Drugs are big business. In 1982, Ronald Reagan's Vice President George H. W. Bush and his aides began pushing for the involvement of the CIA and US 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.* For the power elite in control of global drug trade it's a big succes.

Iran-Iraq War 1980-1988: US openly supports Iraq

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. Iran was befriended with the Soviet Union. In June 1982 President Reagan decided that the United States could not afford to allow Iraq to lose the war to Iran.* The United States sided with Iraq while Saddam Hussein's regime was known for human rights abuses and involvement in terrorism. 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. Hussein was launching some of the worst chemical attacks in history.*

Iran-Iraq War 1980-1988: US secretly supports Iran

At the same time in the early 1980s there was also an initially secret arms deal going on in Latin America, which later would be labeled the Iran-Contra scandal. Between 1981 and 1986, US administration officials secretly facilitated the illegal sale of arms to Iran, which was subject to an arms embargo at the time. The US administration hoped to use the proceeds of the arms sale to fund the Contras, an anti-Sandinista terrorist group in Nicaragua....

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.*

President Reagan's vice president George H. W. Bush and ex-CIA and National Security Advisor Donald Gregg were deeply involved.

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.*

In 1988 the Kerry Report: Drugs, Law Enforcement and Foreign Policy stated...

There was substantial evidence of drug smuggling through the war zones on the part of individual Contras, Contra suppliers, Contra pilots, mercenaries who worked with the Contras, and Contra supporters throughout the region.

The Iran-Contra scandal shows the extensive corruption and involvement in drug trafficking and arms industry of the US power elite up to the highest level. In 2018 Oliver North became president of the National Rifle Association whose vice-president warned for "Latin American drug gangs" in 2013. 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. * Another example of the revolving door.
Officially the US supported Iraq, but unoffcially also Iran...

Members of the Reagan Administration had, at the same time, also been secretly selling weapons to Iran; first indirectly (possibly through Israel) and then directly. It claimed that the administration hoped Iran would, in exchange, persuade several radical groups to release Western hostages. The money from the sales was channeled to equip the Nicaraguan contra-revolutionaries, right-wing rebels.*

Both sides of the conflict were supplied with weapons so the war could last for 8 devastating years. 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. Also note that the mainstream media, controlled by the power elite, cleverly label this monstrous scandal an "affair" making it sound a lot less bad than it really is.

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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.

But was this US president truly "very concerned" with the well-being of all Americans?

A Central Intelligence Agency anti-drug program in Venezuela shipped a ton of nearly pure cocaine to the United States in 1990, Government officials said today. No criminal charges have been brought in the matter, which the officials said appeared to have been a serious accident rather than an intentional conspiracy. But officials say the cocaine wound up being sold on the streets in the United States. ... The agency... issued a statement today calling the affair "a most regrettable incident" involving "instances of poor judgment and management on the part of several C.I.A. officers." The case involves the same program under which the agency created a Haitian intelligence service whose officers became involved in drug trafficking and acts of political terror. ... In the mid-1980's, under orders from President Ronald Reagan, the agency began to set up anti-drug programs in the major cocaine-producing and trafficking capitals of Central and South America. In Venezuela it worked with the country's National Guard, a paramilitary force that controls the highways and borders.*

A Federal grand jury in Miami has indicted a Venezuelan general who led a Central Intelligence Agency counter-narcotics program that put a ton of cocaine on the streets of the United States in 1990, Government officials said today. ... The general was the chief of a program set up by the C.I.A. in the late 1980's in conjunction with the Venezuelan National Guard, which sought to infiltrate Colombian gangs shipping cocaine to the United States. ... From 1987 to 1991, the years General Guillen was in charge, the unit placed a spy in the ranks of a Colombian drug cartel and began trying to win the confidence of drug lords by handling shipments totaling 22 tons of cocaine being shipped through Venezuela.*

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.

Panamanian dictator and drug lord Manuel Noriega worked with the CIA from the late 1950s until the 1980s. In the photo then 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 BCCI 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 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.*

In December 1988, a Senate report found that “Noriega had turned Panama’s political system into what witness termed a ‘narcokleptocracy,’ a system in which the Panamanian government became controlled by personal loyalties to Noriega, cemented by graft and corruption, and substantially funded with narcotics money.” This was hardly a secret in Washington, the report said: “By the time General Noriega was indicted, the United States government had received substantial information about the criminal involvement of top Panamanian officials for nearly twenty years and done little to respond.”*

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 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. US Secretary of State John Foster Dulles played a crucial role in this coup. He was also involved in the corrupt United Fruit Company. 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 its elite. 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 The Guardian reported 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 stated that the 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 the BBC released some quotes from an initially secret NATO report about Afghanistan. One quote reads...

Afghan civilians frequently prefer Taliban governance over GIRoA, usually as a result of government corruption, ethnic bias and lack of connection with local religious and tribal leaders. ... The narcotics trade provides funds to Taliban operations, though the nature of this process is widely misunderstood. The Taliban does not officially encourage nor discourage narcotics production, and it does not play a direct role in the farming, smuggling, refining or distribution process.*

Firstly, the Afghan people preferred the Taliban government over the corrupt government installed by the West. Secondly, the Taliban is not responsible for the massive heroin production and its trade but merely derives funds from it. So the big profits go elsewhere. 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. But there's nothing new under the sun. Already 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.

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. See for example A Tangled Web: A History of CIA Complicity in Drug International Trafficking * with some official links of CIA complicity in international drug trafficking until 1999. This is only the tip of the iceberg, most of it never reaches the surface simply because they labeled it "top secret".