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Alfred W. McCoy (b. 1945) is a historian and a Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He earned his B.A. from Columbia College^[1], and his Ph.D in Southeastern Asian history from Yale University.

McCoy researches and has written about Philippines history, and in particular on the Golden Triangle drug trades of opium and heroin. His The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia (1972 first ed.) was a landmark work in documenting the interactions between the CIA and drug cartels in Southeast Asia.

In this work, McCoy's principal thesis is that, following the effective suppression of the heroin trade in America during World War II and the subsequent decision to stamp out opium growing by Turkey - which had been one of the main sources of raw opium - organized crime organizations in America and Europe collaborated in a wide-ranging conspiracy to establish new centers of opium production, heroin refining and distribution in Southeast Asia, and that their efforts were greatly facilitated by the Central Intelligence Agency and the unstable political situation created by the ongoing Vietnam War.

He points out that the French Connection found its basis on the control of the opium production in the Golden Triangle by the French SDECE military intelligence agency, who financed its covert operations during the First Indochina War (1947-1954) in this way ^[2].

McCoy asserts that the "French Connection" conspiracy arose from an alliance between the Corsican Mafia, who had an historical presence in South Vietnam dating back to the French occupation, and leading members of the American and Sicilian Mafia, under the leadership of Lucky Luciano, who had been imprisoned in the U.S. during World War II for racketeering, but was asked to provide assistance to American military intelligence about Axis infiltration of the waterfront in American ports (which was effectively controlled by the Mafia), as well as assisting Allied forces in their invasion of Sicily and Italy. He reportedly used his contacts in the Sicilian Mafia to assist U.S. forces by gathering intelligence and identifying both fascist collaborators and Socialist/Communist elements in the Italian resistance movement, who were then systematically eliminated.

In return for his assistance, Luciano was covertly permitted to run his crime operations from prison, and at the end of the war he was deported back to Sicily, where he immediately began a major expansion of his drug operations, forging alliances with Corsican Mafia members in South Vietnam and organised crime figures in other countries, including Australia.

McCoy wrote in the book, "American involvement had gone far beyond coincidental complicity; embassies had covered up involvement by client governments, CIA contract airlines had carried opium, and individual CIA agents had winked at the opium traffic. As an indirect consequence of American involvement in the Golden Triangle until 1972, opium production steadily increased....Southeast Asia's Golden Triangle grew 70 percent of the world's illicit opium, supplied an estimated 30 percent of America's heroin, and was capable of supplying the United States with unlimited quantities of heroin for generations to come."^[3]

The CIA's actions were more specifically described by him thus: "In most cases, the CIA's role involved various forms of complicity, tolerance or studied ignorance about the trade, not any direct culpability in the actual trafficking ... [t]he CIA did not handle heroin, but it did provide its drug-lord allies with transport, arms, and political protection. In sum, the CIA's role in the Southeast Asian heroin trade involved indirect complicity rather than direct culpability." ^[4]

McCoy showed how the CIA recruited drug lords in the frame of the Cold War, underlying a "conflict between the drug war and the cold war." ^[2] For instance, the CIA assisted drug lords in Burma in 1950 in operations against China, then from 1965 to 1975 in Laos and through the 1980s in Afghanistan, supporting for example the drug and warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, leader of the Hezbi-i Islami guerilla group ^[2].

He also uncovered money laundering activities by banks controlled by the CIA, first the Castle Bank which was then replaced by the Nugan Hand Bank, who had as legal council William Colby, retired head of the CIA ^[2]. He also alludes to the BCCI, which seems to have played the same role as the Nugan Hand Bank after its collapse in the early 1980s, claiming that "the boom in the Pakistan drug trade was financed by BCCI." ^[2].

Between a repressive policy (the "Drug war"), which he considers a failure ("The repression creates a shortfall in supply which raises price and then stimulates production everywhere around the world." ^[2]) and a full legalization of drugs, which he considers "politically impracticable", McCoy argues in favour of an "alternative strategy," "regularization": "I favor regulation because if cocaine and heroin are commodities let's deal with them as such. You don't repress commodities, you regulate them." ^[2]. Furthermore, against bilateral agreements between the US and other nations (Colombia, Bolivia, etc. - see coca eradication campaign by the US), McCoy argues in favour of multilateral policies under the direction of the United Nations ^[2].

In 2001, the Association for Asian Studies awarded him the Grant Goodman Prize for his career contributions to the study of the Philippines.

• Laos: War and Revolution, co-editor, 1970
• The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia. CIA complicity in the global drug trade, by Alfred W. McCoy with Cathleen B. Read and Leonard P. Adams II, 1972, ISBN 0-06-012901-8
• An Anarchy Of Families (state and family in the Philippines), 1998, ISBN 971-550-128-1
• Closer Than Brothers: Manhood at the Philippine Military Academy, 1999, ISBN 0-300-07765-3
• Alfred W. McCoy, "Requiem for a Drug Lord: State and Commodity in the Career of Khun Sa," in, Josiah McC. Heyman, ed., States and Illegal Practices (Oxford: Berg, 1999), pp. 129-67.
• Alfred W. McCoy, "Mission Myopia: Narcotics as 'Fall Out' from the CIA's Covert Wars," in, Craig R. Eisendrath, ed., National Insecurity: U.S. Intelligence After the Cold War (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2000), pp. 118-48.
• Alfred W. McCoy, "The Stimulus of Prohibition: A Critical History of the Global Narcotics Trade," in, Michael K. Steinberg, Joseph J. Hobbs, and Kent Mathewson., eds., Dangerous Harvest: Drug Plants and the Transformation of Indigenous Landscapes (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), pp. 24-111.
• A Question of Torture: CIA Interrogation, From the Cold War to the War on Terror, 2006, ISBN 0-8050-8041-4

• Page on McCoy at the "Center for Southeast Asian Studies"
• Interview of McCoy on The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia
• "A Correspondence with the CIA" -(part of an article for the The New York Review of Books on the CIA's interest in his Politics of Heroin
• "Cruel Science: The Long Shadow of CIA Torture Research" -(article for Counterpunch on the Abu Ghraib tortures)
• "The Hidden History of CIA Torture: America's Road to Abu Ghraib" -(similar editorial for Truthout)
• Interview: Democracy Now, Transcript and Audio February, 2006