Memories From the Poppy Fields and Notions of Complicity

The War On Terror and The Opiate Epidemic

This photograph is from Eastern Afghanistan. On the horizon you see the foothills of the Hindu Kush mountains come into view. Just before your vision reached the horizon in the photo, you can just see the end of this massive field of flowers. On its surface it is a beautiful photograph of Mother Nature at her finest that froze a memory in time.

But consider the context. This was a war zone. Quite literally one of the most dangerous places in the world. So, it begs the question, just why in the hell would I stop to take a photograph that, if you took away the assault rifles and camoflauge, would look more like something you’d find in a gay couple’s wedding album?

Oddlly enough, the reason does come back to those flowers. Because every single flower in that field is the blossom of the poppy plant. And while the seeds of these poppy plants are one of my favorites on a bagel, it’s the other accoutrement of this plant that inspired this photograph.

The bulbs of the poppy that are sliced with razors and “milked” to harvest their opium.

Unless you’re sheltered, you should know that I’m referring to the poppy being the source of the narcotic drug opium which produces powerful medicinal alkaloids like morphine. Morphine that is then chemically altered to form diacetylmorphine. For those of you not in the know, diacetylmorphine is the chemical name for heroin. Horse. Smack. H. Boy. Muddy water.

And, yes, while there are so many photographs taken from combat zones that are for posterity to create memories of an important time in one’s life that doubtlessly shapes who one becomes and some that are shot mindlessly and don’t really have a point to them other than freezing a moment in time. The purpose behind this photograph was altogether different. Because it carries a gravity with it that can never be understood without an explanation for the reason it was taken.

I took this photograph of my brothers standing in a gargantuan poppy field in full blossom in a combat zone as that nation burned all around us. But here we are, seemingly carefree save for the assault weapons. And the smiles on my brothers' faces are not solely because they are having their picture taken. It’s because this photograph carries a poignant secret that we felt only we were privy to.

This was during the Bush Administration. Long before the “hearts and minds" campaign of Obama changed the way that war was fought. Or at least the way that we fought it. Because under Bush we could capture and kill, harass and horrify, and pillage and plunder with near impunity. We were there to take the fight to our enemy and dispatch him where he stood. God have mercy on anyone or anything that got in our way. Because we certainly wouldn’t.

Unless, ahem, unless what got in our way was a poppy field. I have taken part in destroying fields, farms, villages, livestock (not like a slaughter house, but we did kill their animals), and, of course, people. The damage and destruction we brought to bear was often devastating and absolute. We gave no quarter and offered no mercy. Ours was more of the “hell hath no fury,” “scorched earth” variety.

This was war, after all. And war is not what you hear from a talking head on a television screen watching the evening news.

But then there was the anomaly of the poppy fields. We knew what they were used for. We weren’t stupid, after all. And while most Americans imagine that the strict Islamic ways were indoctrinated into every person living in that country, you can’t believe everything you see on the TV. While there were the extremist factions that we were there fighting against, the truth is that they had people getting high just like we do on this side of the planet. There would be drug houses that bthought to mind the old Chinese opium dens from the wild west except with more squalid conditions. Call it an Afghan crack house.

Human beings and their vices know no ethnical lines.

So, we took the picture because we started to wonder whether we were back in the 80’s during the whole Iran-Contra-CIA conspiracy. You know, the one where the CIA imported pure cocaine into the country to support the rebels in Nicaragua? Congress told them they had to find a new source for funding, because they weren’t going to authorize any more money. So, the CIA thought way outside the box and started importing cocaine.

We did it before, would we do it again?

Were we involved in something similar here in the War On Terror? I mean, I took that picture in 2006. Which coincides perfectly with when the opiate epidemic in this country began to take root. It was during this time period that 3/4 or more of the heroin coming into the United States originated in fields in places like the one in this photograph.

How was all of that dope getting into the US in such copious quantities? Why could we do damn near anything we pleased in this country (let me re-empahasize “anything”…it felt like there were no rules or accountability unless something was so egregious that it could not be swept under the rug) without being called to answer for our actions? Were we, as the boots on the ground, blind to our complicity in it all so there could be plausible deniability? We were just following orders. And it was certainly a lawful one. Even though that didn’t really matter more often than not.

So many things about the whole circumstance just didn’t pass the smell test. Because it was a widely espoused theory that money from narcotics trafficking was used to finance the insurgency. If that’s true, then the fact that we were ordered to not touch those innumerable fields full of the devil’s flower meant that, tangentially, our actions led to the deaths and catastrophic injuries of so many of our brothers and sisters in arms. It led to countless of us struggling to cope with post traumatic stress disorder and it’s symptoms that so often proved paralytic and debilitating.

And that was just on that side of the Atlantic Ocean. Back in the United States, people were overdosing and dying at record rates. The crime rate continued to swell. Incarceration rates were on the rise. Newborns were being brought into this world addicted to opiates in alarming numbers.

And we couldn’t touch the poppy fields.

Hard hit towns and smaller cities saw the local unemployment rate skyrocket because of opiate addiciton. Pill mills were being raided and shut down, giving rise to heroin use among the affluent, suburban crowd or, I’ll call it what it is, white people (which is, sadly, what it took for people to really take notice of the issue). In certain places, the number of deaths due to opiate overdose were more than gun violence and even automobile accidents.

And, still, we couldn’t touch the poppy fields.

As our nation began to withdraw from Afghanistan, there was a shift in the supply line of this nation’s heroin. Over our drawdown period, Mexico became the United States' primary drug dealer. The exponential growth and rise of the murderous Mexican cartels and their innovative importation strategies and business like structure cemented them as the formidable adversaries in the futile effort we still call the War on Drugs.

I have news about the War on Drugs. You’re probably aware of this, but the drugs won. By a landslide. They’ve always won. But that’s another op ed for another day.

I’m not a conspiracy theorist. I don’t buy into far fetched ideas about how things came to be. And I don’t believe in coincidence either. And from the things that I saw both across the water as well as when I returned, the orders that I was given regarding these specific plants and how they were not to be damaged, and our nation’s undeniable history of using drugs as a means to maintain socioeconomic division, this doesn’t feel conspiratorial at all.

I mean, one and one make two. And I saw too much and heard too much and was involved in too much of this to not see this adding up. And out of all the things that I’ve seen, heard, and done that tells me this makes sense, the thing that tells me this makes sense the most is the one thing I couldn’t do…

We couldn’t touch the poppy fields.