“When the U.S. military launched Operation Golden Flow nearly 45 years ago, no one could have anticipated the impact it would have on the study of addiction, behavior and your brain.
It was 1971 and U.S. Reps. Robert Steele and Morgan Murphy had just returned from an official visit to Vietnam with news that stunned the American public: 15% of the active soldiers were heroin addicts. Given President Richard Nixon’s promises to both end the war in Vietnam and solve the rising domestic crime rate, this news was especially unsettling.
As a result, Operation Golden Flow was born.
It is what it sounds like. American soldiers in Vietnam would not be permitted to board a plane home until they passed a urine drug test. If they failed, the soldiers would be forced to stay in Vietnam, detox and try again. The expectations were low, given the extraordinary addictiveness of heroin.”
Read more at: http://www.cnn.com/2015/12/21/health/vietnam-heroin-disrupting-addiction/
Source: CNN.com – December 21, 2015
