Opium (36 page)

Second, supplies have been purchased from countries where poppy cultivation is officially forbidden but enforcement lacking due to inefficiency, undermanning of police and excise agencies, corruption or a governmental inability to address the general situation. Sometimes illegal poppy crops have been either undiscovered or officially regarded as non-existent and therefore ignored.

The situation has changed little in three-quarters of a century. In the 1920s, it was reckoned for every medicinal ounce of opium sold internationally on the legitimate market, 10 ounces traded illegally on the global black market. A League of Nations publication in 1938 stated, between 1925 and 1930, at least 90 tons of morphine had been manufactured in excess of legitimate requirements and sold illegally: virtually no country was free from illicit opium, the trade increasing pro rata with the political instabilities in the Far East and Europe as the Second World War approached. At the time, most smuggled raw opium came from Iran or China with Turkey providing the clandestine factories for the manufacture of morphine.

Then, as ever, the traffickers' aim was profit at as high a margin over cost as the market (in other words, the addict) could sustain. Two vague categories of trafficking existed: the first was smuggling into countries where opiates were illegal, the second importing into countries where they were legal but controlled and subject to excise. The former were drug runners in the modern sense, the second contraband excise dodgers in the age-old tradition of the buccaneer.

Merely by evading duty, the buccaneer-type smuggler stood to turn a tidy profit. A 1909 smuggling case illustrates the possible profit level involved in even a modest operation. Stewards aboard the North German Lloyd line passenger steamer,
Kronprinzessin Cecilie,
regularly smuggled opium and codeine into New York, where it was subject to an importation levy. With the co-operation of the ship's watchmen and a corrupt customs inspector, they passed the drugs to an American confederate who sold them to pharmaceutical firms. Customs agents caught the ring in February 1909. It was discovered the stewards had purchased codeine in Germany for 440 Deutschmarks a kilogram, about $1 per ounce. The duty evaded was $1 an ounce and the supply was sold at $5 an ounce.

High profit margins have always meant traffickers have been sufficiently well bankrolled to outwit or bribe the authorities. One example out of thousands was to be found in the early 1920s on the railway line running to the Chinese province of Shansi. A locomotive driver on a monthly salary of $40 would be paid $200 for carrying a small packet of morphine. The provincial governor promised a $3 reward for every packet seized: the traffickers paid railway inspectors $6 for every undetected packet. Every so often, the inspectors were permitted to make a worthwhile seizure to bring them credit and give their work viability. The remainder of the time, they carried out superficial checks and confiscated nothing. Almost everyone was a winner – the drivers got their smuggling fees, the inspectors got their bribes (and an occasional reward bonus) and the gubernatorial authorities thought they had the situation under control: the only loser was the addict who had to foot the bill.

Traffickers have not just relied upon something as coarse as corruption to meet their ends. Many have been familiar with the legal systems of their target countries, using these to their advantage, especially in the early years of international control when legal complexities occurred because more than one country was involved in a transaction. What was legal practice in one place was not in another. The Advisory Committee was told in 1927 of three-quarters of a ton of morphine found in the possession of known traffickers who had purchased it through the French office of a Swiss pharmaceutical company which had imported it legally into France, there being no import licence required. Such loopholes were widened further because many governments were lukewarm to the idea of controls and usually set light punishments for trafficking. Other smuggling opportunities arose in the early years through the naming and classification of drugs. The constant invention of new drugs meant smugglers could trade in them before they were listed as controlled. The 1925 Convention controlled morphine and its salts. The smugglers promptly traded in benzoyl-morphine, a derivative but not a salt, yet from which morphine could be recovered.

Smuggling networks have often been very complex and convoluted. From 1906, when opium was made illegal in China, there grew up a substantial smuggling network of both foreign opium into China and Chinese-grown opium out of it. In 1925, Hong Kong customs seized 3.5 tons of allegedly Chinese opium, along with a hoard of documentation outlining the existence and the
modus operandi
of several powerful Chinese smuggling syndicates. The current total consumption of legal Indian opium in Hong Kong was 22.5 tons per annum. The documents showed just one syndicate was smuggling such an amount annually. They were not just dealing in Chinese product: 8.5 tons of raw Persian opium was found in a cave on an island near Hong Kong and a seizure of drugs and documents in Shanghai in 1925 proved the extensive importation of Turkish opium shipped from Constantinople via Vladivostok. At the same time, huge quantities of morphine were being smuggled into China via Manchuria by Japanese traffickers.

Macau was also a smuggling centre. Under an agreement with China in 1913, Macau was permitted to import 260 chests of opium a year for domestic consumption and 240 chests for re-export outside China. However, this was usually smuggled into China, the destination disguised by erroneous way-bills or the opium substituted: one opium consignment bound for Mexico was seized by Chinese authorities but found to consist of molasses. The opium was
en route
for Canton. Such opium was often wrapped or labelled to appear to come from China itself, a trick employed globally to place the blame for trafficking upon the Chinese. A huge haul of 14,000 assorted packages of heroin, morphine and cocaine was made in an hotel on West 40th Street, New York City, in 1922: amongst the narcotics were printing plates for Chinese opium labels.

Before the advent of the airliner, most smuggling was inevitably done by sea. Not only were ships trading internationally but a vessel offered a multitude of hiding-places. On 25 February 1929, 194 pounds of opium were found on SS
Kut Sang
in Hong Kong harbour, the drugs concealed in the hollow base of an anchor davit. The original rivets of the base plate had been replaced by screws with heads resembling rivets. This was no more ingenious than in many other instances, such as the morphine and heroin seized by Chinese customs at Tientsin in 1921 from the Japanese vessel, SS
Awaji Maru,
concealed in blocks of sulphate of soda. Customs records across the world are littered with reported hidey-holes: morphine in canvas sacks suspended down ventilator shafts; opium buried in coal bunkers and coke holds, tucked into blanket lockers or, on SS
Montauk,
hidden in a cavity cut into the aftermast. In 1938, 850 hermetically sealed tins of opium were found by New York customs in a false bottom to a fuel-oil tank on a British ship, SS
Silveryew.
Cargoes provided good camouflage: opium or heroin has appeared, amongst many others, in cargoes of dried shrimps, soap (with opium cakes looking like the bars of soap), in duck egg shells packed alongside real eggs, in Bologna sausage skins, in barrels of cement, in loaves of bread and in tins marked pickled cabbage. False labelling often disguised the true nature of a cargo, with just a few containers holding drugs, the remainder being the genuine article. Passengers also carried drugs, with the ubiquitous false bottomed suitcase being a favourite method.

Where a ship was found to be smuggling, a common penalty was to fine the ship's owners although, on occasion, the captain might be able to convince the authorities of his, the crew and the owners' innocence. The captain of SS
Silveryew
succeeded in allaying a fine, the manager of the Silver Line stating on behalf of the owners:

This is the work of an organised gang who try it on all ships going from the Far East to America … No one knows how they work or get the opium on board. It is a great mystery to me how they could have got that enormous amount of dope aboard without being seen. The only way they can be found out … is when one of their own gang gives them away. I think this happened in the present case.

The Second World War generally made things difficult for international smugglers, with supply regions being cut off. Illicit opiate sales dropped sharply in 1939—40 and only slowly increased during the war years. As the war continued, most smuggling was conducted on a small scale by individual merchant sailors or troops returning home.

In the United States, heroin from Mexico began to arrive, carried by peasant couriers: they were colloquially known as ‘mules', a name which has stuck to drug couriers ever since. Opium, being bulky, was brought across the Rio Grande on rafts to be onward transported in baggage on trains, buses or in private cars. For what is probably the first time in the history of narcotics, it was also flown in by light aircraft.

In the Middle East, military transport was used to shift drugs around the region but so too were camels, which were made to carry opium in smooth-ended metal cylinders they were forced to swallow. A smuggling camel could be discovered by the wounds on its mouth caused by the forced feeding. It was said a camel could hold 7.5 kilograms in its belly for at least a month without discomfort. The habit lasted after the war for in 1952 Egyptian customs officers impounded a camel suspected of smuggling. In time, it became drowsy and was slaughtered. Inside its stomach were found twenty-eight rubber containers of opium of which at least one had leaked, causing the beast's stupefaction. Rubber was used to avoid discovery by a metal detector and the trick was still in use at least to the 1970s for the transport of heroin by camel over the Turko-Syrian border.

The ingenuity of opiate smugglers is renowned. A famous instance of the smugglers' artifice concerned opium from Hong Kong entering North America inside the horns of imported cattle. The beasts had their horns cut off, hollowed out and fitted with an inner screw thread. Packed with opium, the horns were then screwed back on to the animals. All went well until an astute customs agent spied one animal with its horn dangling downwards. Less exotic, hollowed out objects have been favoured for years: heels of boots and shoes, oranges and grapefruit, bars of soap, dolls and toys, plaster busts, fake antiquities, books, picture frames and even lengths of timber and grindstones. Any potential container is considered by the smuggler: bottles of medicine and toothpaste tubes in personal luggage, musical instruments (especially those with hollow sound boxes, like guitars), knobs of brass bedsteads, fountain pens, portable typewriters, shoulder pads, cameras, empty wrist-watch cases, photographic film cases marked
do not open
– the list is almost endless. Refrigerator casings, car panels and chassis members, railway carriage doors, spare tyres on commercial vehicles (and, in recent years, those actually on the road wheels), fuel tanks, barrels of tar, aircraft roof and wing cavities, bicycle frames and fire extinguishers have all been utilised.

On occasion, the smugglers resort not to hiding drugs but actually simply disguising them. Opium has been smuggled shaped like peanuts and inserted into ground-nut shells, made into candles, shaped as vehicle wheel-chocks and carved into
objets d'art.
In 1952, opium was being smuggled from Afghanistan and Pakistan into India inside walnut shells which had been emptied of their kernels, re-sealed and placed amongst ordinary walnuts, the authorities only becoming suspicious because the nuts were sent by parcel post rather than in bulk. Heroin, being an off-white or white powder, lends itself to overt smuggling. A Persian carpet importer smuggled heroin by liberally sprinkling it over suitably coloured carpets, which were then rolled up and shipped: the recipient hoovered them clean. Animal skins, to which white powder often clings as a residue of the preservative process, have also been similarly used. As an extension of the cow-horn scam, another instance concerned a Chinese woman carrying her pet cat and its recent litter of five new-born kittens who was arrested for smuggling opium. The pet cat was clean but the kittens had all been drowned, dried off, eviscerated, stuffed with opium and replaced alongside their mother. Kittens are not the only young creatures to be stuffed with heroin; there is the case of a dead human baby also being used, cradled by its erstwhile mother.

International courier services were, for a while, used by drug smugglers, but today this has largely stopped as companies refuse to accept packages from unknown customers unless these are open and able to be inspected. Ordinary postal services, however, are liable to abuse and have long been used by smugglers. The bulk of ordinary mailed parcels carried internationally makes comprehensive detection virtually impossible, despite modern technological methods to counteract arms smuggling and terrorism. Thousands of kilograms of heroin were smuggled out of Vietnam during the Vietnam War through the US Army Post Office; with half a million troops in the theatre of war, comprehensive parcel examination was impossible. Organised rings were established amongst troops who, in some instances, made vast profits from their trade. A particularly unsavoury side to this business was the smuggling of heroin inside body bags returning corpses home for burial: heroin was also smuggled back to the USA hidden in deep wounds in cadavers.

On numerous occasions, traffickers have used children with whom they have travelled, the latter sometimes carrying the contraband: in some instances, they have even used their own offspring. In 1989, in a case dubbed the ‘Heroin Baby Trial', an Australian couple were sentenced to life imprisonment in Thailand after trying to smuggle 5.53 kilograms of heroin out of the country in a pillow in their year-old infant's pram. The method of using children is based upon the knowledge that law enforcement agencies are reluctant to prosecute children because of their age, the complex laws governing minors, the difficulty of proving intent on the child's part and the fact that many are ignorant of what they are doing.