pretty good excerpt from a noam chomsky interview in high times from ‘98…basically we can thank hitler, mussolini, and franco for killing the buzz and we can thank uncle sam and the godfathers for bringing it back, man.
“If you look into the history of what is called the CIA, which means the U.S. White House, its secret wars, clandestine warfare, the trail of drug production just follows. It started in France after the Second World War when the United States was essentially trying to re-institute the traditional social order, to rehabilitate Fascist collaborators, wipe out the Resistance and destroy the unions and so on. The first thing they did was re-constitute the Mafia, as strikebreakers or for other such useful services. And the Mafia doesn’t do it for fun, so there was a tradeoff: Essentially, they allowed them to re-institute the heroin-production system, which had been destroyed by the Fascists. The Fascists tended to run a pretty tight ship: They didn’t want any competition, so they wiped out the Mafia. But the U.S. re-constituted it, first in southern Italy, and then in southern France with the Corsican Mafia. That’s where the famous French Connection comes from.”
