ooks The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade Alfred W. McCoy May, 1991 Lawrence Hill/Chicago Review Press $29 in cloth; $16.95 in paper Distributed by: Independent Publishers Group 814 North Franklin St. Chicago IL 60610 (800) 888 4741 The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia Alfred W. McCoy 1972 Harper & Row (Out of Print) The growth of the Golden Triangle, one of the world's major opium growing regions encompassing Eastern Burma and bits of Thailand and Laos, is inextricably tied to US foreign policy after World War II. Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia is the classic study on the history of global commerce in heroin, written during the Vietnam war. Alfred W. McCoy, Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, has completely revised and updated the book in a new edition by Lawrence Hill press, available May, 1991. Read the interview with McCoy in the January 1991 issue of Z Magazine ( 150 West Canton St., Boston, MA 02118. Monthly, $25/Year.) BAYER pHARM~CBUTI PR...ODU FA.I~BENFABRJI{BN OF ELBERFELD CO. S~:nd far .samples nd LiffNdur~ ta Bayer invented, named and marketed Heroin, as well as Aspirin, at the end ofthe 19th century. By 1924 Heroin is banned in the US. Illegal usage virtually disappeared during World War II. US support for underworld economies in Europe, and dictatorships in Asia, revived Heroin commerce. Advertisementfrom Medical Mirror, 1900. Winter/Spring 1991 RAIN Page 19 Yellow Rainmakers: Are Chemical Weapons Being Used in Southeast Asia? Grant Evans 1983 Verso (Routledge, Cbapman & Hall) Paperback $12.95 The only complete study of the US propaganda balloon that burst under scientific scrutiny. A rumor among a fearful refugee population, sparked by an interesting behavior of tropical bees, was amplified by the CIA and world media attention into pressure on the Lao government. The United States was the last major power to accept the Geneva protocol against chemical weapons use. Yet from this position, they falsely accused a socialist government of using chemical weapons against their own people. This sociological study is thick with ethnographic detail of the Hmong people in Laos, used and abused by the West and their allies, callously tossed from selfreliance to dependence and back again. The Hmong were set against other tribes, pressed into service as mercenaries, turned into opium addicts, forced to grow opium for export, killed when out of line...this is a most disturbing picture of a culture horribly warped by sudden participation in modern warfare and economics. ir America Video Release: February 21st Tri-star Pictures (a unit of Columbia Pictures) This cartoon-like adventure comedy makes some very serious charges about US policy in Laos during the war. It is a fine antidote for any big screen enthusiast overdosed on America-can-do-no-wrong war movies. Although the film's writers are politically well informed, they miss much about Lao society that would have added depth and feeling to this buddy picture. The film's leading characters, pilots hired by the CIA front Air America, are portrayed sympathetically as expendable government workers. To the US administration, however, they were not quite as expendable as the Lao themselves, It is unfortunate that the massive bombing of the country is left out of the film.
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