ABSTRACT
A. W. McCoy has shown, in a well known study, that the French move to do away with the opium monopoly beginning in 1946 never had a chance of success. Rather, French intelligence and paramilitary agents took over the opium traffic in order to finance their covert operations during the First Indochina War. While, as seen, the right-wing resistance to the new communist order in Laos emerged prior to proclamation of the People's Republic in 1975, it would be instructive to situate the interventionist phenomenon within the broad ambit of the Reagan Doctrine. Otherwise enunciated during the American President's 1985 State of the Union address, the doctrine locked the US into support for anti-communist insurgencies wherever they occurred. Overall, the US-Laos theatre of the sixties and early seventies remains one of the least studied areas in western scholarship on Indochina.
