In the cartel war for Asian heroin, Elvis played his part and assured America that dying for druglords was the patriotic thing to do.
The C_A drug trafficking organization was formed in 1947, and was well into traffficking Asian heroin by the time of Elvis' "reality show" service from 1958-1960.
"From its very inception, the CIA has been embroiled in the murky underworld of drug trafficking.
In the late 1940s, the CIA funneled arms and funds to the Corsican Mafia in return for their assistance in breaking up widespread labour strikes in France that were threatening to establish communist control over the Old Port of Marseille. The Corsican crime syndicate, in turn, used the CIA support to set up the trafficking network known as "The French Connection" which saw heroin smuggled from Turkey to France, and shipped to the US, feeding an American heroin epidemic.
In Burma in 1950, the CIA regrouped the remnants of the defeated Nationalist Chinese Army, or KMT, to start an invasion of Southern China and draw Chinese troops away from the Korean front. Easily beaten back by Mao's forces, the KMT instead turned their attention to occupying Burma, imposing an opium tax on all farmers in the opium-rich Shan highlands. Members of the Burmese military claimed that the KMT opium was flown out to Thailand and Taiwan on the same unmarked C-47s that the CIA had used to supply the group in the first place.
In the 1960s and early 1970s, the CIA recruited the Laotian Hmong tribe to fight communist forces in the region. The CIA encouraged the Hmong to grow opium instead of rice to make them dependent on CIA air drops of food. The agency could then force their compliance by threatening to withdraw the food aid. To make the deal even sweeter, they even located a heroin refinery at CIA headquarters in northern Loas and used Air America, a passenger and cargo airline that was covertly owned and operated by the CIA, to export the Laotian opium and heroin. Much of it ended up in Vietnam, causing an epidemic of heroin addiction in US soldiers."
https://www.corbettreport.com/the-cia-and-the-drug-trade/