Correlation between US military Involvement and world-wide drug trafficking
Robert Gorter, MD, PhD, was very much involved in taking care of drug addicts and research in this field since the very early 1971’s when, as a young medical doctor in Amsterdam, he started the very first Methadone Project in the European continent.
Later, it became part of the formal Drug Prevention and Treatment Center of the City of Amsterdam (see Appendices at the end of this chapter). Part of his professional life was dedicated to the phenomenon of addiction with an emphasis on Heroin and Cocaine.
During the 1980’s and 1990’s Robert Gorter assisted the HIV/AIDS program at San Francisco General Hospital to build programs directed towards intravenous drug users to contain the spread of HIV in that population by offering low-threshold methadone programs and free needle-exchange programs. As the medical director of the Department of AIDS Epidemiology and Biostatistics of the University of California San Francisco Medical School (UCSF), Robert Gorter and his team could prove that these programs worked and that within 12-18 months the transmission of HIV was even less than in the population of gay men in the San Francisco Bay Area.
It struck him that whatever politicians and Law Enforcement officers promised to do about containing drug use, there were no noticeable changes in the availability of heroin, cocaine and crack in the streets or in prisons.
Especially during the US military involvement in South East Asia (Vietnam) and recently in Afghanistan, the world was flooded with heroin. During US military involvement in Central America (Nicaragua) the streets (not only of large US cities but throughout Europe as well) were flooded with cocaine.
A puzzling observation……