The Geopolitics of Potency
FIRST INSTANCE: The Opium Wars and British Imperialism (1839-1860) The playbook of using psychoactive substances to exert control isn't American innovation. Britain waged two Opium Wars against China to force open its markets to Indian opium, ensuring lucrative trade routes and undermining Chinese sovereignty. The aim wasn't public health in Britain, but economic dominance. India, then a British
colony, was a key producer for this imperial venture. The parallel here is the leveraging of pharmaceutical supply chains, albeit in a reverse flow, to secure strategic partnerships. REPETITIONS: The 'War on Drugs' and Latin America (1970s - Present) Fast forward to the 1970s, when President Nixon declared the 'War on Drugs.' While ostensibly targeting drug abuse, declassified White House aide
John Ehrlichman's 1994 admission revealed its true purpose: 'The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people.' He elaborated: 'We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we
could disrupt those communities.' This domestic policy was mirrored internationally. The U.S. later used 'Plan Colombia' (initiated 1999) as a multi-billion-dollar military aid package, ostensibly to fight drug cartels, but also to stabilize a key South American ally against left-wing insurgencies, often with devastating human rights consequences (Council on Foreign Relations, 2008). OUTCOMES: