out how to tax them and make them niche drugs and as you mentioned in some cases kind of considered an anti-drug true of cannabis. it's been shown in the recent books brilliantly and it was researched and experimented on as a mind control drug as a weapon of the work of the cia and that still doesn't rise to

the status of the globally commercialize mass consumption popular profitable drug. one of the most effective treatments is basically micro- dosing and there is a push to reschedule it and use it for medical purposes. i don't know how hard it is going to get wher worse we can project in the future but frankly sitting here just ten years ago no one would have predicted the legalization of marijuana for this is possible but actually speak to

>> to be [inaudible] such provocative work. i love it. let me ask you to make some comparisons to two other kind of addictions that don't involvee psychoactive substances. we talk about the addiction to oil and the conflicts surrounding oil and what are the parallels that exist between the drug war and oil related war. of course i'm interested in those parallels but also a different kind of addiction. social media, facebook, the ability of that kind of commerce to manipulate people and we see that cause conflict between the countries. so, can you draw parallels between the psychoactive substances in the war and energy resources, oil and the war and a different kind of commercial

product? >> great question. i could make these kind of linkages and perhaps i should have. one dimension of the relationship between the war on drugs is what i emphasized and another one is the war for drugs and those are the two dimensions you can see well. it is another template resource comes the floor or through and it's part of a larger university using profitable commodities to generate revenue for the warmaking, not particularly unfamiliar story but hugely important. in central america they said it's the most probable thing going. use whatever revenue regardless

of the legal status. comparing it to social media there is a terrific -- [inaudible] >> i will say the new book is probably one of the better known. there is a new book out called the age of addiction and it takes this week in the modern world into the various things we are addicted to including video games and so on. i don't go there, but it provocative reading it i certainly recommend it. i say i talk to but these relationships on the war on drugs but maybe we should also think of the war itself, the war

asar a drug because actually soe of the psychoactive effects of the war can be considered drug like, the adrenaline rush. back in suburbia then he goes and reenlist. there were journalists who got out and wrote a book that described the memoirs and diaries. >> the time for maybe one or two more questions.

anybody that was doing anything with addiction science like something revolutionary with some other approach takes all the way back centuries and brings it right back to b the present. there is the enormous literatu

literature. i do know there's a considerabls amount of research going on and there should be a lot more fun that in terms of the nature of addiction and the very idea of an addiction vaccine interestingly enough for some is a possibility down the road. but i don't have a name for you unfortunately. >> it's sort of already been answered and the question. the effect of the war on china and looking at the causality. it would'v would have been the d not drugs. maybe the analysis and something interesting.

>> thank you so much. >> [inaudible] >> maybe we should conclude by letting the panelists say something. i appreciate you pushing me on that. why it didn't take off on the battlefield it actually made an appearance in world war ii and there is plenty of evidence of it at the major states turned against cocaine but pretended, too basically move against cocaine including he was a big fan of cocaine and basically first became awar aware that ofe the germans were testing it out on soldiers and thought it was a magical wonder drug. it is a perfect example of much easier to identify how something

changed and that it changed factually, versus why exactly, because cocaine basically because of it's becoming more common list status therefore much less used for functional purposes on the battlefield. in fact, now that you've asked me about this, there were efforts and suggestions that the u.s. military study the positive effects of coca on my old and basically the raw material but it's very mild stimulant and it was such an anti-that is quashed any research even though for many centuries peruvian soldiers that were found to be incredibly energy boostingso and hunger

reducing. so, if does open the door for amphetamines because basically that's interesting is when amphetamines become criminalized in the u.s. in the 1960s, that is actually when cocaine takes off, because a lot of people do turn to cocaine recreationally when amphetamines become less available. >> my comment is something you mentioned when the book has its high points on the last page. and i agree with that observation about the war as a drug. i would say from my perspective, yes it is a drug. it is addictive for some people including people that are fighting and people that are watching the fighting. it's addictive for the politicians and such a great

political benefit pays off in so many ways. it's more pernicious even then the individual addiction to those that are seeing it unfold. >> and it depends how we define addiction of course. >> [inaudible] >> i did say this the comment to the question seemed geopolitics may be a reason why cocaine was coming from latin america in the

underlining experiences that you want to see the angles of the inquiry that observe and document the failures of the military one of the sure fire placefireplaces to do the same s to look at is seeing its work against drugs in afghanistan. one of the surest ways to get in the gunfight is to get out of the unit during counternarcotics work. this wasn't ideological. it realized pretty quickly the

operational level and field commanders stopped doing it and tolerated although there are still words officially in the effort to reduce the amount of reduction in afghanistan and most units knew better than to try. there was a doctrinal contradiction with the local population but if you're talking about the local population wartime economy that was often a opium-based because unlike tomatoes were milling, it is an enduring product you can hold onto until the road is open. it isn't perishable. so naturally it is being grown very heavily in the areas that could grow opium with this access and they left it alone or they would engage in activities that look like accomplishments but actually are not.

so you could see the opium fields being burned but they already would have been harvested. and if they would pay the farmer to the field be burned but he already removed the product and that was a very safe patrol to go on and also a farce. there were places in spite of the ground of a afghan police stationy . there is books outside. [applause] there is a reception outside.

thank you. [applause] this is about consumers and the problems they face and about consumer finance into the new consumer financial protection bureau in the free and open societies in the democratic form of government.

>> the fact that most people leave prison i plus a little analysis to see that we could be closing prisons already if it is caught by two weeks in three weeks and four weeks welcome to you all.