The twin vices of drug addiction and alcoholism were rampant in the U.S. military during the Vietnam war and through movies like Apocalypse Now and Platoon became the emblematic image of the armed forces during that war. But figures shows that by the end 2005, of the 104,000 who had sought medical help after serving in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, 32,010 were suffering from posttraumatic stress disorder, depression, drug addiction or alcoholism. Proportionally, that’s three times as many as those who returned from Vietnam.
There hasn’t been the same media coverage of the problem in the ‘war on terror’, but in Iraq and Afghanistan the situation, according to many, is equally dire, some say worse. Alcohol and drug-related charges were involved in a third of all Army criminal prosecutions of soldiers in the two countries in 2006. 240 of the 655 cases resulted in convictions, and alcohol-related crimes have increased each year since 2004.
A Pentagon health study found that the rate of binge drinking in the Army shot up by 30 percent from 2002 to 2005, and, they concluded, that ‘may signal an increasing pattern of heavy alcohol use in the Army’. On top of this, for the first time since 1985, more than a quarter of all Army members asked said they regularly drink heavily, which is defined as five or more drinks at one time.
3,057 veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars were diagnosed with potential drug dependency from 2005 to 2007, according the Veteran Health Authority. From 2002 through 2004 only 277 veterans were diagnosed with a drug dependency.
‘It’s very serious’, Lynn Pahland, a director in the Pentagon’s Health Affairs office, told the New York Times. “It’s a huge concern”.
But despite this surge in drug and alcohol use, spending on programs in the military to reduce alcohol abuse, smoking and obesity dropped from 12.6 million in 2005 to $7.74 million in 2006. A 39 percent decline.
One of the biggest problems remains the same as in ‘Nam: easy access. In Iraq it is also easy to get your hands on what the troops call ‘haji juice’ or ‘haji hooch’ which is local made 90 percent proof whiskey. These are often combined with amphetamines that are provided by medical staff to keep troops alert on missions.
In Afghanistan, many soldiers are getting hooked on heroin even as the Bush administration gives lip service to combating the poppy harvests. The Veterans Authority is the world’s largest provider of substance abuse services, looking after 350,000 veterans per year, and of those 30,000 are being treated for opiate addiction.
This drug addiction and alcoholism is not just a tragedy for the individuals involved, but for the local populations who have been the target of drunk and high soldiers committing atrocities. The Haditha massacre in March 2006, which saw a group of soldiers from 101st Airborne Division rape a 14-year-old girl and kill her and her family, took place after the group had drunk several cans of locally made whiskey.
The prevalence of drugs and drink can end tragically for other the addict’s colleagues too. In late 2004, Specialist Chris Rola, of the Third Infantry Division, after drinking a stash of whiskey and gin, pulled his pistol on another soldier and killed him. And things often get worse when they get back to the U.S. “Lots of soldiers coming back from Iraq have been using drugs,” Specialist William Swenson, who was deployed to Iraq, told ABC News. “Right when we got back there were people using cocaine in the barracks, there were people smoking marijuana at strip clubs; one guy started shooting up.”
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