In this series I wish to explore three important propositions concerning the global drug traffic. The first is that the highly integrated drug traffic industry, in addition to serving the political ends of world powers, has its own political as well as economic needs. It requires that in major growing areas there must be limited state control, a condition most easily reached by fostering regional rebellion and warfare, often fought by its own private armies. This is the on-going situation of designed violence in every major growing area, from Lebanon to Myanmar, Colombia to Afghanistan.
Once drug armies themselves were powerful enough to neutralize the imposition of state authority. But today there are increasing signs that those at the highest level of the drug traffic will plot with the leaders of major states to ensure, or even to stage, violence that serves the power of the state and the industry alike.
Thanks to extensive research in Russia, we now have initial evidence of a second proposition: There exists on the global level a drug meta-group, able to manipulate the resources of the drug traffic for its own political and business ends, without being at risk for actual trafficking. These ends include the creation of designed violence to serve the purposes of cabals in political power – most conspicuously in the case of the Yeltsin “family” in the Kremlin, but allegedly, according to Russian sources, also for those currently in power in the United States.
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The third proposition is that a meta-group of this scale does not just help government agencies make history. I hope to show that it, like its predecessors, has the power to manage both violence and state behavior, and thus make history to its own agenda.
earlier version w/ more footnotes at The Global Drug Meta-Group: Drugs, Managed Violence, and the Russian 9/11
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