The Myth of the Addicted Army: Vietnam and the Modern War on Drugs (review)

In 1971, Congressmen Morgan Murphy and Robert Steele issued a report on drug use among U.S. soldiers in Vietnam. They concluded that 10 to 15 percent of servicemen were addicted to heroin and that even larger numbers were using heroin at least occasionally. The news was the last thing President Richard Nixon wanted to hear inasmuch as it fused the two issues he had vowed to solve in his run for the presidency: the escalating domestic crime rate and the seemingly endless war in Vietnam.

The media, which had earlier picked up on the story of marijuana use in Vietnam, supplied audiences with images of drugged-out soldiers unable to function in combat and threatening to raise the crime rate even further when they came back home. Domestic opponents of the war, seeking to arouse popular antipathy to continued involvement in Southeast Asia, played up the image of the addicted soldier and reports of participation by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in drug trading. In response, Nixon declared a war on drugs, created a special action office on drug abuse prevention in the White House, increased federal involvement in local drug law enforcement, and ordered the Department of Defense to begin testing returning servicemen for drug use in order to prove that his administration was not asleep at the wheel, as congressional Democrats had charged. He also encouraged the governments of South Vietnam, Thailand, and Burma to clean up corruption and crack down on drug trading, and he began the practice of supplying military aid for drug control purposes. Such were the origins, Jeremy Kuzmarov argues, of the myth of the addicted army and the modern war on drugs that it inspired.

In this generally well-written book, Kuzmarov is at his best tracing the political uses of this myth. It created a narrative to explain the loss of the war in Vietnam, portraying U.S. servicemen as increasingly unwilling and unable to carry out their mission. In film, television, novels, and other media, the war’s destructive effects were narrowed to the victimization of U.S. soldiers by drugs. The myth hid the true cost of the war in Vietnamese lives lost and countryside destroyed, setting the stage for future imperial adventures. It also sustained the militarization of the war on drugs abroad. The model of police training, military advising, covert actions, and chemical defoliation that were pioneered in Southeast Asia spread to Latin America. In the United States the emphasis on the foreign origins of drugs hid the problems of structural poverty and inequality that better explained the appeal of heroin, cocaine, and marijuana. Kuzmarov maintains that the entire foreign and domestic war on drugs to the present day is based on the pervasive myth of the addicted army.

What was the actual extent of heroin use in Vietnam? Kuzmarov provides evidence of heroin use, but he believes that the 10 to 15 percent estimate (which Murphy later repudiated) was too large, that military, political, and medical authorities were both unable and unwilling to distinguish between use and abuse, and that little drug use occurred on the front lines, where it could have harmed combat operations, contrary to the media and other portrayals of addicted troops. The soldiers who used drugs or alcohol (the latter of which was often a much more serious problem) did so in rear areas, away from combat zones, or upon return from missions as a way of coming down from the stress of war. Kuzmarov believes that for many soldiers using drugs was therapeutic, something that no one at the time, aside from a few counterculture theorists, would have argued. Only about 5 percent of those taking urine tests failed them, which Kuzmarov believes is a better estimate of actual abuse.

Does what we know about heroin in Vietnam sustain Kuzmarov’s thesis? Kuzmarov cites Lee Robbins’s influential epidemiological study that showed a remarkable...