 On March 16th, 1968, the men of the Charlie Company descended on a village they referred to as Pinkville in Vietnam. Pinkville had been identified as a place the company believed to be full of booby traps and landmines, and of course, Vietcong. Their goal was to destroy the trouble spot, and everybody inside it. As the Charlie Company started to move in and destroy the buildings, they were under the instruction to leave nobody alive. Some villagers tried to escape, only to be shot down by other members of the company encircling in on them. One young boy was clutching a bullet wound in his arm as he stared at the company in shock until he was pumped full of bullets by an M16. Lieutenant William Callie ordered two of his men in the company to take care of this group of kids. The soldiers complied by watching the kids and even giving them candy. When Callie came back, he said that he meant for the soldiers to take care of the kids. Kill them. Callie and another soldier, Paul Midlow, opened fire. Then Midlow started to cry. With bodies strewn about on the ground, an officer gave the orders to dump the bodies in a ditch and fire into the ditch to make sure that there were no survivors. Some soldiers refused, but others complied. A two or three-year-old boy tried to crawl out of the ditch, probably having been protected by his now dead mother. Callie chased the child down, threw him back in the ditch, and shot him dead. Finally, they tossed in a few grenades and they were done. The body count was upwards of 500 civilians dead. None of them were Viet Cong. When Ron Rittenhauer wrote a letter to President Nixon and members of Congress about the incident a year after it happened, it was initially covered up. It wasn't until November of 1969 when the story hit the press. Both Time and Newsweek ran cover stories. They didn't refer to the town as Pinkville. They used its real name, Mylie. With the word out to the American public, Congress and the President can no longer keep the Mylie massacre a secret. Instead, they found a demon to blame for the massacre, marijuana. I'm Chris Cowton and this is the Mises Institute podcast, Historical Controversies. Today we're going to be talking about the role of drugs during the Vietnam War. We have to really begin our story a bit before that in World War II. By 1945, the mafia was in shambles. Many of the New York mobsters had been deported back to Sicily and the heroin trade was interrupted by the war. But heroin wasn't what was on the CIA's mind at the time. Communism was. And to fight communism, it was willing to form alliances with anybody, including mafiosi. When the United States invaded Sicily, they did so with the aid of intelligence gathered through mafia connections, including one Charles Luciano, known more commonly as Lucky Luciano. Luciano was the head of the Genovese crime family who came to power during the years of alcohol prohibition. After prohibition, his syndicate controlled more than 200 brothels throughout New York City. But in 1936, he was arrested and imprisoned in New York. By 1942, the US government made a deal with Luciano. They would commute his sentence in exchange for intelligence provided by his network of gang members. Lucky agreed and in 1946, he was given parole for having aided in the war effort. When he was released, he was deported to Italy. There, he established a global narcotics syndicate. This began the infamous French connection. Lucky and his network of Corsican gangers set up heroin refineries in the city of Marseille, France. In order to help secretly combat French communists, the CIA supplied them with weapons to help suppress labor strikes. By 1951, the Corsican gangsters equipped with CIA-provided weapons had established the first heroin refinery in France. Through the French connection, field traders obtained opium from poppy farmers in Turkey and had it smuggled into Syria. From Aleppo, Gary Johnson's favorite place in the world, it was shipped to Beirut, where it was refined in a morphine. Beirut was ideal because Lebanese banks guaranteed customer confidentiality. So then the morphine was sent to Marseille, where it was dumped offshore, attached to fishing buoys, and it was picked up by fishermen, or quote, unquote, fishermen. And once in Marseille, it was refined into heroin. For the next few years, these Corsican gangsters and their Italian and American mafia controlled the heroin trade in the United States. The heroin arrived in New York City, where it was cut in heroin mills and prepared for distribution. The epicenter of this process was Pleasant Avenue. It was controlled by the American mafia with the collusion of corrupt police officers. And this continued until the Pleasant Avenue connection was shut down in 1973 and more than 100 mobsters were arrested. Refineries in France were also raided in 1971. Heroin was seized, traffickers were arrested, and refineries were shut down. And while this was taking place, Nixon was essentially paying Turkey to outlaw poppy growing and to enforce their own law so the French connection was now starving. But the American mafia wasn't done for them. They just needed a new source of opium and they found it very close to Turkey in the Golden Crescent of Afghanistan and Pakistan. The poppy grown there was shipped to Iran, which consumed much of it, because Iran had a huge opiate epidemic at the time, but what it didn't consume was shipped to Turkey and then distributed through Europe and then the United States. However, the supply of heroin from the Golden Crescent wasn't sufficient, so the mafia needed to look elsewhere for opium and they found it in the Golden Triangle of Indochina where the United States was engaged in the brutal Vietnam War. Years before America entered Vietnam, the French controlled the opium trade there. During this time in the 1940s, France got the Mong people to grow opium as their primary crop. The Mong were the hill tribes who lived on either side of the Laotian and Vietnamese border. The Mong actually have a very large population in the United States because so many of them fled here during and after the Vietnam War. If you've ever seen the movie Grand Torino, the Asians in that movie were Mong. So the French actually used the opium trade under a program known as Operation X to fund their war against the Vietnam when they were trying to maintain their colonial presence. And by the time the United States took over, opium was entrenched in the primitive Mong economy. So as early as 1959, the CIA was working with Mong guerrilla forces to spy on and fight against the communist path at Laos. And to fund the Mong, Air America became opium carriers for them. And the pilots knew what they were shipping but the contents were simply labeled miscellaneous. So this kept the Mong friendly with the US and it also funded their guerrilla efforts against the communists. And on the other side, Laos was a big player in the opium trade. This particularly came through one of their generals whose name I'm probably gonna mispronounce, but it's general Uain Radicone who was also the chairman of the Laotian Opium Administration. Now this guy actually knew how to do business. At the time this was all going on which we're now talking about the 1960s, heroin in Southeast Asia was grade three heroin which was maybe 50% pure. But Radicone marketed it with the brand name 999 which was based on the claim that his heroin was 99.9% pure. In 1962, refineries capable of producing number four heroin which is between 80 and 99% pure started operating in Thailand. And these spread throughout the Golden Triangle so that by 1971, there were 29 number four heroin refineries and Radicone owned the largest refinery and he marketed his number four heroin under the brand W.O.Globe. Now this heroin was not only being sold in Vietnam, it was popular among US soldiers who dipped their cigarettes in it to smoke it but it was also being shipped directly to the United States. Now this is interesting and I think it's worth taking a small digression here. Economically, brand names serve a purpose which is to help us economize on knowledge which is a scarce resource. And in this case, the brand names advertised by Radicone let his customers know that he's getting a consistent purity. So this is important when we're looking at heroin. So heroin's dangerous, I would never contest that but when you look at heroin in a legal versus an illegal environment, the dangers seem very different. In legal environments like Switzerland, we effectively see a case of zero overdoses on heroin. The way we were taught to think about heroin addiction is that people will crave more and more until eventually they overdose and die. This is where a lot of people apply the phrase chasing the dragon which originally just referred to the opium vapors from opium smoking because they kinda look like dragons and this is part of Chinese culture. But this idea of heroin addiction, it's a complete myth. There are really two fundamental causes for heroin overdose. The first is that people don't know what the purity of the heroin they're injecting is. So Radicone was selling heroin of consistent purity but through the chain of distribution it would be diluted by every different person in the supply chain. The heroin that junkies were buying on the streets of New York was not W.O. Globe heroin. They have been supplied by that but it was a different substance by the time it got to them. So a junkie doesn't really know what he's buying and sometimes that means he gets heroin that is actually more pure than he is used to. So he accidentally over-injects. And the other common way that people overdose on heroin and this is the one that Carl Hart, a Columbia University neurologist who does research on drug addiction. This is the one that he talks about. He's looked at the autopsies of a ton of heroin overdoses and he's noticed that a great majority of the deaths related to heroin are not from overdose of heroin itself but of an overdose of something that it is cut with such as fentanyl. In Huntington, West Virginia where I was living the past seven years, about a year ago we had I think 26 heroin overdoses in one day. This is a small town. It's like 60,000 people in this town. So 27 overdoses in one day. An amazing number. And this was all heroin that came down from Detroit and it was cut with fentanyl so it's a serious, serious problem. So with access to actual brand name heroin while the substance itself could still kill you it would actually be a lot less dangerous because people would know the product they are buying. So in terms of consistency and purity. So that's just one of the many ways that drug prohibition makes drugs more dangerous. So anyway, President Thu, the South Vietnamese leader who was put into power by the United States and several of his military officers were also involved in the heroin trade as well. And in fact, the person who came before him was President Diem when he was first put into office in the 1950s he went on a campaign against opium in Vietnam. And that lasted for about three years until he needed to get into the opium trade to fund his dictatorship over there which the United States supported until he was killed. So US officials turned a blind eye to the heroin trade even as Americans helped with the shipments because the top priority in Vietnam was the communist forces. Drugs were also seen as a problem among American GIs after the MyLy massacre was exposed to the American public. CBS aired a clip of US soldiers smoking marijuana from the barrel of his rifle. Seeing this clip, Democratic Senator Thomas Dodd, this is the father of Chris Dodd, he held hearings about marijuana use in Vietnam. Now Ron Rittenhauer, the soldier who exposed the MyLy massacre, he was included among the witnesses at the hearings. And two members of Senator Dodd's staff started questioning him about marijuana use in Vietnam. Rittenhauer realized they were trying to paint marijuana as the scapegoat for the massacre. You assholes, Rittenhauer said to him, we were all potheads. So Rittenhauer finally agreed to testify in front of Congress about MyLy but only after he got a guarantee that they would not ask him about marijuana. Instead, Rittenhauer sat through a line of witnesses who all suggested that marijuana was responsible for the massacre and when Rittenhauer was called up, they didn't bring up MyLy at all. Instead, they only asked him questions about marijuana. So Rittenhauer was furious. Dodd is stacking the evidence, he told a group of reporters, nobody mentioned drugs at MyLy after it happened and they would have been looking for any excuse. So that's his direct quote after the hearings. And on the same day as the hearings, the Pentagon actually issued a statement saying that there is no evidence that the MyLy incident was the product of narcotics but it said drugs were a serious problem in Vietnam nonetheless. And pot smoking was incredibly common during Vietnam. An estimated 75% of US troops at least tried marijuana while they were there and a large chunk smoked it regularly. I think it was about 30% smoked regularly. So if you've ever seen the movie Good Morning Vietnam, the character that Robin Williams played was Adrian Cronauer who hosted an Air Force radio show and on the show he once joked, speaking of things, controversial, is it true there's a marijuana problem here in Vietnam? No, it's not a problem, everybody has it. So it's really not hard to imagine why so many GIs smoked marijuana. As one pot smoking soldier put it, quote, Vietnamese pot became our path to sanity, our lifeline. It was a simple yet very effective way to maintain peace of mind amidst the chaos of the conflict and escape from the horrendous reality of our daily lives. So marijuana was used as a coping mechanism while the government was putting these guys through hell. And additionally I'll tell you that my best friend is a physician's assistant and when he was getting his degree he had to write his thesis on a medical treatment. Now he's an officer in the Coast Guard and he was going through a military program and he asked if he could do his thesis on the use of marijuana to treat PTSD and he was shot down on the grounds that there wasn't enough research done on the topic. And what this really meant was that there wasn't enough American research on the topic because the government has complete control over American cannabis research. But he compiled a load of studies from other countries such as Canada, Britain, and Israel. Israel had a lot of marijuana studies. In fact it was an Israeli scientist named Rafael Machulum who discovered that THC is the psychoactive component. And so he finally got the permission to do the study and needless to say there's copious evidence that marijuana is very effective treatment for PTSD. So these Vietnam soldiers were effectively self medicating the PTSD that they were getting from their experiences in the war. Though of course none of this was actually known at the time. So marijuana really wasn't unique to soldiers in Vietnam. It was very common among soldiers stationed in the Philippines during the three year war there after the Spanish-American War. It was also common in the Panama Canal Zone which led to the Panama Canal Zone report that concluded just like all the other studies that marijuana really didn't seem to be harmful. So marijuana culture was huge in Vietnam. Soldiers were making pipes out of their guns like the GI shown by CBS. They made pipes out of cartridge cases and bamboo and most grotesquely they occasionally made them out of the bones of dead Viet Cong. On their lighters they engraved drug related poems like always ripped, always stoned, I made a year, I'm going home and other things of that nature. So the year that my life occurred the US government had already started cracking down on marijuana. So the army they sent drug sniffing dogs to search their soldiers and there were mass arrests made for marijuana use. And so pot use did decline but the soldiers just replaced it with another drug and that was of course heroin. So by 1970 one army officer was quoted as saying if it would get them to give up the hard stuff I would buy all the marijuana and hashish in the Delta as a present. That's how bad heroin was by the 70s. In 1971 congressman Robert Steele and Morgan Murphy came back from their visit to Vietnam and reported that as many as 4,000 soldiers were addicted to heroin there. The media ran with it. Time magazine said drugs were a quote as common as chewing gum in Vietnam and ABC ran an hour long special called heroes and heroin. At this time if the GIs weren't smoking the heroin with their tobacco they were snorting it. Heroin snorting is far less potent than injection. So an usual crow head of the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs visited Vietnam to observe the heroin crisis. He figured that if they made heroin more expensive they'd stop using it. So we had the army crack down on heroin and this drove prices up just like he expected it to and when heroin got more expensive soldiers didn't stop using instead to get the most bang for their buck they simply started injecting heroin. So this is the iron law of prohibition at work by the way by cracking down a marijuana the army drove soldiers to heroin snorting and smoking and by cracking down on heroin the army drove soldiers to injecting heroin each attempt at controlling the problem ended up exacerbating it. If you remember in the last episode I told the story of Jerome Jaffe and how he became the first so-called drugs are. One of the plans that made him popular with Nixon was the idea to drug test American GIs and hold them in Vietnam for rehabilitation. The idea was to incentivize soldiers to stay clean so they could go home as soon as possible. By Eagle Crow's second visit to Vietnam Jaffe's drug testing plan was already in the works. Now Jaffe's plan actually worked once soldiers started realizing that they were going to have to go through what they called the P house of the August moon before being shipped home they started keeping themselves clean but this is interesting for a couple of reasons. One is heroin use didn't stop due to Jaffe's drug testing plan soldiers merely stopped using shortly before their time was up and moreover when soldiers went home very few of them brought their heroin habit back to the United States. So the reason this is important is because it highlights the problem with the traditional addiction theory that the government has always been trying to peddle. Heroin is chemically addictive, yes but a major component of the addictive quality of any heart drug use is not the chemical element of the psychological one. Soldiers were using heroin while they were in Vietnam as a way to cope with the horrors they were facing over there. Once they returned home most of them no longer needed heroin to get them through their ordeals. So heroin use plummeted and soldiers had an easy time abstaining prior to being shipped home because it wasn't the chemical dependency that drove their usage. Drug abuse in Vietnam was clearly an environmental issue. Now this is worth stopping to think about. It seems clear from the Vietnam experience and there are studies that reaffirm this that have been published since Vietnam that drug abuse is largely the product of environmental factors. Now if this is the case how might we imagine that incarceration might affect the drug user? If drugs are a way of coping with tough environments it almost suggests that throwing somebody in an abusive prison system for 10 years might actually reinforce their drug habit. But that's an aside. Anyway, that's where I'm gonna end the show today. This is a short one but I thought Vietnam is a subject worth giving its own isolated episode two. And the next episode which you're gonna wanna listen to we're gonna talk about the Carter years. And these are interesting because Carter is the first president to recommend decriminalizing marijuana and did this in front of Congress. And for a few years in the early part of his administration it actually seemed like that was gonna be the case but then some events took place that turned everything around and marijuana ended up by the end of the Carter administration being seen by the American public as something far more sinister than they saw it even during the Nixon years when he was trying to get them to view marijuana as this great evil. So it's gonna be a very interesting very important episode. You're definitely gonna wanna listen to it. So if you have not already make sure you do subscribe to this podcast and thanks for listening. For more content like this visit mesis.org.