Opium

by Martin Booth

  Regardless of these measures, addiction grows unabated, critics of economic reform loud in their condemnation, stating liberalisation has allowed heroin in and quoting a Chinese proverb: if you open the window, sunlight comes in but so do mosquitoes and evil spirits.

  Concerned at the South-east Asian situation, Beijing hosted a conference in May 1995 with representatives from China, Thailand, Burma, Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam, to draw up their first co-operative strategy to curb the drug trade. A three-year action plan was tabled, aimed at reducing drug demand, promoting alternative development for drug-producing regions and strengthening law enforcement. In a post-conference declaration, the six nations agreed the situation required immediate attention and acknowledged no country could solve the problem alone. The plan, expected to cost $10 million, including seeking a 75 per cent aid package from international sources.

  Despite governmental concern, some official factions in China are involved in their own shady dealings: the PLA, for example, have invested tens of millions of dollars in Hong Kong property, some of it proceeds from foreign arms-for-drugs deals, having used the collapsed Bank for Credit and Commerce International (BCCI) for many of their transactions. They now use other Chinese banks with overseas offices or branches in tax havens around the world, such as the Cayman Islands.

  Hong Kong is still a major heroin port, heroin arriving by sea from the Golden Triangle. In March 1994 police, acting on a tip-off, seized 67 kilograms of Double UOGlobe heroin in 96 blocks, wrapped in nylon, waxed paper and plastic and hidden on the sea floor south of Lamma Island: many recent seizures world-wide have been of heavily compressed blocks of powder. In the same year, the Royal Hong Kong Police and Customs and Excise Department discovered a total of 446 kilograms of heroin. Despite maritime smuggling, well over 50 per cent of heroin now comes overland from the Golden Triangle by way of Yunnan and Guangxi provinces and the cities of Guangzhou and Shenzhen. The Hong Kong–Chinese frontier being essentially open, smugglers use the huge daily cross-border traffic of pedestrians, train passengers and vehicles to hide couriers who carry heroin in body belts and baggage from stockpiles maintained in Shenzhen. Rarely, commercial cargo flights are used.

  Double UOGlobe heroin is the most common brand brought into Hong Kong but, just as Hong Kong is famous for its fake watches, computer software and designer clothes, so is it for heroin. Some heroin cutting mills and packing houses, often located in the northern New Territories near the Chinese border, have been importing Double UOGlobe product, adulterating it to 50 per cent purity with rice powder, caffeine, antipyrine or talc, recompressing it in hydraulic presses, repackaging it in fake Double UOGlobe labels and sending it on as the genuine 100 per cent pure article. In 1994, twenty heroin manufacturing or cutting centres in Hong Kong were neutralised with thirty-eight drugs syndicates being closed down. Not only traffickers are involved in opium and heroin: as throughout its history, drugs remain an important commodity in Hong Kong’s free market-place and it has been suggested that several otherwise legitimate Chinese multimillionaires have substantially invested in narcotics.

  Heroin use within Hong Kong has soared since the spring of 1994, purity at street level decreasing from 41.3 per cent in 1993 to 23 per cent in 1994, whilst the street price rose from HK$322 to HK$463 per gram. Over 93 per cent of the addict population consumes heroin, No. 4 heroin the most widely used, with most addicts smoking rather than injecting it: No. 3 smoking heroin is now almost non-existent. Only a very few elderly traditional opium smokers remain: the author was offered a block of fifty-year-old opium with an antique opium pipe in nearby Macau in May 1995, the vendor, a man in his eighties, still referring to it as nga pin. In 1994 there was just one arrest in Hong Kong for keeping an opium divan.

  A major concern in Hong Kong is the growing number of school-age heroin addicts; 15-year-old girls and even 10-year-old boys are coming to the notice of clinics, one 10-year-old telling a social worker ‘I feel happy on heroin.’ This ‘happiness’ may be somewhat dented if, in 1997 when Hong Kong reverts to Chinese sovereignty, the authoritarian measures applied by Beijing are brought to bear.

  Hong Kong street dealers and addicts, perhaps because they have such a long history of opiate use, are most artful in their methods of doing business. Heroin is sold either in plastic packets of between 1 gram and 1 ounce, in either powder or rock form, in 2-gram Po Chai (Chinese traditional medicine) bottles or as single doses in ‘straws’. A ‘straw’ is a 2-centimetre long piece of plastic drinking straw, filled with heroin and heat sealed at each end. It may be carried either under the tongue, in the cheek or in the hand, held between thumb and middle finger. At the approach of a police officer, it can be flicked up to 10 metres away. Few addicts are caught in possession in the street unless they are exceedingly careless.

  Most Golden Triangle heroin is intended for Western markets. Demand in Asia – not including China, which has a huge potential addict population – is not expected to increase significantly. Cultural or economic barriers to drug use exist in some countries, whilst others have reached a peak. In places, heroin is not the preferred drug: for example, in Japan, which has the economic potential to increase heroin use, addicts prefer to use stimulants.

  Chiu Chau syndicates still control the majority of the trade but other groups, such as the Hokkien Chinese, also move Golden Triangle drugs, often through Taiwan where there are also excellent money laundering facilities. The Triads, who continue to hold a near-monopoly over international shipments from South-east Asia and control sizeable wholesale distribution networks in the West, are relocating out of Hong Kong in readiness for the 1997 hand-over of sovereignty. As well as moving to London, the European Union and to the USA, they are building up a presence in Australia and Canada. Organised Chinese gangs exist in Sydney, Toronto, Vancouver, San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York, London, Manchester, Amsterdam, Rome, Paris and in places where a Chinese ethnic presence is not traditional, such as the German cities of Frankfurt, Stuttgart, Munich, Cologne and Berlin.

  In a potentially alarming development, Chinese gangs have moved to Italy, often using Chinese restaurants as fronts for heroin trafficking. In Rome alone, there are over 400 Chinese restaurants, whereas only a handful existed in 1990. The Italian police are worried about how the Triads and the Mafia may co-exist for, although there has so far been some co-operation between them, the police fear gang warfare if the Triads try to rival Mafia drug interests.

  Triad contacts with organised crime syndicates in Australia have existed since the early 1970s when they started importing heroin. By 1994 an evaluation by Australian law enforcement agencies showed 85–90 per cent of heroin entering Australia was owned by Chinese groups associated with organised crime in Hong Kong and China: the same gangs also linked to other groups operating in Vietnam, the Lebanon, Italy, Turkey, Romania and New Zealand. The Chinese are often vital links in the communications network of international organised crime. In Australia, they are allied to motorcycle gangs who are major heroin distributors, thus following a pattern, for Hell’s Angels motorcycle gangs, found in seventeen countries, are frequently related to international crime.

  Wealthy expatriate Chinese (some of them members of, or related by business to, Triad societies) also run world-wide smuggling networks. On the surface they may be involved in hotels, banks, tourism and manufacturing but a percentage of their profits is invested in trawlers and tramp steamers which carry heroin and illegal immigrants to the West and stolen luxury cars into China. In 1992, more than 100,000 Chinese were smuggled into the USA alone and the trade continues to grow.

  Although it is known the Yakuza bankroll bulk shipments of drugs to Western markets, the extent of their involvement in present day international drug trafficking is hard to assess. They are virtually impenetrable and, given their organisational skills and financial prowess, not to say the cover Japanese world trade can afford them, almost impossible to combat.

  The Golden Triangle producers and traffickers do not,
of course, have it all to themselves. There are other players involved.

  Afghanistan is the second largest illicit opium producer and in recent years there has been an increase in the numbers of poppy farmers, refugees returning after the Russian withdrawal growing poppies as a quick and easy cash crop with which to rebuild their country and set themselves up. In some parts of the country the Russians destroyed irrigation systems so poppies have been an ideal crop because they do not need irrigation.

  The year 1994 saw a 38 per cent increase over the 1993 production estimate and a bumper harvest of poppies, most of which are grown in Nangarhar Province and the Helmand Valley where poppies have traditionally been raised and poppy head medicine commonly used for stomach ailments. There are approximately 250,000 opium smokers in Afghanistan, with a swelling number of heroin smokers, but most opium is sold for processing into morphine base or heroin over the Pakistan border, or converted into morphine base locally and transported through the Central Asian republics to Europe. Former Mujaheddin fighters and their one-time Communist enemies are now doing a brisk business together by selling arms – either left behind after the Russian withdrawal from Afghanistan or specifically purchased as military surplus from Russia – for drugs which they then market into the international trade.

  Neighbouring Pakistan is in some ways the Thailand of western Asia for it is a producer, a processor and a transit country. The price it pays is similar to that of Thailand, too: Pakistan has well over 1.5 million heroin addicts at a minimum estimate. A government ban exists on poppy farming and some crop eradication has occurred, but traffickers have no problem persuading smallholding peasant farmers to break the laws when they can earn ten times as much from poppies as they can from fruit, vegetables or tobacco. Most Golden Crescent heroin is refined in Pakistan in the lawless areas of the North-West Frontier Province where central government rule is still usurped by local tribal chieftains. To attempt to combat the problem, the government offers incentives to compliant chieftains but compliance is usually ignored once the incentive is taken: the drug traders can out-bid and out-bribe the authorities and corruption amongst even senior local officials is rife. There has even been reported a heroin factory inside a United Nations managed refugee camp in the Khyber Pass.

  Pakistani drug barons, based in Karachi or Lahore, finance export consignments and act as middlemen for international crime syndicates, their couriers often illiterate Pakistanis who are dispensable. For the courier, who is often ignorant of the penalties he may face, arrest can mean years in a foreign gaol or even the death penalty in certain countries. So brazen are some Pakistani barons, they export heroin or morphine base in loads as large as a ton in weight, shipping through the Suez Canal to Turkey, Turkish-controlled Cyprus and other Mediterranean countries, with some going via Mauritius and Madagascar.

  There is another danger from the heroin trade in Pakistan: the country is on the verge of becoming so powerful as a heroin producer, refiner and trader that it threatens to destabilise an already insecure political and geographical region. For this reason, intense international pressure is being put on Pakistan to stamp out the heroin trade and enforce existing laws, seven or eight Pakistani narco-barons allegedly being secretly extradited to the USA over the winter of 1994—95.

  Even in India, where the opium industry has for many years been well regulated, licit opium is being diverted into the illegal market and illicit opium produced. According to some estimates, up to 30 per cent of the legal product may be ‘disappearing’, caused by corruption amongst lower-paid officials who aid poppy farmers in selling to traffickers. The incentives for the farmer are tempting for he can earn up to forty times more from traffickers than from government buyers. Most of the illegal growing is done in the north-eastern state of Arunachal Pradesh and those bordering Burma, where the opium may be taken over the frontier. In the same area of India, pro-independence guerrillas of the National Socialist Council of Nagaland traffic in heroin along the Burmese border: indeed, it seems as if all the separatist groups in India and Sri Lanka are establishing common trafficking networks to raise finance.

  Although India clamped down on any domestic use of opium forty years ago, there remain a small number of opium addicts in the rural north who are provided with supplies by the government. They do not pose a problem: what does is the increasing rate of heroin manufacture in India. According to suppressed official reports, India has anything between one and five million heroin addicts. The native product is No. 3 heroin made in primitive, mobile laboratories. Some is exported to Bangladesh and Nepal, where addiction rates are rising, but most exportation is handled by Muslim middlemen in Bombay or New Delhi who deal in heroin from Pakistan, Afghanistan and Burma. Drugs not only pass through in transit but are warehoused in enclaves such as the Muslim quarter of Old Delhi where up to 500 kilograms are held at any one time, waiting to be couriered out.

  The last of the Golden Crescent ‘opium states’ is Iran. Reliable information is hard to come by: the official line is Iran is opium-free. Certainly, poppy farming was officially banned in 1980 but it continues close to the frontiers with Pakistan and Afghanistan and, according to American intelligence, in the Kurdish areas on the Turkish border where morphine base and heroin laboratories exist, the revenue aiding the Kurdish separatist movement. Inside Iran, there are thought to be about two million heroin addicts, the worsening economic and social climate and repressive government policies claimed as underlying reasons. Iran, along with Burma, Afghanistan, Syria and Nigeria, was listed in March 1995 as being ‘uncertified’ by the USA. This means these countries are not deemed by the USA to be making serious efforts to tackle narcotics, resulting in USA opposition to all but humanitarian aid intended for them from such international agencies as the World Bank. Some believe certification arbitrary. President Hashemi Rafsanjani of Iran has criticised the certification as politically motivated: certainly, Iran has been attempting to halt opiate traffic from the Golden Crescent.

  Outside the two ‘golden’ opium areas, there are also other countries engaged in opiates. In 1991, it was estimated over 3000 hectares of land in Lebanon were used for poppy cultivation, producing 34 tonnes of opium. Lebanon has been cited as the best example of what has become known as ‘narco-terrorism’, the use of drug trafficking to further the objectives of governments and terrorist organisations. However, from such a definition it is obvious this is not a new phenomena: one is reminded of pre-war Japanese drug involvement in China and CIA use of drugs in South-east Asia, not to mention the Shan states groups who use opium to fund themselves. There have long been connections between international drug traffickers and international terrorists but over the last few decades they have become significantly interdependent.

  Heroin has become a terrorist currency and this is especially true in the purchase of arms. Some governments or terror groups also use drugs to undermine their enemies, which for many has often been the USA, accepting they demoralise a nation and introduce criminal activity to society. Terrorists, seeking to cause chaos and disorder, have seen drugs as a powerful strategic weapon.

  There had traditionally been a drug trade in the Lebanon: it is famous for growing a particularly potent hashish known by dope-heads as Lebanese Gold, which was marketed especially in the Near East. In the 1960s, some of the religious and political factions in Lebanon began to earn large sums of money from hashish. As internecine tension rose in the 1970s, hashish production mushroomed, the drug farmed in the Bekaa Valley. When the Lebanese civil war commenced in 1975, the country’s economy was devastated, drugs becoming its mainstay.

  As the fighting escalated hashish, which was sold comparatively cheaply, failed to earn sufficient foreign currency so, in 1982, Turkish poppy growers were brought in to the Bekaa Valley. Under their guidance, poppies were raised and heroin produced. Weight for weight, opiates were at least ten times more profitable than hashish. The trade expanded until it embraced all the fighting factions, much of the conflict centring on
the control of narcotics – not just the poppy fields but also the roads, ports and airstrips from which drugs could be shipped.

  Heroin (and, to a lesser extent, hashish) also financed troops and armaments. An indication of its relevance to terrorist organisations may be gained from the intelligence that, as early as 1982, it was estimated the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) earned $300 million from the narcotics trade, three times what it was given in political subsidy by friendly Arab regimes.

  In 1975, Syrian forces seized the Bekaa Valley and began to extort money from the drug merchants, corruption in the Syrian occupation forces aiding hashish and poppy cultivation and heroin manufacture from which Syria took a large cut of the profits. Ties were established by highly placed Syrian officials with the Sicilian Mafia who, it is believed, administered some Syrian trafficking operations.

  There were possibly up to 100 mobile heroin laboratories in the Bekaa Valley in 1991, with more sophisticated, permanent facilities existing over the Syrian border. Although, the next year, production was negligible due to poor weather substantially damaging the poppy crop, it was thought by DEA analysts at the time that it could return to normal in 1993. This did not happen. It now appears most poppy crops have been eradicated, the cultivation of poppies limited and local production considerably reduced. With the ending of the civil war, however, the Lebanon has assumed its traditional role as a trafficking hub, with new dealer networks quickly establishing themselves. Imported morphine is refined into heroin whilst Russian operators and Sicilian mafiosi use Lebanese ports to export drugs and launder related earnings. It has also been alleged that several Lebanese parliamentary deputies and government officials are involved in the business.