Lars Schall: Governments are Complicit in the Illegal Drug Trade

The following interview helps us understand the drug war from a dramatically different perspective than the one the corporate media paints. Instead the traditional portrayal of the war on drugs as a fight between law enforcement and illicit drug dealers, scholar Oliver Villar explains that the illegal drug trade is a tool of empire, a means of social control as much as profit. Villar, a lecturer in politics at Charles Sturt University in Bathurst, Australia's insight is well worth the read: Lars Schall: What has been your main motivation to spend 10 years of your life to the subject of the drug trade? Oliver Villar: The main motivation goes sometime back. I think it has to do first with my own experiences in growing up in working class suburbs in Sidney, Australia. It always has been an area that I found very curious and fascinating, just to think about how rampant and persuasive drugs really are in our communities, and just by looking at it in more recent times, how much worse the drug problem has become, not just in lower "socio-economic areas", but everywhere. But from then on, when I finally had the opportunity to do so, I actually undertook this as a PhD thesis. I spent my time carefully looking at what was written on the drug trade, but as coming from Latin America. I was very interested in particular in the Latin American drug trade as well. So I looked at the classic works such as Alfred W McCoy's Politics of Heroin, Peter Dale Scott's Cocaine Politics, Douglas Valentine's The Strength of the Wolf, and works that related not just to the drug trade, but from various angles, including political science perspectives to see what we know about drugs.