Dan Russell: It's a combination of different things. People are more prone to neurotic inebriative behavior if they are frustrated in their own lives and its directions, if they can't do what they want to do with their lives.

I mean, there are addictions to sex, to gambling, to drugs, but when addiction experts look at these things, they find they are all rooted in the same kinds of psychological frustrations. They are not different, the addictions, to sex, drugs, or gambling, they're an escapist, neurotic thing rooted in the same causes.

You don't seperate them out psychologically. So when addiction experts try to deal with addiction, what they find they are dealing with is not pharmicological, but in root frustration. The inability to get work they like, for instance, drives a lot of people completely crazy.

Disinformation: OK, define "pharmaco-phobic."

Dan Russell: That's a literal term. Pharmaco-phobia is quite like ethno-phobia, which is how you define racism. It has a political purpose and a political generation.

Cocaine is a perfect example. This culture is taught to hit the roof at the mention of cocaine, taught to hate cocaine. But when you talk to your average bourgeois twit, he doesn't know a goddamned thing about cocaine. Often he doesn't even know where it comes from. What you're dealing with there is the phoney reason to make war on Native Colombians and take control of the Upper-Putumayo, just as how we were taught to go crazy at the word "Communism."

Ho Chi Minh was a communist. Well, I was still only 20 in 1965 and very much a part of this scene, but most of the people who went crazy and hated the Vietcong didn't know anything about the Vietcong.

Disinformation: They just listened to the propaganda.

Dan Russell: Right, it's that kind of thing. It had a political purpose, to make you support the War.

Disinformation: What are your thoughts on small "low intensity" conflicts playing a direct part in the growth of the illegal drug industry and drug terrorism?

Dan Russell: I'd turn it around. I would say that all wars play a direct part in the growth of Defense Contractors who procure contracts. That's the function of these small wars: to foster multi-billion dollar military weapons assembly lines, and to keep them humming. That is their function. There is no such thing as "drug-sponsored terrorism," it's "money-sponsored terrorism."

Disinformation: I was reading an article, "Pro-American Military and Political Blocs Around the Caspian Basin Livening Up," by Oleg Zotov of the Transcaspian Project, on how Kyrgystani peoples, and the Talibs in Kabul, rich and poor, have been forced to sell or transport drugs, by the US having destabilized the region even there. The article is discussing the areas of Afghanistan, Turkey, Pakistan, the central Asian countries. I know something similar is happening now in Burma and Thailand, and that we're doing the same things in Colombia and the Andean region. Are these wars and conflicts all just a creation, complete fabrication from beginning to end?

Dan Russell: Yeah, if you look at the recent history of Turkey, and then just east of that, Afghanistan, you'll see that Richard Helms and company were operating as the Iranian Shah's military team. Ted Shakley was there, and Richard Armitage, Felix Rodriguez, and Helms was US Ambassador to the Shah in 1975. This is just after he'd stepped down from running the CIA. They were the ones who engineered the 1980 coup in Turkey.

They did it from their base in Iran.

What they were doing at that time was working with Abdullah Catli and his Grey Wolves, using them to engineer control of the heroin trade throughout that region.

Disinformation: Who were the Grey Wolves?

Dan Russell: They were the street fighters for the facist National Action Party (MHP). In 1997, Judge Rolf Schwalbe concluded that two Kurdish clans known to be heavily involved in heroin trafficking had "excellent relations with the Turkish Government," and "personal contacts with a woman minister in the government."

The Turkish publicity first hit the fan in November 1996 when a Mercedes Benz crashed in Ankara. Inside the Mercedes was the former Istanbul deputy police chief, and also CIA organizer of the counterinsurgency teams aimed at the Partiya Karkeran Kurdistan (PKK), the Kurdish Workers Party.

Sedat Bucak, Village Guard chieftan and True Path Party (DYP) parliamentarian, was seriously injured. Next to him, also injured, was Abdullah Catli, founder of the Grey Wolves. Since 1978, he had been wanted for mass murder and international drug smuggling. Why was he riding around with the most powerful police officials in Turkey?

Catli was carrying a license to carry arms and a Green Passport reserved for senior Ministry officials, both signed by Interior Minister Mehmet Agar.

Agar was the CIA organizer of the 120,000-strong police and counterinsurgency force trained by the CIA. What you could show was that Helms's team in the late 1970s, operating from Iran, organized this. In 1980, when Suleyman Demiral's conservative parliamentary government in Turkey was overthrown, CIA Ankara station chief Paul Henze cabled Washington, saying, "our boys have done it."

That event was an organic part of the Golden Crescent, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran, and Turkey heroin trade organized by Helms's team, along with the Turkey Grey Wolves, who are now running it.

Disinformation: The US has now delivered a small portion of military equipment to Kyrgystan, while simultaneously reducing the amount of military financial assistance. So the article's point was that increasing military hardware, while reducing financial help results only in infinitely long war. To continue to supply the war effort, the fighters resort to selling and trafficking drugs.

Dan Russell: You have to understand that the legalization of the herbs and the medicalization of the alkoloids would collapse the value of the heroin, which in turn would collapse the whole military effort based on the heroin trade, all over the world.

Disinformation: How about the drug treatment center near you, the Benjamin Rush Center? How does this tie into our current medical viewpoint on pain treatment, drugs in general, or substance use, as American modern medicine still reveres notorious bleeders and poisoners like Benjiman Rush by naming drug-treatment centers after him?

Dan Russell: Well that sort of sums it up, doesn't it?

The fact, is these things are a profitable monopoly. If you legalize the inebriative herbs, you would partially collapse the monopoly. If you medicalized the alkoloids, so that heroin, or smoking opium instead of methadone are being prescribed, you would have a safe alternative.

It is a fact that smoking opium has been used for centuries in cultures that accept it with no bad consequences.