The History of the Golden Triangle — The Region That Supplied the World's Opium for a Century

Golden Triangle opium history | CIA drug trade Cold War | heroin epidemic America | Burma Myanmar opium For most of the 20th century, a remote mountain region where Burma, Laos, and Thailand meet supplied more opium to the world than anywhere else on earth. This is the story of how that happened — and why the U.S. government played a larger role than anyone in Washington ever admitted. In 1951, the CIA launched Operation Paper: a covert program to arm Chinese Nationalist soldiers stranded in Burma's mountains after losing the Chinese Civil War. Those soldiers paid for everything with opium. The CIA knew. The Federal Bureau of Narcotics looked the other way. And as the trade industrialized through the 1950s and 1960s, the same supply chains that moved opium out of the Golden Triangle began moving heroin into American cities. By the time the Vietnam War ended in 1975, an estimated 34% of U.S. troops had used heroin during deployment — sourced from the same mountains, moving through the same networks American policy had helped build. What followed was a heroin epidemic that hollowed out Detroit, Baltimore, Harlem, and hundreds of American cities. Burma alone accounted for an estimated 80% of the heroin reaching the U.S. East Coast at the height of the trade. This video covers: — The ancient origins of opium cultivation in Southeast Asia's mountain tribes — How the CIA's Cold War strategy industrialized the Golden Triangle drug trade — The warlord Khun Sa, who controlled up to 70% of the world's heroin supply and was indicted by a federal grand jury in Brooklyn in 1990 — then retired to a mansion in Yangon, never extradited — The direct line from Operation Paper (1951) to the American opioid crisis that costs the U.S. over $1 trillion per year Sources include Alfred McCoy's The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia (1972), declassified CIA documents, DEA records, and U.S. Senate testimony.