Publisher’s Foreword

The small size of the room had me sitting on my little brother’s bed, while my dad and his friend sat on dining room chairs. It was September 1969, I had a 5-month-old daughter, was a partner in a thriving record store in Portland, had just helped pull off a successful rock festival headlining the Grateful Dead … and it was the day before my twentieth birthday. So, I had a few other things on my mind when my dad said, “It’s time to have that talk.”

He was referring to a question he had asked me months earlier about the Vietnam War. I was young, and had given him a flip answer. He said we would have to have a “talk.”

My dad had been waiting for a visit from Dr. D.F. Flemming, a Vanderbilt University professor and author of The Cold War and its Origins. We had met before when my family lived in Nashville in the late ’50s, but I had little recollection because at that time I was more concerned with baseball cards and bicycles.

I felt strange as we three sat there, then my dad spoke right up saying, “The Vietnam War is about drugs.” He said other things: about secret societies, playing out a lose-scenario, sway pieces in the news, and more. My head was swimming. I didn’t understand what my dad was talking about. Early on in the discussion I thought my dad was having a parental “drug talk” with me, and I kept waiting for him to tell me not to smoke pot, etc. But dad kept on talking about his work in the intelligence field.

He told me he had first been approached in 1936, when he was an exchange student to China. He had served in the Office of Strategic Services and was “placed” into the army in 1943, to report back on the doings around General MacArthur, among other duties. Later on in the Philippines, towards the end of WWII, my father worked with Colonel Edward Lansdale. This relationship continued while both were employed by the Central Intelligence Agency, where my dad’s last overt job was serving as Branch Chief, Head of East Asia Analysis Office. Lansdale would occasionally stop by the family home in rural Virginia, and a 1956 meeting with Lansdale in Tay Ninh Vietnam would play a big part in my father’s decision to leave the agency in 1959.

Now my dad had never uttered a word to me alone, or in a family setting, about his “secret” work. So I was fascinated, but was also on the automatic pilot of a child being “talked to” by a parent. Dr. Flemming didn’t speak much, simply reinforcing some of my dad’s points. It quickly became apparent that I had no frame of reference for what was being said, and the talk soon ended.

Further conservations, some rather heated, with my father continued my education into something I call CIA-drugs, a subject that officially doesn’t exist. There was a bit of reportage in the alternative press and some of the men’s magazines about possible involvement of our intelligence agencies with the drug trade. Then in late 1972 came Alfred McCoy’s ground-breaking exposé, Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia, which seemed to validate my Dad’s words.

During the ensuing years some light would shine now and then into this deep nether realm of quasi-official drug trafficking, generally to be blotted out by ceremonious denials and, when needed, the full force of a pliant media.

That The Strength of the Pack a superb investigative work of history by a noted and respected author is being published by us, a small and relatively insignificant press, illustrates the power of officialdom … and money.

This flimflammery is nothing new; the smuggling of narcotics has been an integral part of foreign policy decisions and the world’s “legitimate” economy for centuries. Indeed, as Professor Carl Trocki says in Opium, Empire and the Global Political Economy, “The trade in such drugs usually results in some form of monopoly which not only centralizes the drug traffic, but also restructures much of the affiliated social and economic terrain in the process. In particular two major effects are the creation of mass markets and the generation of enormous, in fact unprecedented, cash flows. The existence of monopoly results in the accumulations of vast pools of wealth. The accumulations of wealth created by a succession of historic drug trades have been among the primary foundations of global capitalism.” He also realizes that, “drug economies have the power to destroy or seriously undermine an existing political order.” How true.

My studies have concluded that our long-running Drug War has nothing to do with temperance, the health of our community, our children or ourselves, but simply serves to keep in place drug prohibitions that create a gigantic black market. A black market that allows “weeds” to be sold for, sometimes, even more than gold. An underground economy that may allow faceless forces to exert political and financial pressure from the shadows, creating situations where who knows whose eldritch hand one may be grasping.

History shows that a state-regulated open market operates with less harm to civil institutions, and engenders less personal tragedy and social misery. The Strength of the Pack shows that America’s valiant federal drug law enforcement agents have been used as pawns in a rigged game, played in the dark … with their hands tied behind their backs.

Onwards to the utmost of futures!
Peace,
Kris Millegan
Publisher
TrineDay
August 18, 2009