Vietnam 1971

The Misuse of Drugs Act 1971 was pivotal in defining attitudes to drug users in the UK for the next twenty nine years and beyond into the New Millennium. For the many of the people who had lived through the hedonism and optimism of the 1960s the MDA was the final nail in the coffin as recreational drug users became criminals overnight.
In South East Asia the war in Vietnam was changing under the US presidency of Nixon who wanted to see soldiers returning to America and the effective handing over of the war to the Southern Vietnamese to continue alone.
Throughout the 1950s and 1960s the CIA had been at odds with the Federal Bureau of Narcotics under Anslinger and then Giordano. Whilst the CIA were championing a policy of anything goes in the interest of national security (including the running of heroin as a means of infiltrating the Communists and Mafia), the FBN found themselves investigating the very people whose side they were supposed to be on.
In the paradoxical world of the early 1970s, where boundaries were becoming increasingly blurred, soldiers engaged in the disastrous conflict in Vietnam found themselves caught in the maelstrom of a government desperate to draw a line under the war it was losing and a people back home that were more concerned with the ideals of the 1960s. For many, heroin offered a way out and a means by which to bury the horrors of war.
The photo of soldiers lining up for a heroin test reveals the extent to which the use of the drug was prevalent throughout the conflict. Readily available in South East Asia, largely as a result of British opium export to China during the 19th Century, heroin use was a concern for the American administration seeking to curtail it's use back home.