Subtitle of this picture is "money makes the world go round". Drugs are big business. Those in control of global drug traffic make huge fortunes of it. In 1982, Ronald Reagan's Vice President George H. W. Bush and his aides began pushing for the involvement of the CIA and U.S. military in drug interdiction efforts. With the most powerful intelligence agency and the most powerful military the Anglo-American power elite took control of the global drug trade. Drugs are big business, at least since the British Empire fought its Opium Wars against China. The Anglo-American Empire maintains that tradition. From the perspective of its stated aims the so-called War on Drugs is a global failure. Despite significant increases in drug war spending, drug use rates have continued to rise *. So for the power elite in control of global drug trade it's a big succes.

In 1980 the Iran-Iraq War broke out which lasted until 1988 and cost about 1 million lives. Oil played a major role in the war. The United States sided with Iraq while Saddam Hussein's regime was known for its human rights abuses. Nobody had any doubt about Iraq's involvement in terrorism. In June, 1982, President Reagan decided that the United States could not afford to allow Iraq to lose the war to Iran *. Iran was befriended with the Soviet Union. The enemy of my enemy is my friend. Both Iraq and Iran used poisoned gas in the war. The Riegle report detailed 70 shipments (including Bacillus anthracis) from the United States to Iraqi government agencies over three years, concluding It was later learned that these microorganisms exported by the United States were identical to those the UN inspectors found and recovered from the Iraqi biological warfare program. *
Also other western countries aided Iraq by selling chemical weapons. For example German firms sent 1,027 tons of precursors of mustard gas, sarin, tabun, and tear gasses in all. The U.S. knew Hussein was launching some of the worst chemical attacks in history *. Later the US would falsely accuse Saddam of having weapons of mass destruction in order to find support for starting the Iraq War. But by that time Uncle Saddam had already used the western-made chemical weapons provided by Uncle Sam and his friends.

In the early 1980s there was another at that time secret arms deal going on in Latin America. Bush and Gregg were, in fact, deeply involved in a previously undisclosed weapons-smuggling operation to arm the contras that began in 1982, two years before the much publicized Iran-contra operation run by marine lieutenant colonel Oliver North and financed by the sale of missiles to Iran. This earlier operation, known as Black Eagle, went on for three years, overlapping North’s operation. The idea of both operations was to circumvent congressional restrictions on the CIA and the Pentagon. Although conceived by William Casey, the late CIA director, these operations were not sanctioned officially by the CIA or other government agencies. They were the instruments of a secret U.S. foreign policy carried out by men who constituted a kind of shadow government. *
The National Security Archive obtained the hand-written notebooks of Oliver North, the National Security Council aide who helped run the contra war and other Reagan administration covert operations, through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed in 1989. The notebooks, as well as declassified memos sent to North, record that North was repeatedly informed of contra ties to drug trafficking. *
The Iran-Contra scandal shows the extensive corruption and involvement in drug trafficking and arms industry of the U.S. power elite up to the highest level. Officially the US supported Iraq, but secretly it also supported Iran, first indirectly through Israel and later through the Iran-Contra deal. Both sides of the war were supplied with weapons so the war could last for 8 devastating years.

Also Israel, which usually presents Iran to the world as one of its main enemies, aided in supplying the weapons to Iran. All this was a big win-win for the Anglo-American elite. Key figures involved were Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, Donald Gregg and Félix Rodríguez. It of course involved their powerful friends at their intelligence and military apparatus. See also Arun Gupta's article Let’s Talk About George H.W. Bush’s Role in the Iran-Contra Scandal * and Brown University's Understanding the Iran-Contra Affairs.
It's interesting to note that Oliver North later in 2018 became president of the National Rifle Association whose vice-president warned for Latin American drug gangs. How ironic. See also Jon Schwarz's article Oliver North Worked With Cocaine Traffickers to Arm Terrorists. Now He’ll Be President of the NRA. * Nice example of the revolving door.

An open society can not survive a secret government. ... We had the usual complaints that said that public money should not be used to do programs like this. But in actuality, it was the kind of program that public television was meant to do. ... And you'll never find it on commercial television. Public television or mainstream media will never let you know about the secret government and its corruption because it is owned by the same corrupt secret government. Also note that "their" mainstream media cleverly label this monstrous scandal an "affair" making it sound a lot less bad than it really is.

On 5 September 1989 US president George H. W. Bush said: This is the first time since taking the oath of office that I felt an issue was so important, so threatening, that it warranted talking directly with you, the American people. All of us agree that the gravest domestic threat facing our nation today is drugs. Drugs have strained our faith in our system of justice. This man is "very concerned" with the well-being of all Americans. The National Drug Control Strategy of 1989 shows the hypocrisy of these people.

In 1972 historian Alfred W. McCoy wrote a book called The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade which includes meticulous documentation of dishonesty and dirty dealings at the highest levels from the Cold War until today. In 1994 ex-DEA Michael Levine published The Big White Lie: The Deep Cover Operation That Exposed the CIA Sabotage of the Drug War which tells how the beautiful South American "Queen of Cocaine" seduced the CIA into protecting her from prosecution as she sold drugs to Americans; how CIA-sponsored paramilitary ousted, tortured, and killed members of a pro-DEA Bolivian ruling party; and how the CIA created La Corporacion, the "General Motors of cocaine," which led directly to the current cocaine/crack epidemic. See also Joël van der Reijden's A History of CIA Drug Trafficking: How Drug Cartels and Drug-Dealing Death Squads Have Been the CIA's Best Friends for Many Decades.

Panamanian dictator and drug lord Manuel Noriega worked with the CIA from the late 1950s until the 1980s. In the photo vice-president of the United States, George H. W. Bush, met with Manuel Noriega in 1983.
Throughout the 1970s and the 1980s, Noriega was able to manipulate U.S. policy toward his country, while skillfully accumulating near-absolute power in Panama. It is clear that each U.S. government agency which had a relationship with Noriega turned a blind eye to his corruption and drug dealing, even as he was emerging as a key player on behalf of the Medellín Cartel (notorious for Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar). Noriega was allowed to establish "the hemisphere's first narcokleptocracy". ... One of the large financial institutions that he was able to use to launder money was the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI) which was shut down at the end of the Cold War by the FBI.
The B.C.C.I. and the western banking cartel were also involved in the Iran-Contra Scandal in order to launder all the dirty money. Such crimes cannot take place without a "proper" financial backbone.
Beginning in 1986, U.S. President Ronald Reagan negotiated with General Noriega, requesting that the Panamanian leader peacefully step down after Noriega was publicly exposed in the New York Times by Seymour Hersh, and later exposed in the Iran-Contra Scandal.
While Noriega was supported by the CIA he was involved in torture, rape, drug trafficking, etcetera. He also disrupted trade unions that had formed in the infamous and very corrupt United Fruit Company from the US after Guatemala became known as a "banana republic" ruled by corrupt governments.

In 1954 the CIA carried out the Guatemalan coup d'état and installed the military regime of Carlos Castillo Armas, who was followed by a series of right-wing military dictators and the Guatemalan Civil War. U.S. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles played a crucial role in this coup, he was a founding member of the Council on Foreign Relations and a trustee of the Rockefeller Foundation. In that coup Efraín Ríos Montt played a role alongside the CIA. Later he became the dictator of Guatemala in 1982 and was known as a war criminal. He was replaced by another military dictator in 1983, Óscar Humberto Mejía Víctores.

Since World War I the United States developed a pattern of interfering in the domestic sphere of Latin American nations to protect the economic interests of American capitalists. See also Mary Creedon's Aspirations to Empire: American Imperialism, Foreign Policy, and the 1954 Guatemalan Coupd’état or Patricia M. Plantamura's Impacts of U.S. Foreign Policy and Intervention on Guatemala: Mid-20th Century.

Afghanistan is known for being the world's supplier of heroin, which is made from opium poppy. In 2014 it was reported that Afghanistan produces 90 percent of the world's illicit opiates. The War in Afghanistan started in 2001 as part of the so-called War on Terror. The power elite of the Anglo-American Empire started the war and NATO joined them. In the following picture you can see what happened to opium poppy cultivation in Afghanistan since 2001...

In 2014 journalist Spencer Ackerman wrote that Opium cultivation is estimated to be at an all-time high in Afghanistan, despite the US spending $7.5bn to combat it. ... Opium-poppy cultivation takes up 209,000 hectares (516,230 acres) of land in Afghanistan, a 36% increase since 2012. * The information comes from the UNODC Afghanistan Opium Survey 2017 report which also stated: Area under opium poppy cultivation increased by 63% since 2016, reaching a new record high. It reveals the significant increase of opium production in Afghanistan since the United States and NATO forces intervened and occupied the country.

In 2012 journalist Craig Murray said the following about the intervention in Afghanistan: Did we invade Afghanistan to reopen the gates to the worlds opium supply or was it just a by-product of our invasion? One thing is for sure, anyone that believes that the only parties with a financial interest in Afghan opium are the Afghanistan people would be deluding themselves in the extreme, heroin is a worldwide multi billion dollar trade and like all suppliers of anything the Afghanistan poppy farmers were receiving a tiny percentage of that multi billion dollar racket, that trade goes well beyond Afghanistan or its supposed terrorist involvement in it, Afghan heroin sells on the international narcotics market for 100 times the price farmers get for their opium right out of the field and there are far more financially powerful players in the game in the West that don't want that trade to stop than there are in reality in Afghanistan.
Heroin is big business. The War in Afghanistan shows what happened to opium production and worldwide heroin addiction under the power of the Anglo-American Empire and NATO. The facts speak for themselves. Not only did American taxpayers pay lots of taxpayer money to seemingly combat drugs in Afghanistan, but the Anglo-American power elite, no doubt, also profited from an exploded heroin production and distribution worldwide. Another win-win construction for the Anglo-American power elite.

See UNODC's World Drug Report 2019. Obviously, the so-called "War on Drugs" is an utter failure from the perspective of the stated aims spread via the propaganda of the power elite. Since they intervened more heavily on a global scale, and with the progression of globalization, we see that the amount of drugs increased dramatically on a global scale as well. It doesn't really take a genius to know who benefited most from this global drug trade.