Posted on 08/07/2007 4:06:19 PM PDT by chessplayer
Afghanistan -- Just outside the main gate to Bagram airfield, a U.S. military installation in Afghanistan, sits a series of small makeshift shops known by locals as the Bagram Bazaar.
(Excerpt) Read more at salon.com ...
The political Left in this country is the lowest form of lying trash.
In the military, scoring drugs has always been just as easy as scoring women for those so inclined..........
Our troops get regularly tested at home (in the US) for drugs. Every once in a long while you hear about someone “popping on a piss test”. I am pretty sure they probably do it overseas as well.
Its easy to score chocolate in Hersey.
When you are where any product is mass produced, it is proably easy to secure.
MRE’s can bung up your cornhole, why put yourself at further risk with smack, it does the same thing...
I MEANT GETTING REGULARLY TESTED.....NOT popping on a piss test. SORRY.
I have in-processed almost 1,500 OEF/OIF disability claims in the last four years in my small VA Regional Office and the total number of opiate-dependent veterans I have seen among them is — exactly zero. The “30,000” figure alluded to in the article is (I would bet) 90% from the period 1967-1980 when the US military went to hell and had to be recovered.
Can't speak for other units, but the stories I heard from friends at the time suggest it was pretty widespread.
This reporter seems to have spent a lot of time trying to prove that the war is creating GI addicts but, like he says, all his information is “anecdotal.”
John Kerry finally admitted that he never witnessed a single atrocity in Vietnam and that all his information was “anecdotal”—urban legend.
The experience the U.S. military had with heroin in Vietnam showed that out of all personnel who tested positive for opiates upon their return to the states, all but about 10 percent recovered after some treatment and counseling. What this seemed to indicate was that of the minority of U.S. personnel in RVN who were experimenting with or abusing heroin or opium, only about 10 percent were true addicts who could not permanently recover. This chronic addict group was probably a smaller percentage than addicts in the U.S. general population.
The disease concept of chemical dependency—the prevailing theory of addiction among a majority of medical, mental health and treatment professionals—states that alcoholics and addicts are born with a genetic predisposition to addiction which manifests itself with the first use of these substances.
Popular propaganda has claimed for 40 years that Vietnam produced an army of drug addicts, drunks and psychotics. The news media, Hollywood and activist historians used a lot of “anecdotal information” and veteran imposters to push this crap.
B.G. Burkett and Glenna Whitley wrote “Stolen Valor” (Verity Press—ISBN 096670360-X) in 1998. This is an exhaustively researched book that proves Vietnam veterans as a whole statistically had lower rates of desertion and criminal indictment than World War II veterans. It also shows how popular culture created the “Rambo” myth.
The Salon story is just one of the constant smears the news media publishes to diminish the honor of America’s fighting forces and lower the public’s morale in the War on Terror. The media are old hands at this game.
Since the honor, courage and patriotism of our Armed Forces have produced so little fodder for the left to use to damage morale and undermine the war effort salon thought they might make something up. They have no evidence that a problem even exists, but since the drive by has such a problem with substance abuse and sexual deviance, even if the Armed forces have a fraction of the problem then it's major.
The unit I was in was awash in heroin in `70-`71.Heard
2 shots when some bro`s shot a major trying to arrest
them smoking mj.
Yeah,you could get those little vials of scag for about
$2 and put it in your Marlboro and smoke it like normal,
Then there were your hard core that warmed it up.
A wee problem with race relations,yeah.It was scary where
I was.I liked it better out in the field,
I saw first hand only up until mid-68 and only in the 1st Inf Div....the news references about it didn’t begin until long after that.......I’m sure it was available, but it wasn’t popular, so to speak, until later..........geez, when I got drafted in fall of 66 marijuana in the states wasn’t very widely and openly available yet except for places like NYC, SFO, etc. I am absolutely certain I knew more guys in Vn who smoked their first reefer THERE than had ever tried or even had a chance to consider junk. But I do also know that what you say is and was true 2 yrs after my DEROS. By that time the “Woodstock generation” was arriving in Vn.
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