Of people including myself to think about Something Like the opium war as maybe an anomaly or something very particular to a very particular time and place and i have to say im guilty of thinking about it that way but great scholarship, truly great scholarship like killer high, like a lot of the work done at the Washington Institute forces me to see the world ina totally new way. This book has forced me and i think it forces all readers to really focus on the eternal and incredibly expensive relationship between drugs and war. That relationship extends from war conducted by people who are often on a form of drugs, some form of psychoactive substance. It extends to wars and conquest of drugs or the Raw Materials for drugs. It extends to wars for markets and outlets for drugs and of course we are all familiar with warsagainst drugs but as peter argues so effectively , this phenomenon, this interaction between psychoactive substances and conflicts is leased throughout history and up to the present. Peter makes a number of very interesting conclusions in this book but raises a number of questions and we will have an opportunity with this fantastic panel to delve into some of those questions which will again emphasize this entirely new lens that peter gives us to see the world. Let me explain how we are going to proceed. Im going to ask peter to come up and speak for 10 minutes about the book and im going to ask our panelists to comment or 10 minutes or so on the book and we will open it up for questions and answers let me briefly introduce peter and our panelists. Peter andreas is the john hay professor of International Studies at the Washington Institute and at the department of political so science. He is the coauthor of 11 books including killer high but also smuggler nation, of course my relevance today is we live in a world of trade frictions and talks about piracy and claims about a variety of countries and illicit activities. Next to speak will be Chris Chivers who is a Pulitzer Prize winning longform writer and journalist for the New York Times, im sort all of you are familiar with his work, im a big fan. Hes worked at the New York Times says 1999, his career as a Foreign Correspondent as focused on conflict regions spanning afghanistan, iraq, chechnya, libya and syria and others. Chris also served in the marine corps infantryman and a combat veteran from the first persian gulf war. The next to speak will be angelica duranmartinez who is associate professor of Political Science at the university of massachusetts global, angelica is a phd recipient from brown and she is a noted expert on latin american and comparative politics but with a particular emphasis on organized crime and criminality, illicit markets and the relationship between the actors and nonstate actors, she is the author of the awardwinning 2018 book the politics of drug violence, criminal cops and politicians in colombia and mexico that was from Oxford University press and stephen duranmartinez kinzer is a senior fellow at the Washington Institute and in an awardwinning journalist who over the course of his career covered 50 countrieson five continents. Stephen spent more than 20 years working for the New York Times as Foreign Correspondent bureau chief and among his numerous acclaimed books include the 2019 volume poison or in chief signy gottlieb and the cia search for mind control, topical for the discussion today with that let me turn the microphone over to peter andreas. [applause] okay. Thank you all for coming. If you are here because you think this is about the made for tv dvd killer high, sorry to disappoint you. Im sure that dvd has and will outsell my book. The genre for that ibelieve on amazons horror comedy. So my book is definitely horror. Theres no comedy in it. The title killer high has grown on me. It wasnt my selection. My choice was originally the subtitle for the book, a history of war in six drugs. What i tried to do in a mere 300 something pages is retail the history of warfare through the lens of drugs. And retail the history of drugs through the lens of war and hopefully for those of you who end up reading the book you will not think of war again in the same way and you wont quite think of drugs in the same way. In fact id like to mention that drugs and war Work Together and overtime came became quite addicted to each other. My one line would be drugs made war and war made drugs. These two things tend to be treated quite separately and in the literature on drugs and war, i tried to tie them together across time, across place and across the psychoactive substance. The motivation for the book was not history, it was to bring history into what i consider a policy debate that suffers from a severe case of historical amnesia, a debate about the socalled nexus between drugs and conflict. We talked today about narco states. The first thing that comes to mind is afghanistan when we think about narco insurgents or narco terrorism we talk about afghanistan but looked at this issue from a much deeper historical sweep coming back not just years and decades centuries, the first true narco state is probably Great Britain. The first in fact Great Britain is probably the first narco empire, if you think about the sheer importance of alcohol taxes, the importance of the t trade. The powerful drug, im addicted to it, its called caffeine, not nicotine. Dont touch the stuff. For the importance of the opium trade. For the rise of britain as the worlds foremostmaritime power. In fact, narco insurgents, yes, its the taliban, but it was also George Washington, why do i say George Washington . That conflict very much depended on revenue generated by tobacco. In fact, that alone from france based on tobacco revenue and the brits were so upset about it a bird tobacco field whenever they found them. Including tobacco fields owned by thomas jefferson. So i try to do is systematically unravel and interrogate, unpack the relationship between drugs and war. And i find theres five relationships, what is war while on drugs literally combat and drug use in wartime not just combatants but also on the homefront as well, drug use by civilians dealing with coping with wartime, obviously war is stressful work. No surprise that drugs help soldiers cope, they also help them celebrate victories, help them prepare for battle, they give him liquid courage after all. I also talk about more through drugs. Totally different than war while on drugs, word through the drugs meeting using drugs 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 Police Impact drugs. From the most benign to the most dangerous psychoactive substances. Then theres war for drugs. Which is actually distinct from the first two were at war for drugs is going to war over markets and as ed mentioned, the most famous case of this of course are the opium wars of the mid19th 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 going on in mexico today. More people have died in mexico since late 2006 and have died in iraq and afghanistan combined. Drug violence that although security analysts are reluctant to call it war, if you actually look at the sheer number of casualties, if you look at how well armed the perpetrators are using military grade equipment, the actors themselves are often militarily trained, often defectors from the military and in one case us trained antidrug force turned into a drug squad for Drug Trafficking organizations. And then you think about the state itself has deployed its military and a frontline role in fighting drugs, the mexican military is essentially an antidrug course at this point and then you say its not just mexico but also colombia to some extent and brazil to some extent and even the United States in the 1980s as loosened the policy, thomas restricted the use of the us military or Law Enforcement purposes, now very much indebted in the war on drugs. At the border and beyond and just proliferation also of militarized policing in our own community, swat teams invented before the war on drugs but really took off thanks to the war on drugs and this is using military technologies, exmilitary personnel and approaches to fighting a substance. There is a war against drugs, which is closely related but distinct than war for drugs. War against drugs started as a metaphor, nixon declared war against drugs, he didnt actually send in troops to fight drugs. But since the 1980s, its become progressively more militarized so that we could actually call it an outright war. And last but not least, this is probably the research in the book that most surprised me is drugs after war. How much war and war itself the Lasting Legacy in terms of drug production, trafficking, regulation, drug tastes have been fundamentally altered. Thanks to wars in ways that we often dont give more credit for. Just to give youa few examples , why are we a coffee drinking rather than a tea drinkingnation . Because we won the American Revolution. The brits went on with tea, we turned to coffee. We not only turned the coffee, we turned to whiskey. One was the drink of choice produced in long island before the American Revolution but it still arrives which is what kept much of the nation going including massachusetts and whiskey became the ill call it beverage of choice, it was a national drink, it was no longer needed for imports from abroad, it was considered patriotic to turn against whiskey and turn against that british strength t cells are very take that we now take for granted were actually a result of war. The very criminalization of cocaine is a product of world war ii. Very few people remember that cocaine was legally produced by Japanese Pharmaceutical Companies , coat was thrown in job. The destruction of those fields and destruction of the Japanese Army suitable cocaine industry is part of the us victory in world war ii. The us had turned against cocaine earlier of course it wasnt only with the victory of japan that the us was able to globalize its preference for cocaine prohibition so cocaine was one of the biggest losers of world war ii. Illegal cocaine, decades later was arguably one of the biggest winners. So theres five relationships, now i want to tell you a little bit in the few minutes that i have about the six he drugs and ive already given you hints because i mentioned some of them. The oldest, most multipurpose and arguably doubleedged of thedrugs is alcohol. It goes back, its to beer and wine. And then the distilling revolution really did indeed revolutionize things. Think about why france is the worlds most famous wine producing region in the world. Its the roman conquest is what brought wine to france. Bordeaux was set up as a port by the romans after the romans retreated and were pushed back, wind indoors in france. The distilling revolution was absolutely essential to the conquest of the new world. Think about theimportance of alcohol and ethnic cleanser in westward expansion. In fact, part alcohol become so important that it was actually rations on both sides of the American Revolution. After the revolution whiskey became part of us military rations. In fact, the british to leave it or not had runrations until the early 1970s on their naval ships. The second drug, tobacco arrives much later than alcohol but once it arrives, equally potent and in fact, some of the downsides of alcohol, alcohol basically can raise a lot of revenue but you also might have a drunk military. The czar was able to finance the Largest Standing Army in europe with vodka revenue but his soldiers were drunk. Tobacco is the ideal war drug, highly portable, fights both anxiety and boredom, relieves, is highly taxable and doesnt impede performance even if it might eventually kill you. The globalization of tobacco is intimately also about the spread of warfare, soldiers globalize warfare and the very mode of Tobacco Consumption was closely influenced by war so why did we turn away from lucas and pipes to cigars and then cigarettes, to increasingly portable, easily produced to move, this was the intimate story of war. In fact, cigarettes by the time world war ii came around was the most valued ration in cigarette soldier rations. Third, being. My drug of choice and im completely addicted to the stuff. Its the most, world most popular psychoactive substance. But certainly far from a benign relationship to war, arguably stimulated imperial expansion, i already mentioned the British Empire of tea but then we also have the rise of caffeinated soldiers. Its fascinating in the rise of the us civil war, is mentioned in soldier diaries were often been done, cannon or rifle. Coffee is just this essential ingredient to keep soldiers going area and since coffee was an instant hit on the battlefield in world war ii and then outlived world war ii. The coffee break was actually introduced for defense workers during world war ii and then outlived world war ii and institutionalized in theworkplace in the 1950s. And then all the way up to today, the favorite beverage of military bases across the world are hyper caffeinated beverages like red bull and monster and so on. Fourth, opium. I had already mentioned opium wars are an extreme case of the relationship between war and drugs which is more for drugs, imperial wars but also for example the Japanese Imperial occupation of china. Theres no way japan in the late 1930s could fund its occupation of china without narcotics. And amphetamines in extreme case of war while on drugs, sun tzu since the is the essence of war, he did not mean amphetamine but maybe pretty impressed at how important amphetamines were to keep soldiers on many sides going during world war ii. And the last but not least, cocaine. The extreme case of war against drugs which ive already said a few things about. Ill stop there and turn things over to chris. [applause] thank you peter. Im open to compliments, 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 ive used up to independence, its probably a sign its a hell of a book. I was early lucky reader, peter got me a copy over christmas and i spent the holidays with. Its a work of history asyou just heard. And it, history is an act of making diverse and sometimes divergent sources over here into an understanding and maybe a set of narratives that are relatable and analysis that can make you as you said, reimagine the world and understand a new, in this case the world of war and that was my experience that i dont want to talk about history, at least notdistant history. I want to talk more about now and the more recent observations since the persian gulf war of 1990 and 91 and the socalled, as the military calls it global war on terror since 2001 and bring events that peter has related up to the present time. Are there any recent veterans in the room . Any . 1 . Hopefully there will be some on cspan and you can fact check me so i welcome you to comment afterwards but peter talks about in the book and in his remarks the place, but that various substances have on the battlefield and the battlefield of this era that we live in now have changed a bit through modern conventional militaries, wars become so technical and the military commands have become in some cases so politically sensitive at some of the longstanding drugs of the battlefield are now prohibited. Alcohol most notably. For a varietyof reasons , although military is a heavy user at the personal level of alcohol, at the individual level, at the unit level when deployed, alcohol, im not going to call it nonexistent is not but its almost invisible, its quite rare. Its very unusual to see alcohol on thebattlefield. Some of this is because of the worst, we have been since 2001 and since the gulf war in fact often played out among islamic populations. There is a sensitivity to having the military make the social faux pas of ingesting alcohol in a country where they have been in some cases invited, in other cases occupied but in any case are hoping to get along with the population better than what the they otherwise might so there is still alcohol on the battlefield. You wont see much of it, youve got to look. When i was in the 80s and 90s, there were among the troops, i was in the marine infantry these things called snakebite gets which was a euphemism, a jump and it was people would have sent to them shampoo ballsperhaps with a little in it. But it was quite guarded, its very obvious if you know as most everyone here as some sort of relationship with alcohol, very hard to hide alcohol use so i remember one snakebite get being broken out on a worship that i was on but they literally lock the doors and someone said i just got bit by a snake and pulled out a bottle and everyone got like a couple of shots and that was it. And in a 10 monthdeployment. It wasnt much alcohol that at all. But there are many other drugs out there. And theres 80 hypocrisy that you will see in how the military, our military and western militaries in general relate with drugs in their own forces versus into their at satellite forces and 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, the mechanical failure of the aircraft. There was a story that circulated in the military the years after that the sailor had been smoking pot in a hangar deck and had caused a small fire in a garbage can and this activated the Sprinkler System which had