Get Active Subscribe Support Us

AFGHAN WAR LINKED TO INCREASED HEROIN USE

On May 5, U.S.  Rep.  Elise Stefanik called me at home to say she would share my concerns with the House Armed Services Committee on which she sits.

My concerns about our deployed troops becoming manipulated into fighting what are essentially proxy wars for the Sunnis and Shiites received positive feedback from Col.  Lawrence Wilkerson, Colin Powell's former chief of staff; Matthew Hoh, an Iraq war vet and Senior Fellow at the Center for International Policy; and a recently retired senior staffer at Homeland Security.

I would greatly appreciate anyone out there helping me by contacting and encouraging Rep.  Stefanik to follow through on sharing these concerns with that committee as she said she would.

We are paying so high a price in so many ways for our current endless wars.

Another price we're paying may only now be coming into focus.

We've been in Afghanistan, the heroin-producing capital of the world, for 13 and a half years.

Thousands of mercenary contractors like Blackwater have cycled through there in this time.

Hundreds of thousands of troops, both ours and our allies', 95 percent plus of whom are honest, have also been there.

Opium-poppy crops, the source of heroin, have increased there during this time.

The brother of Hamid Karzai, our puppet Afghan president, was a drug lord, and Karzai's government was rated the most corrupt on Earth.

We didn't learn from the final years of our Vietnam war, when Southeast Asian heroin was smuggled into the U.S.  inside the bodies of dead American troops.

Today, new heroin infests the smallest American towns, easier for some teenagers to get than beer, cheaper, more plentiful and more potent than ever.  Accidental poisoning is one of the leading causes of accidental death among young adults.

We may ignore any connections between our Afghan war and our heroin epidemic, at our own peril.

This Vietnam-era veteran and retired professional drug counselor believes there's a connection.

More of our chickens may have come home to roost, another consequence of our wars now coursing through the veins of our nation's youth.

Roland Van Deusen

Clayton