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This article discusses the efforts of the U.S. government to combat drug abuse and the impact of drug use on the society. A life lived fully has lessons for those who study it carefully. That of Khun Sa, Burma's recently retired heroin king has some profound, little-noticed lessons for the U.S. narcotics policy. In his fifty-year rise from boy soldier to drug lord, Khun Sa's career offers some criticism, even a critique, of the war on drugs that the U.S. has pursued so relentlessly for the past quarter century. As purity rose and price plummeted commodity changed culture. Once stigmatized in the 1960s as a ghetto drug, the mark of a social marginal and heroin was reinvented within the U.S. youth culture of the 1990s as the ultimate badge of a hip authenticity. In the past 30 years the number of hard-core heroin users in the country has risen sharply. Across the Eurasian land mass from southern China to Western Europe heroin addiction is rising rapidly. Despite the vast scale of this illicit industry the U.S. and United Nations officials remain committed to a policy of prohibition. Under its war on drugs campaign, the U.S. is trying to bust dealers on its streets, intercept smugglers at its borders and arrest drug lords in Asia and the Andes.

The article offers information on the Afghan war strategy against opium trade launched by the government of U.S. President Barack Obama on February 13, 2010. It relates the visit of U.S. war commander General Stanley A. McChrystal in Marja, a remote market town in southern Afghanistan's Helmand Province. It traces three events that triggered the rise in Afghanistan's opium harvest. Also noted is the reversal of Taliban's opium ban and revival of drug traffic by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) following the defeat of the Taliban in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks.