The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia

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The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia is a major nonfiction book on heroin trafficking, specifically in Southeast Asia from before World War II to during the Vietnam war. It was the product of 18 months' research and at least one trip to Laos by Alfred W. McCoy, its principal author, who wrote it while seeking a PhD in Southeast Asian history at Yale University. Its most groundbreaking feature was its documentation of CIA complicity and aid to the Southeast Asian opium/heroin trade; while its thesis was initially controversial, it has gained acceptance. Interestingly, the CIA demanded of Harper & Row (the book's publishers) that they be given the galleys so that they could criticize it and take whatever legal action they felt necessary before the book's publication. Harper & Row felt that the criticism the CIA offered were extremely weak, and not only published it, but published it two weeks before its initial release date. An expanded edition was published in 2003, more pointedly entitled The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade (ISBN 1-55652-483-8).

[edit] Reference

• The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia. CIA complicity in the global drug trade (1972) Alfred W. McCoy with Cathleen B. Read and Leonard P. Adams II, Lawrence Hill Books ISBN 0-06-012901-8

[edit] External link

• "A Correspondence with the CIA" —(part of an article for The New York Review of Books on the CIA's interest in The Politics of Heroin.)