Alfred W. McCoy. The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade. 1991 Edition (1st edition was published in 1972).

The preface is sexy, thrilling, and concise—just what you'd expect from the sharp title and cool cover art; the book itself is scrupulously undramatic and painstakingly factual, not for beginners, and a big disappointment if you were hoping for a spy book or a conspiratorial leftist screed.

The editing is marginally flawed, with slightly more typos than one would expect, and numerous moments of redundancy which are perhaps forgiveable considering the enormous amount of material to organize. The writing is strong, lucid, artful, convincing, and a bit mind-numbing. I am reminded of Blond Ghost in that the book offers alternative or secret histories of the Allied Invasion of Sicily in World War II, and American dealings in East Asia (with the Vietnamese War as the centerpiece). God DAMN this writer did a lot of work, and, apparently, no heroin, to produce this painfully thorough history of the global opium trade. For a book about revolutionaries, criminals, spies, and drugs, this is not a page-turner: each page is made of bricks. I've read my share of tedious encyclopedic nonfiction, but the three hundred pages of minutiae about the Asian opium trade, while it has a few beautiful moments (p. 127's description of slash & burn agriculture for example), is punishing. How many names of warlords can one's memory reasonably juggle?

The point of the book is the shocking truth that U.S. government agents ally themselves with drug dealers, that these drugs generally end up in the veins of American addicts, and that this has happened continually since World War II, often under administrations (Nixon, Reagan) that make lots of noise about the "war on drugs." The reasons can often be boiled down to the fact that the war on communism takes precedence over the war on drugs, and that an alliance between spies and criminals is natural because they all inhabit loci of power in the invisible world that exists between national borders. And, also, perhaps, some spooks, like some cops, congressmen, or CEOs, are just corrupt or criminal. This simple fact can be shocking when presented simply as in, for example, Whiteout, a book that regurgitates simplified reductions of the elaborate research done by real journalists like McCoy. But in The Politics of Heroin the message is drowned in responsible research and a contextualization so effective as to make this ugly alliance seem natural (which it is).

Read the preface. I usually don't allow myself to write about a book in these pages unless I have read the entire thing. But here I made it to 374, with just over one hundred pages left to go.