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GUEST: Glen Ford, Radio BC

U.S. Foreign Policy Abets AIDS at Home

Twin stories surfaced this month, although much of the public did not make the connection. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control announced that African-Americans account for half of all new cases of HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. And, officials now admit that Afghanistan’s opium production has increased 40 percent in the past year. Columbia, another U.S. puppet state, accounts for most of the worlds cocaine. Is there a connection between rampaging AIDS in American ghettos and booming opium and coca production in American-dominated Afghanistan and Columbia. Of course there is.

It is widely agreed that AIDS shifted its critical mass of infection from homosexual males to African Americans of both sexes through the nexus of intravenous drug use, its primary entrance to the larger Black community. So rapid and thorough has been the demographic transformation of the illness, that NAACP chairman Julian Bond characterizes AIDS as a “Black disease” – one that has killed 200,000 African Americans in the past 25 years. AIDS is now the leading killer of Black women between the ages of 25 to 34. Statistically, Blacks are seven times more likely to die of AIDS, than whites.

The vortex of this fatal storm is poverty, ignorance, isolation, and a government that does not give a damn about Black life – but at the center, is drugs. And those drugs come from two U.S. protectorates – colonies, really – Afghanistan and Columbia.

The Americans make a real mess of the world, wherever they step. The Taliban had virtually eradicated opium production by the year 2000. Then came the U.S. invasion. Now, Afghanistan’s opium crop accounts for nearly 90 percent of the entire world’s heroin supply. Yet the United States blames that on the Taliban, whom they claim they are defeating – even though almost every arable square foot of land in one southern province is dedicated to opium production. Do the Taliban control all of Helmand province? The Americans say they don’t. Clearly, people who the U.S. calls allies, do. The Americans have made a deal: Support our puppet government in Afghanistan, and you can grow tons of the cash crop that brings death and disease to our citizens in the United States. After all, they’re mostly Black.

The same is true of Columbia, the third largest recipient of U.S. aid dollars in the world. That money has propped up a succession of regimes that have been soaked in cocaine for more than three decades. The U.S. made a deal. The Columbian ruling classes were allowed to continue their narcotics assault on the American people, as long as they suppressed the Left in their country.

The U.S. gives impunity to drug lords, while Americans die in the hundreds of thousands from the end-result of the drug trade. Heroin- and cocaine-filled needles spread the plague, which has now become general in Black American, touching victims who have never injected themselves with unclean needles. The infection is as much political as it is viral. U.S. foreign policy is a disease, that is ruining the lives of millions abroad, and here at home. For Radio BC, I’m Glen Ford.