From Vietnam to Mexico and Afghanistan, the United States’ wars on drugs have deepened violence, addiction and instability. Today, that legacy is edging closer to Australia.

The US wars against drugs conform to a familiar narrative: they are no more successful than its other, standard-issue conventional wars; in some cases they are far worse because they not only left the original problem unsolved, they exacerbated it.

But even this misses two points of extraordinary significance. The first that has been made time and again and needs to be made again. The historical record of the wars on drugs, mobilised by the US, and extending back to no later than the Nixon administration, reads not only as a litany of tragic failure, but a series of events from which the US seems incapable of learning from.

It is 18 years since the administration of GW Bush administration and Mexico undertook the Merida Initiative – a massive military-backed operation to combat drug trafficking and its diversified organised criminal regimes such as money laundering, human smuggling, and oil theft.

The results are staggeringly negative: the cartels responded by mobilising their own mercenary forces and fought the forces of the Mexican state in a form of hybrid war which, as of 2024, has produced 486,000 dead and another 130,000 disappeared. The drugs continued to flow.

The second is that within the Special Operations forces which the US will deploy to initiate any attack on Venezuela are personnel who are themselves part of the problem.

And it is an old problem, merely updated. Its bookends are the final years of the Vietnam War and the hangover effects in the here and now of over-extended, high tempo operations experienced by an influential minority within the 70,000 personnel charged with conducting special operations.

While the transit is from a conscript army to elite soldiers in an all-volunteer force, the comparison is linked via the need in both eras to escape from the everyday reality of operations.

In the former, an investigation mounted by the US Army War College over 1969-1971, revealed that, of US troops in Vietnam, 58 per cent were using marijuana, 14 per cent were using hallucinogens, and 22 per cent (“epidemic proportions”) were using heroin.

Some 25 per cent of Vietnam War-era troops were arrested within two years of discharge; 200,000 of the same veteran-cohort went on to become clinically defined drug addicts.

Today, the numbers are nothing like the above but the situation is parlous, nevertheless. At Fort Bragg, North Carolina, the largest US Army base in the United States, there is evidence of not only a serious drug use problem but also a serious drug trafficking problem. Research on the latter – an entrepreneurial project run by a seemingly well organised and immune minority within the Special Operations forces has been published by Seth Harp, a reading of which justifies the title: _The Fort Bragg Cartel_.

It is crucial to understand the underlying causes, some of which will resonate with readers in Australia. They point to the forces and units in question being, essentially, a secretive elite, charged with executing highly dangerous missions in return for which they are indulged with and covered by layers of immunity from the standard the regimes of military and criminal justice.

To make matters worse, in some theatres such as Vietnam and Afghanistan, they operated in an exceedingly drug-permissive environment. Specifically, at the highest levels of government the drug trade flourished with the full knowledge, and effective consent, of the US political and military command.

The inference is that, in the furtherance of whatever strategic objectives had been decided, the creation of addicts among the military and abroad was an “acceptable” collateral cost.

During the US occupation of Afghanistan, for example, the country eventually produced nine times the total heroin production of the rest of the world. It flowed at crisis levels to Asia, Australia, Europe, Russia, and the US itself. At the same time the US had narco warlords on its payroll.

Even within the military, however, there was an ample supply of officially prescribed potentially addictive drugs – such as dextroamphetamine (in the form of Adderall) – to allow them to cope with operational demands.

Overdosing as a form of coping with grief and pain became common, and from there the recourse to opioids was/is almost “logical.”

With Vietnam in mind, the consequences are recognisable. At Fort Bragg, in the five years to 2022, there were 15,293 overdoses, and 332 deaths; 20 per cent of the inmates in state penitentiaries, and 25 per cent in federal penitentiaries were ex-military.

For Australia, these developments are the harbingers of danger. They provide part of the backdrop for the accelerating growth of drug trafficking in Asia-Pacific which, coincidentally is taking place at the same time as the expanding US presence in Australia, and the Trump administration’s predilection to decide on major strategic initiatives in isolation, and then to act unilaterally in the commission of major crimes on the high seas. Serial murder might be the least of these if the US attacks Venezuela.

Given the presence of the Joint Facilities, the growing US presence in Australia, and the various joint exercises which are increasing, Australia is in an inescapable position and it is worsening by the day.

While it is not certain that President Trump would order similar actions to be taken by US forces in Asia-Pacific which are linked to Australia, it is clear that, given his compulsion to order extra-judicial killings of suspects – yes, murder is also an appropriate term - Australia would share the responsibility, if not the guilt for the outcome.

Even if that does not come to pass, why is there such silence in Canberra about events to date? Is it because, as was suggested in Part 1, the commitment to high principle is only at the level of a sentiment? Or that Venezuela and Venezuelans are sub-principle – and not worth the possibly costly reactions that would follow from the White House?