Two years into the occupation of Iraq the menace of drug abuse appears to be afflicting American troops.
Aware of the debilitating effect drugs had on the morale and effectiveness of GIs in the Vietnam War, the authorities are attempting to stifle a repeat in Iraq.
Aside from random urine tests and barrack room searches, commanders have asked their troops to inform on colleagues.
In the past month a soldier has been arrested for selling cocaine and two per cent of the troops from one brigade have been charged with drug and alcohol abuse.
According to US army figures, out of the 4,000 men of the 256th Brigade Combat Team, 53 faced alcohol-related charges and 48 were charged with drug offences.
Since the overthrow of Saddam’s regime the borders that have been so porous for insurgents have been equally open for heroin and hash smugglers from Afghanistan and Iran providing a cheap market for troops. With colleagues being killed or wounded on a daily basis, some US soldiers have turned to drugs to escape the horrors of fighting insurgents.
Damn, it’s starting to look more like the bad ol’ days in Danang!
1% doesn’t seem all that high to me, especially if that’s the worst they could find. If you took a sample of American civilians in that age group, how many would be considered to be abusing alcohol or drugs? I’m from Ontario, but it was definitely more than 1% each at my highschool or even the first couple of years of university.
For heaven’s sake…war and intoxication are linked all the way back to ancient times. The volunteer farmer-soldiers of the Athenian army were given a huge ration of wine before major campaigns and battles, so that they could be inebriated when they faced the spear-tips.
More recently in “good war” history, the famous WWII cartoons of Bill Mauldin are filled with instances of Willie and Joe bumming alcohol from the liberated cellars of Western Europe. Mauldin was a reporter, not a caricaturist…he traveled with the GIs and knew they liked to get lit at every conceivable opportunity.
Does Mauldin’s reportage discredit the WWII war effort on the basis of American troops’ desire to dull the edge of combat with a good buzz?
For heaven’s sake…war and intoxication are linked all the way back to ancient times.
Umm, so? The article is about illegal drugs and drug abuse. But if we come across any articles about ‘Soldiers Drinking Beer!!!..News at Eleven!!!’, we’ll keep your post in mind.
This, tangentally, brings up something I’m wondering about. You’ve got this bumper crop of poppies in Afghanistan being raised by the very warlords the CIA bribed into compliance. They’re marching around with private armies, that dwarf the official forces around, only on good behavior because they’re making money hand-over-fist via the trade.
Now we get reports of all these DoD and CIA operations happening “off the books” meaning with retired personnel and money not acquired from Congress.
Any of this starting to sound like the good old days of Air America out of Cambodia? Or the CIA’s gun-drug running connections with the Contras?
I’d really like to see someone explore this and see if the CIA or DoD are using the easy availability of Afghani heroin to make some money to fund operations and, if so, how much cash we’re talking about here.
There’s no useful difference between the legal and illegal drugs, in general. That there’s a spike in usage of any of them is usually a sign things aren’t going well, though.
Legal, Illegal, doesn’t matter. The military is paired pretty heavily with drugs in general. You have to understand what kind of general population the standard army is. It also doesn’t help that most oversea stations have drugs in abundance, cheap, and GI’s (usually young men) have nothing to spend their money on but booze and drugs.
Any of this starting to sound like the good old days of Air America out of Cambodia? Or the CIA’s gun-drug running connections with the Contras?
The CIA resorted to drug-dealing because Congress wouldn’t fund covert action. After 9/11, covert action gets a blank check from Congress. There’s no need for U.S. intelligence services to dabble in the drug trade when they’re getting all the chedda they can spend from Capitol Hill.
(Side issue, and one I’d love to write a book about someday: Isn’t it interesting that in Afghanistan as in Colombia as in Burma as in the Bekaa Valley, ideological insurgencies have so readily morphed into profit-motivated drug cartels? Whether we’re talking about Gulbuddin Hekmatyar or FARC or the United Wa State Army or Hizbollah, all embraced narcotics trafficking on a historic scale that re-shaped the face of their societies to a degree that their political militancy could never have hoped to achieve…and in each case utterly for the worse.)
There’s no useful difference between the legal and illegal drugs, in general. That there’s a spike in usage of any of them is usually a sign things aren’t going well, though.
You don’t know what you’re talking about. The armed services have long had incredible trouble with drug use in the uniformed population. This ever-present problem is exacerbated by any deployment. Any. Read accounts of any peacekeeping intervention anywhere in the world, and you will hear heroin described as a standard-issue ration.
It’s a problem of armies, not of American armies. Jesus, we’re talking about a 1% drug-offense rate in the 256th BCT, while the Russia Journal reports that the Russian army endures a 4% rate of drug use. Russia opposed the Iraq War. Does its army’s 4% drug-use rate mean that armies whose governments opposed the Iraq War think the war is going four times worse than armies whose governments are involved?
Well, I don’t see anything in the article indicating this. More like the commanding officers are being proactive, looking to head off trouble. Certainly the specific examples sound a lot like the people in my dorm at university.
In one case, according to Stars and Stripes, the in-house US forces newspaper, Sgt Michael Boudreaux was found with drugs, four bottles of whiskey and 22 videos of Iraqi pornography. He received a seven month confinement, was demoted to private and given a bad conduct discharge.
In another case, Pte Emily Hamilton told a court martial that she used a hashish pipe belonging to a colleague because “it helped me go right to sleep”. She was given a year’s confinement and a bad conduct discharge.
hrm…sorry, but if you want me to kill, you bet your ass I’m gonna get ripped afterward.
I abused pretty heavily when I was a news photog, and I was only shooting pictures of dead people, not well, you know.
it is only natural for someone to look for a release after traumatic events, drinking, drugs, sex exc. Most people don’t find constructive outlets for negitive energy in thier twenties.
Daniel, are you telling me you think pot is more addictive or dangerous to your productivity on the job than beer? Cocaine and hash probably aren’t as bad, either.
So anytime someone burns a J in a warzone, it’s just like the Nam?
“According to US army figures, out of the 4,000 men of the 256th Brigade Combat Team, 53 faced alcohol-related charges and 48 were charged with drug offences.”
53 of those were alcohol-related which, in truth, can be as simple as a D&D on base with a night in the clink to sober up. Don’t know if it was beer, of course, but still.
Daniel, are you telling me you think pot is more addictive or dangerous to your productivity on the job than beer? Cocaine and hash probably aren’t as bad, either.
No, I am telling you that drug abuse has long been part and parcel of all sorts of armies, mobilized or demobilized, and certainly of armed conflict throughout history, and cannot be considered a “sign things aren’t going well.”
Put another way: There are approximately 3,412 reasons to conclude that things aren’t going well in Iraq, but a 1% rate of drug offenses among U.S. forces isn’t one of them.
Actually, that’s not quite true. The recent story about the White House angle on covertly influencing the results of the Iraqi election is a case in point. Congress raised such a ruckus about the possible implications of a cooked election (“Is that what our boys are dying for?” and “What if the Shiites find out?”) that it was supposedly cancelled. However sources seem to be saying that the CIA (or DoD) went off the books instead so they didn’t have to pass a request along to the intelligence panels in congress at all (in theory - however you’ve got a few congressmen now trying to figure out if a law was broken here). Now if that’s going on lord knows what else they’re up to and they’ve got quite a history of it.
Side issue, and one I’d love to write a book about someday: Isn’t it interesting that in Afghanistan as in Colombia as in Burma as in the Bekaa Valley, ideological insurgencies have so readily morphed into profit-motivated drug cartels? Whether we’re talking about Gulbuddin Hekmatyar or FARC or the United Wa State Army or Hizbollah, all embraced narcotics trafficking on a historic scale that re-shaped the face of their societies to a degree that their political militancy could never have hoped to achieve…and in each case utterly for the worse.)
Actually, look at the Taleban’s position on poppies (burn the fields, kill the growers) compared to what the U.S.'s position seems to be (look the other way while mouthing platitudes). It would seem zealous followers of Islam don’t cotton to the drug trade all that much or at least that particular strain didn’t. It’s possible that could be changing now and there are reports that al Qaida is trying to cash in here. But I haven’t seen actual confirmation of that.
Most legitimate governments of drug producing regions cut themselves into the action every bit as much as rebel movements do. It’s just a matter of money. But I do agree that the effects tend to be very pernacious no matter who’s tied into the underground economy.
That’s certainly not what you said before. To poo-poo the article, you pointed out that GIs drank in WWII and that some ancient Greeks were issued wine. I don’t know why you left out the English navy’s rum.
Now you’re talking about drug abuse, which is something different. I don’t know if it’s a sign whether things are going well in Iraq or not, and I’m not sure I care to get into an argument whether it’s “long been part and parcel of all sorts of armies”, which I suspect you made up anyway.
But it’s a serious problem if it’s finding its way to one out of every hundred of the soldiers in a disciplined fighting force like the US military. Me and Donald Rumsfeld expect more.
