University of Virginia Library

Asian Drug Traffic

Viet War Increases Opium Trade

"Mr. President, the specter of heroin
addiction is haunting nearly every
community in this nation."

With these urgent words, Senator
Vance Hartke spoke up on March 2 in
support of a resolution on drug control
being considered in the U.S. Senate.
Estimating that there are 500,000 heroin
addicts in the U.S., he pointed out that
nearly 20 per cent of them are teenagers.

The concern of Sen. Hartke and others
is not misplaced. Heroin has become the
major killer of young people between 18
and 35, outpacing death from accidents,
suicides or cancer. It has also become a major
cause of crime: to sustain their habits, addicts
in the U.S. spend more than $15 million a day,
half of it coming from the 55 per cent of crime
in the cities which they commit and the annual
$2.5 billion worth of goods they steal.

Heroin In Suburbia

Once safely isolated as part of the
destructive funkiness of the black ghetto,
heroin has suddenly spread out into Middle
America, becoming as much a part of suburbia
as the Saturday barbecue.

This has gained it the attention it otherwise
never would have had. President Nixon himself
says it is spreading with "pandemic virulence."
People are becoming aware that teenagers are
shooting up at lunchtime in schools and
returning to classrooms to nod the day away.

But what they don't know — and what no
one is telling them — is that neither the volcanic
eruption of addiction in this country nor the
crimes it causes would be possible without the
age-old international trade in opium (from
which heroin is derived), or that heroin
addiction like inflation, unemployment, and
most of the other chaotic forces in American
society today — is directly related to the U.S.
war in Indochina.

The connection between war and opium in
Asia is as old as empire itself. But the
relationship has never been so symbiotic, so
intricate in its networks and so vast in its
implication.

Never before has the trail of tragedy been so
clearly marked as in the present phase of U.S.
involvement in Southeast Asia. For the
international traffic in opium has expanded in
lockstep with the expanding U.S. military
presence there, just as heroin has stalked the
same young people in U.S. high schools who
will also be called on to fight that war.

Clandestine Activities

The ironies that have accompanied the war
in Vietnam since its onset are more poignant
than before. At the very moment that public
officials are wringing their hands over the
heroin problem, Washington's own Cold War
crusade, replete with clandestine activities that
would seem far-fetched even in a spy novel,
continues to play a major role in a process that
has already rerouted the opium traffic from the
Middle East to Southeast Asia and is every day
opening new channels for its shipment to the
U.S.

At the same time the government starts
crash programs to rehabilitate drug users among
its young people, the young soldiers it is
sending to Vietnam are getting hooked and
dying of overdoses at the rate of one a day.

While the President is declaring war on
narcotics and on crime in the streets, he is
widening the war in Laos, whose principal
product is opium and which has now become
the funnel for nearly half the world's supply of
the narcotic, for which the U.S. is the chief
consumer.

There would have been a bloodthirsty logic
behind the expansion of the war into Laos if
the thrust had been to seize supply enters of
opium the communists were hoarding up to
spread like a deadly virus into the free world.

But the communists did not control the
opium there: processing and distribution were
already in the hands of the free world.

Who are the principals of this new opium
war?

The ubiquitous CIA, whose role in getting
the U.S. into Vietnam is well known but whose
pivotal position in the opium trade is not; and a
rogue's gallery of organizations and people —
from an opium army subsidized by the
Nationalist Chinese to such familiar names as
Madame Nhu and Vice President Nguyen Cao
Ky — who are the creations of U.S. policy in
that part of the world.

Strange Story

The story of opium in Southeast Asia is a
strange one at every turn. But the conclusion is
known in advance: this war has come home
again — in a silky grey powder that goes from a
syringe into America's mainline.

Most of the opium in Southeast Asia is
grown in a region known as the "Fertile
Triangle," an area covering northwestern
Burma, northern Thailand, and Laos. It is a
mountainous jungle inhabited by tigers,
elephants, and some of the most poisonous
snakes in the world.

The source of the opium that shares the area
with these exotic animals is the poppy, and
the main growers are the Meo hill tribespeople
who inhabit the region. The Meo men chop
back the forests in the wet season so that the
crop can be planted in August and September.

Poppies produce red, white or purple
blossoms between January and March, and
when the blossom withers, an egg-sized pod is
left. The women harvest the crop and make a
small incision in the pod with a three bladed
knife.

The pod exudes a white latex-like substance
which is left to accumulate and thicken for a
day or two. Then it is carefully gathered, boiled
to remove gross impurities, and the sticky
substance is rolled into balls weighing several
pounds.

A fraction of the opium remains to be
smoked by the villagers, but most is sold in
nearby rendezvous with the local smugglers. It
is the Meos' only cash crop. The hill tribe
growers can collect as much as $50 per kilo,
paid in gold, silver, various commodities, or
local currency. The same kilo will bring $200 in
Saigon and $2000 in San Francisco.

There are hundreds of routes, and certainly
as many methods of transport by which the
smugglers ship opium — some of its already
refined into heroin — through and out of
Southeast Asia. But there are three major
networks.

Some of the opium from Burma and
northern Thailand moves into Bangkok, then to
Singapore and Hong Kong, then via military
aircraft, either directly or through Taiwan, to
the United States.