At present, Al-Qaeda is known to finance its terror operations through drug-trafficking. "[the New York Times reported] that 'militants linked to Al Qaeda also established connections with Bosnian organized crime figures. The officials said Al Qaeda and the Taliban found a route for the trafficking of heroin from Afghanistan into Europe through the Balkans.'... In other words, the CIA knew that Al-Qaeda was involved in heroin-trafficking, but (as is so often the case with big-time drug-traffickers) was not widely sharing it...Bin Laden's network now uses the drug connections which Bin Laden developed with his friend, the former CIA protege Gulbuddin Hekmatyar" during the Soviet occupation (Scott 2007) The CIA did not merely turn a blind eye to the drug backgrounds of organized criminals, spies, and rebel factions. Even while it condemned the use of LSD by the American counterculture, it used the drug in its own experiments, often without the knowing consent of the subjects, ostensibly to improve its interrogation methods. In at least one recorded incident, the subjects, reflecting agency prejudice were African-American servicemen (Cockburn & St. Clair, 1999, p. 153). In 1977 Senate hearings with the CIA director revealed the nature and extent of these past experiments. Senator Chaffee called the experiments: "bungled, amateurish experiments that don't seem to have been handled in a very scientific way, at least from the scanty evidence we have" ("CIA Director Stansfield Turner's Testimony," 1977 Senate Hearings on MKULTRA, pp. 35-34). The best-known example of these experiments was the MKULTRA subproject, "a project involving the surreptitious administration of LSD on unwitting persons...the Director of Central Intelligence wrote to the technical services staff officials criticizing their judgment because they had participated in an experiment involving the administration of LSD on an unwitting basis to Dr. Frank Olson, who later committed suicide but the experiments still continued for a number of years afterwards ("CIA Director Stansfield Turner's Testimony," 1977 Senate Hearings on MKULTRA,...

34-35).
The CIA's complicity with the drug trade highlights a larger problem with the existence of secret organizations within a democracy. This secret organization's actions have flouted the U.S. government's own policy and laws, even though the freely elected government created the organization's existence. With no real oversight, the CIA used taxpayer money to finance drug-running groups, even while ordinary citizens were being sent to jail for minor drug infringements. To save democracy and promote anti-communist activities, the CIA subverted democracy. To preserve freedom, it conducted experiments upon American citizens without their consent and contributed to the enslavement of countless other Americans to drugs by keeping a steady supply of addictive substances flowing into the nation's borders. Finally, through its anti-communist support for the Afghanistan rebels, it may have abetted in creating the channels for growing and distributing the heroin that financed and continues to finance anti-Western terrorist activities.

Works Cited

CIA Director Stansfield Turner's Testimony." 1977 Senate Hearings on MKULTRA. Retrieved 10 Sept 2008. http://www.druglibrary.org/schaffer/history/e1950/mkultra/Hearing05.htm

Cockburn, Alexander & Jeffrey St. Clair. (1999). Whiteout: The CIA, Drugs and the Press. New York: Verso.

McCoy, Alfred. (2003). The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade. New York: Lawrence Hill Books.

A tangled web: A history of CIA complicity in drug international trafficking." (7 May 1998).

Institute for Policy Studies. Retrieved 10 Sept 2008. http://www.fas.org/irp/congress/1998_cr/980507-l.htm

McCoy, Alfred. (1997). "CIA covert actions and drug trafficking." Retrieved 10 Sept 2008. http://sonic.net/~doretk/Issues/97-08%20AUG/ciacovert.html

Scott, Peter Dale. (2007). "Al-Qaeda, the Taliban, the Northern Alliance, and drug-trafficking."

University of California at Berkeley. Retrieved 10 Sept 2008. http://socrates.berkeley.edu/~pdscott/q3.html