On and off for over a decade, the Central Intelligence Agency conducted an audacious highly classified program to covertly manipulate Afghanistan’s lucrative poppy crop, blanketing Afghan farmers’ fields with specially modified seeds that germinated plants containing almost none of the chemicals that are refined into heroin, The Washington Post has learned.
The program’s disclosure comes as the war on narcotics is again dominating the security agenda.
President Donald Trump has declared war on drug cartels in the Western Hemisphere, ordering more than a dozen lethal strikes on alleged drug boats in the Caribbean and the eastern Pacific, designating cartels as terrorist groups, and moving a vast naval and air force to the region. He has also authorized the CIA to take aggressive covert action against drug traffickers and their supporters.
In Afghanistan in the early 2000s, the burgeoning opium trade was thwarting U.S. goals, as American troops engaged in a deadly struggle to defeat the Taliban, eliminate terrorist groups and stabilize the weak Western-backed government. Afghan heroin fueled corruption in President Hamid Karzai’s government and in the provinces. It helped pay for the Taliban’s weapons and equipment. And it accounted for the majority of global heroin supplies, with most of the drugs bound for Europe or the former Soviet Union.
Western allies and U.S. government agencies argued bitterly over which strategies would dent the crop without undermining rural Afghan support for Karzai. Diplomats and drug enforcement officials debated everything from aerial herbicide spraying to purchasing the entire Afghan crop and sending it overseas to be processed into medicine.
Unbeknownst to almost all of them, the CIA was operating its own secret heroin-eradication program, run by the spy agency’s Crime and Narcotics Center, which was flush with funds during the Afghan war. The airdrops of modified poppy seeds began in the autumn of 2004, three people familiar with the program said. The operation was paused at least once and ended about 2015, those familiar with it said.
Once the seeds were dropped, the goal was for the plants sprouting from them to cross-fertilize with native plants and become the dominant strain over time, degrading the overall crop’s potency.
The American plants not only contained virtually no morphine, but they were bred to sprout early and produce especially vivacious red flowers, making them attractive to Afghan farmers who, the CIA hoped, would harvest and replant their seeds.
The Fentanyl crisis is almost a direct response to the war on opiods. The US had preconditions when leaving the Taliban in power, and one of those was to disband heroine production. Guess what all of the users switched to?
Geico?
Afghanistan’s poppy crop declined notably from 2007 to 2011, before rising again and skyrocketing after 2016, the SIGAR report said, citing U.N. and CIA data. The Taliban profited off the heroin pipeline for years, although U.S. officials clashed over how central it was to their finances.
Yeah? Makes sense. I definitely don’t remember a huge wave of heroin flooding the US during that time period. Also definitely don’t remember US soldiers protecting poppy fields in the same time frame. And if there’s one thing I definitely don’t associate the CIA with, it’s trafficking in drugs to fund itself with off-book money.
They just pivoted to fentanyl
I mean the heroin market never stopped, the overall consistency and potency was weakened.
Say you have poppies from several different fields all over Afghanistan, all being processed in bulk together after harvest. If you end up with 100 pounds, but 1/4 of the product is from the modified poppies that contained very little morphine, and the seeds have been dropped randomly and spread throughout the country, you’ve still significantly weakened the bulk crop and the final product that will be sold to the consumer.
It’s unlikely there was ever a consistently weakened final product between every harvest, but you’re probably noticing repeated inconsistencies in the final product several seasons in a row, and you really can’t narrow down why it keeps happening because it seems so random and unpredictable. Is it the soil? The weather? Something else? Nobody knows.
Even if you start producing and exporting larger amounts, it’s still potentially larger amounts with a weaker than normal potency. You might start considering a cheap way to consistently enhance the potency, rather than continuing to drive yourself crazy trying to figure out why farmers all over Afghanistan have suddenly gotten so unlucky with the consistency of their crops.
I’m not exactly sure where fentanyl started coming from around 2013, but it might have seemed like a miracle fell into the laps of desperate people who had literal boats or planes full of inconsistent product they needed to unload. It’s super cheap and it’s extremely potent.
The CIA stopped the program in 2015, because it didn’t work out as well as they had hoped (allegedly). Since people just started cutting the weaker heroin with fentanyl, it didn’t really make much of a dent in the amount of heroin people were willing to buy. If anything it kinda seems like it may have backfired (allegedly).
I definitely don’t associate the CIA with, it’s trafficking in drugs to fund itself with off-book money.
Darndest thing that fentanyl had to be introduced to the U.S. market on such a large scale during this time. Even after the CIA cut their losses, and ended their program in Afghanistan, synthetic opioids have stuck around, and fentanyl has replaced heroin as the dominant opioid in the U.S. Its cheap, it’s potent, and most importantly, you don’t even need to go to Afghanistan to get it because it can be synthesized anywhere you can set up a lab.
It’s also 30 to 50 times more potent than heroin, 100 times more potent than morphine, and with a quicker onset. Since it’s lipophilic, it hangs around in your body fat for much longer than heroin. This also means that you have to wait a longer period of time to start Buprenorphine/Suboxone treatment if somebody has been using fentanyl or a fentanyl laced product, because you risk sending the patient into acute withdrawal if you give it too soon. (I think it’s 48 hrs for heroin to be eliminated and up to 7 days for fentanyl).
What an odd coincidence. Way cheaper, more potent, easier to obtain, and all the pharmacological properties you might associate with an addictive substance that make it easier to get people hooked and harder for people to achieve sobriety.
They dropped it on the competition.
The CIA seems incapable of learning the world is like a poorly laid wallpaper. If you push down a bubble somewhere, it reappears somewhere else, and before you know it your enemies from 20 years ago are now your friends against a new enemy. So the cycle continues. I wish they’d just stop covertly fucking with everything.
The CIA, much like the ever glazed Navy SEALs, is pretty much constant reinforcement of the theory that “quiet power” will always be far more effective than anything flashy. Sending in a team of highly trained soldiers to plant a bug or doing some convoluted scheme to destabilize a regime is almost always much less effective than just having a pretty woman give someone fifty bucks in pizza and asking them what they did at work that day.
But claiming you are doing flashy shit is how you get funding. And, unfortunately, the CIA et al have not realized the key is to just not do it after getting the money.
So, the cia is responsible for the fentynal crisis replacing the heroine.
Fent started getting bad in the US after Chinese drug manufacturers figured out a more stable precursor that could be shipped internationally without needing temperature controls.
This precursor was very cheap and easy to import, so the cartels started manufacturing fentynal and selling it in the US.
So the program starts around 2004, and roughly a year later, you presumably have a decrease in potency of the global supply. This is also during a time when prescription opioids were still being heavily over-prescibed in the U.S., which is usually the path that most Americans started down before moving on to using heroin.
Depending on several factors, tolerance to opioids can develop fairly quickly, and a person who becomes dependent will begin taking increasing amounts of the drug to achieve the same effect. (It’s also important to note that with opioids, your body decreases endogenous opioid production that is required for normal functioning. Once dependence is reached, many people continue to use increasing amounts not just to get high, but to avoid having severe withdrawal symptoms. It’s a pretty horrific cycle).
The most common way an opioid overdose usually occurs, is when a person develops tolerance, becomes sober, and then relapses after a period of sobriety when tolerance has decreased. Once tolerance is down, the same amount of a drug a person was accustomed to taking before sobriety, can be fatal afterwards.
Overdoses can also occur when there’s a fluctuation in drug supply potency, which is always a risk when a person is using street drugs. However, if the CIA’s crops first began growing around 2004, sudden fluctuations in potency of street market heroin, lines up pretty nicely with the increase in overdoses around 2005-2006.
Fentanyl is introduced into the U.S. supply around 2013, and there seems to be another smooth increase in the trendline.
The CIA ends it’s program around 2015. The second surge of opioid deaths, where the trendline dramatically jumps around 2016-2017, also seems to line up pretty nicely with this time point.
If cutting heroin with fentanyl was standard procedure by 2015, and heroin potency mysteriously increased, then you would be adding the extremely potent synthetic opioid, to a heroin supply that is suddenly consistently more potent than it has been at any point in the last decade.
The airdrops of modified poppy seeds began in the autumn of 2004, three people familiar with the program said. The operation was paused at least once and ended about 2015.
Drug overdose death rates in different countries: Who should be alarmed?
Who plotted to kill Afghanistan’s poppy mills?
Wound up making orphans in the West Virginia hills?
Deaths from opioid overdoses are especially prevalent in 4 US states
I’m more interested in the Canadian story here. That looks interesting
Fentanyl was being added in to the U.S. heroin supply by 2013, and the CIA’s program ended in 2015. Then for some “mysterious” reason, heroin potency suddenly greatly increased around 2016-2017, but adding fentanyl to heroin had become SOP.
Either Canada is getting our fentanyl laced opium smuggled in from their southern border, or our fentanyl laced opium is moving through Canada before it’s being delivered into the U.S.
If it’s the latter, that would certainly contradict the the president’s narrative about which border it’s coming from. If it’s the former, then I think maybe that makes us the bad hombres at the southern border?
Ive seen twin peaks
My understanding is that it flows down from Canada. Vermont has a bad opiate problem partly because it’s so available there.
Opiates flow down, hard drugs like heroin flow up.
Whenever I hear about invasive plants or animals I always wonder if it’s geo-politics.
- Invasive bees.
- Invasive mollusks and fish in lakes and rivers.
- Invasive plants that are a lot more flammable.
