66. Mirante, Burmese Looking Glass, 147: “I suspected that Ne Win wouldn’t mind if it killed more than poppies in the hills of the Shan State.” A professor told Mirante that an environmental impact assessment was done before the program started. “It made clear that spraying in Burma would be environmentally risky and of dubious effectiveness. State buried the report and went ahead with the program anyway. . . . The U.S. ambassador to Burma, O’Donohue, told our conference that the spraying program was the greatest success in recent U.S.-Burma relations” (148). Cf. Mother Jones Magazine, February–March 1989, 41.
67. Shelby Tucker, Among Insurgents: Walking through Burma (London: Radcliffe, 2000), 93. For similar reports on the DEA’s use of 2,4-D against the FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia) in Colombia, see David Weir and Mark Schapiro, Circle of Poison: Pesticides and People in a Hungry World (San Francisco: Institute for Food and Development Policy, 1981).
68. McCoy, “Lord of Druglords,” 454–55; Lintner, Burma in Revolt, 278, 380–81, 377–78.
69. Valentine, The Strength of the Pack, 70; cf. McCoy, The Politics of Heroin, 234.
70. Mills, Underground Empire, 201–3, 222 (quoting from internal DEA report on termination of Operation Durian); McCoy, The Politics of Heroin, 431. Poonsiri’s main Bangkok purchaser, Lu Hsu-Shui, had established himself by trading opium for gold with the KMT in northern Thailand (Lintner, Burma in Revolt, 307). In San Francisco, Lu Hsu-shui and two of his sons paid one and a half million dollars for the Shaw Hotel, today the Renoir Hotel (Mills, Underground Empire, 214).
71. Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, New York Times, June 16, 1986.
72. Mills, Underground Empire, 1076–78.
73. Keith Quincy, Hmong: History of a People (Cheney: Eastern Washington University Press, 1995), 163.
74. Peter Dale Scott, The Road to 9/11: Wealth, Empire, and the Future of America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 73–75, citing Christina Lamb, Waiting for Allah: Pakistan’s Struggle for Democracy (London: H. Hamilton, 1991), 222; cf. McCoy, The Politics of Heroin, 479. Fazle Haq was the governor of Pakistan’s North-West Frontier Province; at the same time he was also an important CIA contact and supporter of the Afghan mujahideen, some of whom—it was no secret—were supporting themselves by major opium and heroin trafficking through the province. However, after lengthy correspondence with Fazle Haq’s son, I am persuaded that there are no known grounds to accuse Fazle Haq of having profited personally from the drug traffic. See “Clarification from Peter Dale Scott re Fazle Haq,” 911Truth.org, http://www.911truth.org/article
.php?story=20090223165146219.
75. Scott, The Road to 9/11, 73–75, citing McCoy, The Politics of Heroin, 475 (leading drug lords), 464 (60 percent).
76. McCoy, The Politics of Heroin, 461; citing interview with Dr. David Musto.
77. McCoy, The Politics of Heroin, 462.
78. Thomas Fuller, “No Blowing Smoke: Poppies Fade in Southeast Asia,” New York Times, September 16, 2007. Cf. United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, “Opium Poppy Cultivation in Southeast Asia: Lao PDR, Myanmar and Thailand,” 2009, 3: “Opium poppy cultivation in Lao PDR, Myanmar and Thailand combined has decreased from an estimated 157,900 hectares in 1998, the year of the United Nations General Assembly Special Session on Drugs, to only 29,400 hectares in 2007. Despite a 22% increase in 2007, this corresponds to an 81% overall reduction in only nine years.”
79. “Figure 2: Global Opium Poppy Cultivation (Hectares), 1990–2007,” United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, “Opium Poppy Cultivation in Southeast Asia: Lao PDR, Myanmar and Thailand,” 4. Just over 250,000 hectares of opium were planted in 1990 and just under that figure in 2007. The biggest divergence from that level was in 2001, the year that the Taliban successfully banned opium production in their area of Afghanistan. Total opium production for that one year dropped to about half the average.
80. Catherine Lamour and Michel R. Lamberti, The International Connection: Opium from Growers to Pushers (New York: Pantheon, 1974), 190–92.
81. Peter Truell and Larry Gurwin, False Profits: The Inside Story of BCCI, the World’s Most Corrupt Financial Empire (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1992), 94–95.
