The CIA drug connection is as old as the agency

"On the other side of the world, as a 1993 piece in the New York Times observes, "CIA ties to international drug trafficking date to the Korean War" in the early 1950s. The subsequent brutal US war on Vietnam and neighbouring countries saw the establishment of a heroin-refining lab in Laos - with heroin "soon being ferried out on the planes of the CIA's front airline, Air America". The article continues: "Nowhere, however, was the CIA more closely tied to drug traffic than it was in Pakistan during the Afghan War"."