Morcan Books & Films

In book two in our international thriller series The Orphan Trilogy we highlight the direct link many commentators and researchers are convinced exists between the Kosovo War and heroin.

 

They’d arranged to meet with an Omegan mole who worked in the Clinton administration. He was helping them with a new Omega Agency operation involving the Kosovo War, which had just broken out in Europe. Naylor and his cronies were seeking to use Kosovo as a transit route for Afghan heroin bound for EU countries. Despite the official news stories being circulated by mainstream media, Omega knew the extremely lucrative heroin trade was behind the war. –The Orphan Factory 

 

The above excerpt from The Orphan Factory was inspired in part by a discussion rumored to have taken place at the 1996 Bilderberg Group conference in Toronto, Canada. Its confirmed elite attendees included David Rockefeller, Henry Kissinger and Margaret Thatcher, and the discussion was said to have ended with the decision to create the Kosovo War.

If true, we can only imagine how the discussion went…

Bilderberger #1 may have said in passing that another war was needed to support the Military Industrial Complex.

Bilderberger #2 may have mentioned that Kosovo had significant mineral reserves – since valued at more than 13 billion Euros – including silver, zinc, cobalt, lead, bauxite and lignite worth tapping into.

Bilderberger #3 may have replied that the value of those reserves paled into insignificance next to the value of oil reserves of Middle East countries, and the gold and diamond reserves of several African countries.

“Yeah, true, we gotta think big,” Bilderberger #4 may have added.

After some head scratching, Bilderberger #5 may have reminded his or her fellow Bilderbergers that Kosovo lay smack bang in the middle of the infamous Balkan Route through which billions of dollars of heroin passed annually into western Europe from Turkey, Iran and Afghanistan. And his or her associates may have quickly deduced that whilst the value of Kosovo’s mineral resources may not warrant going to war over, the value of its drug trade – then believed to be worth around US$300 billion – was something else entirely.

That imaginary discussion highlights one of the most disturbing conspiracy theories surrounding illicit drugs – in particular heroin and opium – and the disturbing role these drugs have played in recent wars.

The infamous Balkan Route – a narcotic superhighway.

 

The drug behind a hundred wars

Dope. Tar. White Nurse. Black Pearl. Hero. Big H. Snow. Boy. Junk. Smack.

These are just a few examples of the seemingly inexhaustible slang terms people use when referring to heroin. Some, like China White or Mexican Mud, reflect location; others, like Dragon or White Girl, reflect popular songs while most are simply insider terms for those in the know.

It’s worth noting the difference between heroin and opium because the two are often confused and because both are often referred to in the conflicts we wish to highlight – namely the Kosovo and the Afghanistan wars.

Opium comes from the opium poppy (also known as Papaver Somniferum in scientific circles), whereas heroin is a semi-synthetic opioid analgesic, not an opiate.

Most will be familiar with the Opium Wars that date back to the late 1830’s and involved Britain illegally trafficking opium into China and making enormous financial sums as a result.

What’s less known is that heroin has been a cause of many a conflict – between countries, tribes and drug cartels – since it was first produced on a commercial scale as a wonder drug in the late 1890’s.

 

The Kosovo War

The brief but bloody Kosovo War was fought over 1998-99 between the ruling Federal Republic of Yugoslavia and the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) who, you may recall, received military support from NATO. Essentially, it was a conflict between the Orthodox Serbians and the Kosovo-Albanians.

One of the enduring images from the Kosovo War.

Armed with weapons smuggled in from Albania, the KLA attacked Yugoslav authorities in Kosovo, sparking a campaign of retribution by Serbs, which resulted in the confirmed deaths of many hundreds of KLA sympathizers – fighters and civilians – and a mass exodus of refugees.

NATO then lent its weight to the conflict by participating in an aerial bombardment of Yugoslavia, attracting widespread controversy and condemnation, and prompting more than a few conspiracy theories. Even China chipped in, claiming the US was flexing its military muscle and expanding its presence and influence in Europe.

Some critics of the NATO campaign, which occurred during President Bill Clinton’s tenure, even labeled it a diversionary tactic to deflect attention from Clinton’s recent embarrassing dalliance with Monica Lewinsky in the White House.

All of these accusations were met with denials by the Clinton Administration, although the denials rang hollow in the face of the UN Security Council’s refusal to sanction NATO’s aggressive military involvement in the conflict.

A refugee camp struggles to cope during the Kosovo War.

 

“How many wars do you want to have in your lifetime? How many bombs are you going to drop? I just think it looks like we’ve become a warrior nation … We are dropping bombs on crowded cities at night where old people and children are sleeping, and we’re watching it on CNN … What are we doing with all these wars? How are we safer? … You can’t use an anti-war platform to get elected. So maybe that explains why it’s so easy for us to go to war. Norman Solomon has written a book War Made Easy. Essentially he says, if the president of the United States wants a war, he can have one. I believe that totally. It’s very, very hard to dissent.”–Phil Donahue, interview on Piers Morgan Tonight that aired on CNN January 7, 2012

 

The heroin connection

It’s the role heroin played in the Kosovo War that has intrigued many independent researchers.

Kosovo lies in the center of the Balkan Route through which nearly all Afghan heroin (the world’s most popular variety) passes through on its way to greater Europe and beyond, including the United States. The extraordinary value of the Balkans’ drug trade has been estimated to be worth anywhere from US$500 billion to one trillion dollars annually.

There’s speculation the Western-backed KLA was heavily involved in this profitable business, adding fuel to the theory that the desire to control heroin trafficking was the underlying cause of the Kosovo War.

Certainly, Kosovo Albanians are prime movers in the region’s illegal drug trade – second only to the Turkish mafia, according to US Drug Enforcement Agency officials who, in 2000, estimated that Kosovo Albanians controlled nearly half of Europe’s heroin. Those same officials said as much as 6 tonnes of heroin passed through the Balkan Route every month.

In an article by The Guardian dated March 13, 2000, columnist Maggie O’Kane said international agencies fighting the drug trade were warning that Kosovo had become “a smuggler’s paradise” and “Nato-led forces, struggling to keep the peace a year after the war, have no mandate to fight drug traffickers…who are running the Balkan route with complete freedom”.

In the same article, a former Yugoslav narcotics official described Kosovo as “the Colombia of Europe”. The official says, “The Kosovo mafia has been smuggling heroin since the mid-1980’s. But since the Kosovo War, they have come into their own.”

Perhaps the foremost authority on drug wars is Canadian economist Dr. Michel Chossudovsky, author of The New World Order, whose extensive commentaries clearly convey that “the expensive Yugoslav conflict” was “directly linked to the multi-billion drug war”.

Dr. Chossudovsky.

In an exclusive interview dated June 30, 1999 in cannabisculture.com, Dr. Chossudovsky says, “Drugs serve political interests … They help finance covert intelligence operations … the Vietnam War, the generals in Haiti, the Contras, Colombian paramilitaries … Many groups are funded with drug money that serve geopolitical interests. And there is usually covert support provided by the CIA to these groups.

“It is well documented the KLA is financed by the drug trade. It also has links to the CIA, German intelligence and Islamic terrorist organizations. So Islamic terrorist organizations the West has labeled as its enemies are co-financing the KLA alongside NATO. It’s a totally absurd situation”.

Dr. Chossudovsky also alludes to drug profits being laundered to buy arms in post-war Kosovo.

 

Operation Enduring Freedom aka Operation Opium

Dr. Chossudovsky also believes heroin is a primary motivating factor in the war in Afghanistan – the war the American administration calls Operation Enduring Freedom. In an article published in RonPaulForums.com and dated June 25, 2013, he says, “Since the US-led invasion of Afghanistan in October 2001, the Golden Crescent opium trade has soared.”

The documented Northern Route for drug trafficking out of Afghanistan.

In the same article, Dr. Chossudovsky says in the previous four years there was a surge in Afghan opium production. He quotes UNODC (the UN Office on Drugs and Crime) figures which reveal that poppy cultivation in Afghanistan in 2012 covered an area of more than 154,000 hectares; he also quotes a UNODC spokesperson as confirming in 2013 that opium production is heading toward record levels.

Dr. Chossudovsky is also extensively quoted in the GlobalResearch.com site, which provides some of the most credible, in depth research and reporting on the Afghan drug trade.

Afghan farmers collected raw opium in a poppy field.

Under the tell-all heading “The Spoils of War: Afghanistan’s Multibillion Dollar Heroin Trade”, Global Research carries yet another article by Dr. Chossudovsky. It was first published in May 2005. In it he states:

“Heroin is a multi-billion dollar business supported by powerful interests…One of the ‘hidden’ objectives of the war (in Afghanistan) was precisely to restore the CIA-sponsored drug trade to its historical levels and exert direct control over the drug routes.

“Immediately following the October 2001 invasion, Opium markets were restored. By early 2002, the opium price…was almost 10 times higher than in 2000.”

Readers are reminded that “prior to the Soviet-Afghan War (1979-1989) opium production in Afghanistan and Pakistan was directed to small regional markets” and “there was no local production of heroin.”

Dr. Chossudovsky claims “the Afghan narcotics economy was a carefully designed project of the CIA, supported by US foreign policy”.

History lends some weight to the doctor’s claims. Out of the chaos that followed the Soviet-Afghan War, the ruling Taliban decreed that opium production be significantly curbed. That ruling was followed by another ordering that opium cultivation cease totally.

A solitary US Marine patrols a poppy field in Afghanistan.

There has been considerable speculation that America’s invasion of Afghanistan was prompted by this development. Whether true or not, one result of that military action is not in doubt: the opium ban was quickly lifted and Afghan opium production rapidly rose to record levels.

Of course, this could be passed off as coincidental. An innocent result of an invasion that saw Afghanistan’s war lords back in control and opium growth thriving once again. Indeed, that’s the official line and that’s how many perceive it.

However, if commentators and researchers are united about any one thing it’s that the CIA is inexorably linked to Afghanistan’s illicit drug trade and has been, in the words of one commentator, “since the agency funded Taliban fighters to oppose the Soviets”.

 

(Profiting from) The War on Drugs

The motivations for creating these drug wars, if indeed that’s what they are, is the massive profits the global elite can derive from their well-documented drug trafficking.

Which begs the question: why are drugs so profitable? Essentially, many argue, it’s because they are illegal. By making drugs a criminal enterprise, it creates an enormous black market economy where drugs fetch far greater prices than they would if legal.

Many authors and independent media outlets have repeatedly suggested the War on Drugs is a money-making scheme and doesn’t actually prevent drug usage or reduce the number of addicts. They point to countries like Portugal, the Netherlands and the Czech Republic, which have all decriminalized drug usage to varying degrees and have subsequently experienced a decrease in the amount of drug-related crime and a reduction in the incidence of drug addiction.

In an article dated January 23, 2014 and headed World leaders slam war on drugs as ‘a disaster’, CNBC comments that the “decades-long war on drugs has failed and the world’s lawmakers need to consider decriminalization”.

Former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan is quoted in the article as saying the War on Drugs “has been a disaster and has inflicted enormous harm … Drug use is not down. It’s time for a different approach. Drugs have destroyed many people, and the wrong government and policies have destroyed many people”.

Drug war casualties (above and below)…no end in sight.

Possibly interrelated to the theory that drugs are prohibited to fuel the highly profitable international drug trade, is the privatization of prisons that has occurred in America and throughout much of the Western world in recent decades. Something that started happening around the same time the War on Drugs began.

Privatized prisons could be viewed as an adjunct to the previous chapter, which covered secret prisons. In the West at least, these privately-owned, non-government facilities can’t be classified as secret prisons in that they are not off-the-grid or unknown to the government. However, according to conspiracy theorists, they are secretive in so far as they don’t disclose their true agendas.

Once prisons are privatized, they need prisoners to make a buck or they’ll go out of business. That’s the economic reality. Some critics of the privatized prisons business claim that it’s open to corruption and suggest that private companies running these prisons have been known to collaborate quietly with law enforcement officials to ensure their prisons are full of inmates.

The obvious candidates to target – after murderers, rapists and drug-pushers of course – are drug-users, according to those who promote this theory. If true, then the War on Drugs may also be a scam designed to put users in prison and keep them there.

Remember, it’s a fact that a large percentage of prisoners around the world have committed victimless crimes involving drugs. And like the War on Drugs itself, the privatized prison system is highly profitable.

Could it be this war and these privatized prisons are some kind of two-fold, money-making scheme of the elite? Or are we getting a bit paranoid here?

 Private prisons like this one need prisoners to make a buck.

“I’ve seen people I love die from this disease (drug addiction). Now we have a chance to at least demonstrate that this isn’t what people feel about this issue anymore … People don’t want drugs to be illegal anymore, they don’t want their heads of politicians buried in the sand.” –Russell Brand, from television interview on February 13, 2014 on the UK’s Channel 4.

 

If this entire conspiracy theory on drug wars is wrong, fictitious, over-egged or, heaven forbid, just plain loony, another scenario is very possible: this scenario is that drugs are simply one of the many fortuitous and spontaneous spoils of war, and while the global elite may not actually be starting wars to financially benefit from drug-trafficking they sure as hell do alright out of it.

Even in mineral-rich and oil-rich war-torn regions like the Middle East, illicit drugs and the huge profits to be made from them are a nice added bonus, wouldn’t you agree?

And even if there is no ulterior motive surrounding the War on Drugs – a very big IF – the bottom line is the drug prohibition program hasn’t remotely worked; the international drug trade is expanding, not contracting, and drug usage is increasing worldwide.

We don’t remotely support drug use. The horrors that illicit drugs inflict on individuals and on society in general are there for all to see.

However, the problem is one that may be with us forever because it does seem that drugs and profits cannot be separated, and history shows that where large profits are to be made, corruption flourishes.

Meanwhile, excuse us for one moment. It’s time for us to take our medication again!

 

Read more in The Orphan Conspiracies: 29 Conspiracy Theories from The Orphan Trilogy – available now via Amazon at: http://www.amazon.com/The-Orphan-Conspiracies-Conspiracy-Theories-ebook/dp/B00J4MPFT6/

A book that’s for the common people.

 

Not all is what it seems! –James & Lance

 

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