Before the Vietnam War, the drug trade that would eventually reshape Pakistan had almost nothing to do with Pakistan at all. It centered on the border region where Burma, Laos, and Thailand meet – territory that earned the name the Golden Triangle for the opium grown, dried, and refined there before moving along Asian trafficking routes toward Europe and America.
After that war ended, the trade didn’t disappear. It relocated, and Pakistan’s tribal border areas became its new center of gravity – a shift that accelerated sharply once the Soviet war in Afghanistan got underway. Opium cultivation became a genuinely effective way to fund weapons for the fight, and the profits from poppy fields turned directly into arms purchases for the war effort next door. By most accounts, the United States’ own intelligence services played a real part in organizing and accelerating that trade during the same period, whatever the stated policy on drugs happened to be.
The result was straightforward and lasting: Pakistan became a genuine world center of the drug trade, with politicians, wealthy financiers, and government officials drawn into it alongside the traffickers themselves. By the period covered here, Pakistan already had an estimated 1.5 million people addicted to drugs – a domestic cost that arrived alongside the profits. Perhaps the most damning detail is the simplest one: several gazetted police officers, the very officials meant to enforce the law against this trade, were themselves found to be part of it.
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