Bored With The USA lyrics correction

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Aeneas
Dirty Punk
Posts: 67
Joined: 25 Oct 2015, 1:42am

Bored With The USA lyrics correction

Post by Aeneas »

After reading Alfred W. McCoy's book
The Politics Of Heroin In Southeast Asia (1972) ,
it finally dawned on me what the actual Joe Strummer lyric is
at the end of the I'm So Bored With The USA (1977) anthem song:

To you I'm talking,
the CIA,
Saigon's drugging,
the USA.

The book describes Saigon international airport (i.e. south Vietnam capital (Ho Chi Minh City) )
as the main trans-shipment point
for the heroin grown in the Golden Triangle (Burma and thereabouts),
to the USA and Europe.
That is, while the US army and the CIA (Central Intelligence Agency)
were occupying Vietnam,
they actually boosted, not destroyed, the opium production there.

Interestingly, as the decades passed, after the end of the Vietnam War (1975)
Afghanistan (the Golden Crescent)
became the main opium producer with 350 sq. miles cultivated by 1999.
Then the Taliban banned the poppy in 2000 and reduced the cultivation
to 30 sq. miles.
Then in 2001 the USA with Britain decided to attack and defeat the Taliban
in Afghanistan. This had the immediate result that the opium production
in Afghanistan rocketed back from 30 sq. miles to 285 sq. miles cultivated by 2002.

Clearly many generals in the US military and CIA commanders
are being bribed to facilitate this opium production.
Yet, I have never heard of Congress performing Oversight hearings to find out
which US generals and CIA operatives are receiving those bribes.

Oxycontin is derived from the opium poppy.
It was introduced in 1995 by Purdue Pharma.
It would be interesting to know whether Oxycontin manufacturer
Purdue Pharma has any connection to any US military/CIA operatives.
Did George W. Bush and his staff have any contact with Purdue Pharma, especially
with the tax money giveaway to pharmaceutical companies in the
Medicare Prescription Drug, Improvement, and Modernization Act (2003).

How could the Taliban have been successful at banning the opium production
with their pea-shooters, and the US military/CIA fail to do the same ?
Supposedly, that is the purpose of US congressional oversight.

Clearly Strummer foresaw the effect of the US military/CIA on opium production.

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