>Are these 'drug wars' about mercantile capitalist ownership of the
>marijuana trade?
>What a pity, if this is so.
Mostly cocaine and increasingly meth. It used to be heroin and marijuana. Here's one of the big lies about the drug war. Sinaloa became a big drug region in WWII when the U.S. military needed morphine. Here's a summary from the PBS program Frontline:
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Japan gained control of the Asian opium supply and the U.S. military needed morphine for its soldiers. So the U.S. turned to Mexico for help. "We were concerned that our supply of opium or morphine would be cut off because the world was at war. So we needed a supply close by. But,that was one of those black box things. Who knows when it happened, who did it, and why." says Edward Heath (Heath was DEA's agent in charge in Mexico for over ten years. ) During this period of a government-tolerated opium trade, many Sinaloans made their fortune. "Everybody was growing it, it was institutional. Some government officials bought the harvest from the farmers to export themselves. There were even soldiers up in the hills caring for the plants," explains Dr. Ley Dominguez, a 77-year-old life long resident of Mocorito, one of Sinaloa's most notorious opium regions. After Japan's defeat, however, the U.S. no longer needed Sinaloa's inferior strain of opium. But many farmers continued to produce opium and heroin; operations became more clandestine, and a smuggling network was set up.