Narcotopia by Patrick Winn

The subtitle of this is In Search of the Drug Cartel the Survived the CIA--and it is kind of a fascinating story in light of all the other drug related stories that involves the CIA. I had never heard about this place, the Wa people, or what was happening here until I read a characteristically short article reviewing this book, and the phenomenon described therein, in the Economist this year. The short story is that every opportunity the US has to mess up a situation with either the War on Drugs or the War on Communism, they (we) will most spectacularly misread the situation, make the poorest choices, and in this case, when that is figured out, the winner is able to play both of those sides against each other and emerge with something that looks like a win. The book follows the Wa people—a tribe situated along the Burma-China border and best known for head-hunting—over the last half-century as they established the United Wa State Army, an independent government in control of a 30,000-man fighting force and a colossal drug cartel that produced heroin and later switched to manufacturing methamphetamine. The book centers on several Wa figures, including Saw Lu, a Baptist who fought to unite and modernize his people (he led a successful campaign in the 1960s to get them to stop head-hunting) and to wean them off drug trafficking, all while serving as an informant for the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration; and his nemesis Wei Xuegang, the secretive criminal genius who turned the UWSA into the dominant cartel in Southeast Asia’s Golden Triangle region. Stirring the pot is the feud between the DEA, which backed Saw Lu, and the CIA, which nurtured the drug trade and sabotaged Saw Lu’s efforts. Part gangster saga, part espionage thriller, and part liberation epic, Winn’s narrative alternates between rollicking adventure and harrowing violence conveyed in vivid, muscular prose. It’s a riveting portrait of how deeply the drug trade is embedded in Southeast Asia’s modernizing economies—and in America’s foreign policy.