What is the modern history of the drug trade in Lebanon? How is that history implicated in the dynamics of state building, economic development, civil war, and foreign intervention there? In what ways is Lebanon's drug trade connected to broader circuits of illicit production, trade, and consumption? Jonathan V. Marshall offers the first concerted treatment of these questions in his well-researched and original monograph. The study begins in 1950, with the arrival of a U.S. Federal Bureau of Narcotics Agency (FBN) investigator in Lebanon. It concludes in 1990, when the Lebanese government, backed by 15,000 Syrian soldiers, began demobilizing local militias. This forty-year period covers wide-ranging transformations in local political economy, the international drug trade, and U.S. foreign policy. Marshall succinctly narrates how local production and trade in hashish and opium intersected with such transformations.
Marshall advances two primary arguments. First, production and trade in hashish and opium were (differentially) important aspects of the structure of political power, the nature of economic privilege, and the pattern of armed mobilization in Lebanon. Marshall identifies and documents the role of well-known Lebanese personalities, including presidents, prime ministers, parliament members, party and militia leaders, businessmen, and landlords, in the drug trade. This explains why, as of this writing, the Lebanese Ministry of Information officially prohibits the book's entry into Lebanon. Second, Lebanon had a central role in the international markets of hashish and heroin during the period under study. Marshall highlights this role by identifying a litany of major drug-related arrests and seizures in the United States, Europe, and the Middle East that are in one way or another traced back to Lebanon. He advances both his arguments through an approach that is attentive to the intersection of geography, historical legacies, and contingency. In doing so, he eschews a host of deterministic narratives that have characterized the literature on both Lebanon as well as so-called “failed states” and “narco-states” (Chapter 8).
Two distinct narratives about the development of the Lebanese trade in hashish (Chapter 1) and opium (Chapter 2), respectively, open the book. Major growers and traders enjoyed the protection and patronage, if not direct sponsorship and partnership, of various state elites and institutions. As such, most drug enforcement campaigns were of a theatrical nature, and primarily intended to appease foreign governments such as Egypt or the United States. When state officials burned crops, confiscated merchandise, or prosecuted individuals, they invariably targeted either minor players or affiliates of rival politicians. So important was Lebanon to a globally diffuse network of hashish and heroin smugglers in the 1950s and 1960s that the FBN opened a Beirut office in 1954, establishing a permanent presence in the Middle East. According to FBN surveillance reports, the local trade in both hashish and opium had its roots in the French colonial period. It was then that farmers first began to harvest drug crops, and merchants made use of emerging transportation networks to satisfy the international markets for both drugs. A post–World War II combination of booms in demand and disruptions in global supply set the stage for a dramatic increase in the demand for Lebanese hashish, heroin traffic through Lebanon, and a concomitant response by farmers, landlords, merchants, and politicians. As Marshall writes, “it was a classic case of a neocolonial periphery supplying raw materials for value-added manufacturing [or direct consumption] at the center” (p. 34).
Marshall argues that the drug trade was a primary source of revenue for arms, consumer and luxury goods, as well as salaries during the Lebanese Civil War. The polarization of Lebanese society in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the attendant growth of local militias, and disruptions in Lebanon's drug trade expanded the playing field for participation in the local drug trade (Chapter 4). The collapse of government authority and the formal economy during the civil war, coupled with the 1980s fiscal crisis, consolidated the reliance of select political parties and their militias on drugs-based revenues (Chapter 5). This resulted in some of the largest hashish crops in Lebanese history as well as the emergence of local opium production. Lebanon was estimated to have supplied one-fifth of all heroin entering the United States in 1983 and one-third of all U.S. hashish imports in 1985. Such trade pumped hundreds of millions of U.S. dollars annually into the local economy, sustaining the livelihood of farmers and enriching merchants, the financial sector, and even wholesale urban communities. On the one hand, this produced instances of cooperation as producers, processors, transporters, and exporters of different sects, allied to different parties, and in control of different territories, colluded to facilitate the drug assembly line. On the other hand, it also led to some of the most intense fighting, such as battles over the control of formal ports and the creation of informal ports.
Not all parties to the civil war equally participated in the drug trade. According to Marshall, the key players were the Lebanese Phalange (Kataeb) and the Lebanese Forces (LF). These two militias generated a significant portion of their revenues from the drug trade, and regularly turned up in the Drug Enforcement Agency's (DEA) investigative reports. The author is quick to point out instances of the “primacy of politics over drug enforcement” (p. 86). It was for this reason that U.S. drug enforcement operations against the Kataeb and LF never materialized into significant arrests and seizures. This also explains why U.S. intelligence agencies continued to supply both organizations with financial resources and political cover. Furthermore, the Reagan Administration increasingly involved the DEA in non-drug-related covert operations against groups that were much smaller players in the drug trade but which U.S. policymakers viewed as antagonistic to U.S. interests.
The politicized nature of public allegations against—or underreporting of—various other groups’ involvement in the Lebanese drug trade make up the last two chapters. To this effect, Marshall challenges the claim that the Syrian regime directly sponsored the Lebanese drug trade after its intervention in 1976. Instead, he highlights how Syrian military officers established a “modus vivendi with traffickers” (p. 122) for a host of strategic and economic reasons (Chapter 6). Marshall also demonstrates the multifaceted complicity of Israeli officials in the drug trade, at first by virtue of their geographic proximity and later as a direct result of the 1978 and 1982 Israeli invasions of Lebanon and the subsequent occupation of the south. Marshall dismisses allegations that the Palestine Liberation Organization, its affiliated groups, and Hizbullah are “narco-terrorist organizations” (p. 142). For the author, this was not about morality. Until 1990, none of these organizations had any need for or capacity to engage in the drug trade in a centralized, organized, or consistent manner. In fact, one organization that was much more implicated in the drug trade was the understudied Armenian Tashnaq Party and its various affiliate groups.
The Lebanese Connection is an important contribution to the historiography of Lebanon. Marshall makes excellent use of U.S. government sources that scholars of the Middle East overlook. These include the records of the DEA (including its predecessors, the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, later Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs) and the U.S. Department of State's annual International Narcotics Control Strategy Report. Marshall also provides an important outline of the origins of drug cultivation and trafficking in Lebanon and their subsequent role in the civil war. Scholars interested in a social or cultural history of drug production, trade, and consumption in Lebanon will be disappointed by what is effectively a political narrative that takes for granted the illicit nature of drugs and U.S. drug enforcement efforts. At various intervals the relationship between the drug trade and particular events appear at best circumstantial. A major reason for these limitations is Marshall's neglect of local Lebanese sources—whether newspaper reports, legal codes, memoirs, or oral histories—due to the fact that the author can read Arabic sources “only in translation” (p. 4). Nevertheless, he provides rich foundations to broaden and complicate our understanding of Lebanon's early independence and civil war periods. This work makes it difficult to rigorously study political economy, militia mobilization, and foreign intervention in these periods, without taking “informal sectors” such as that of the drug trade seriously.
