Opium (46 page)

By 1979, Golden Crescent heroin had taken over the European market. The Corsican syndicates in Marseilles worked alongside the Sicilian Mafia in starting new heroin laboratories in Europe to handle it. Lebanese smugglers supplied the laboratories and trafficking increased between Europe and the USA where much of the resulting heroin was distributed by the American Mafia through a number of outlets including a chain of pizza parlours, known as the Pizza Connection. Inside twelve months, Golden Crescent originating product made up 60 per cent of the American market, pushing the population of addicts up to equal its previous highest point. When the Golden Triangle drought ended, however, that region began to develop its market share again, eventually becoming the major world heroin source once more.

And so, whilst some optimists might have thought the 1970s were the beginning of the end of the opiate scourge, pessimists took a different view. Since 1960, the global drug trade had become more complex and labyrinthine than ever before. There were more players, more sources, more diversity than there had ever been which meant the problem was all the more difficult to address. The pessimists won the argument for the 1980s saw an unprecedented explosion of addiction across the Western world and especially in the USA where drugs had created an extensive, often alluring and sometimes attractive, subculture. The statistics for world heroin production mirror the problem: between 1982 and 1990, it tripled. Clearly, matters were reaching a crisis point.

15

Warlords, Barons and Laundrymen

Not all the world's opium trade is illicit. There is of course a legal market for opium and its alkaloids for pharmaceutical use. Present day licit production varies with projected sales, stocks and the international supply and demand situation. In line with UN Conventions, only enough crops are grown from one season to the next to meet current demand.

The main producer and only country in which the growing of opium poppies for their actual raw opium gum is still legal today is India. The centres for poppy farming are the states of Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and Uttar Pradesh: in all, approximately 13,000 hectares are dedicated to poppies and there are about 100,000 farmers in the licensed opium farming system which is carried out under strict government control. Most processing is carried out at the Government Opium and Alkaloid Factories in Ghazipur, the methods being essentially the same as they were two centuries ago.

Liquid opium is delivered to the factories, weighed, taken into the sunlight and poured into wooden trays, more than 12,000 of which are spread out at any one time under the hot sun during the processing months after the harvest. Each tray is stirred thrice daily to prevent crusting and encourage evaporation which continues until the opium has only a 10 per cent water content when it is formed into cakes on a press, the initials GEO being stamped in them as a quality mark. In this state, as a raw opium gum, it is exported to international pharmaceutical companies for the extraction of morphine or codeine, earning India approximately $15 million annually. An estimated 45 per cent of the world's legitimate morphine requirement comes from Indian opium.

Other countries which grow licit opium poppies produce alkaloids from poppy straw which is less labour intensive and therefore more secure. Tasmania supplies about 40 per cent of world requirement with Turkey, France and Spain also producing alkaloids from poppy straw. The Australian industry was first started during the Second World War, research centring on Janos Kabay's process. A pilot production programme was begun in Tasmania in 1964, the first season of commercial production beginning in 1970. Today, there are on average 600 farmers cultivating about 6000 hectares of poppies annually, the poppies complementing other crops in a rotation cycle. The farmers have developed new sowing techniques and a highly mechanised harvesting process making the Tasmanian industry the most efficient and highest yielding in the world.

Strict controls are maintained. A poppy crop can only be grown by a farmer contracted to one of the two alkaloid manufacturing companies in Tasmania and who must be licensed by the Tasmanian government, the licence being annually renewable and not transferable. Every farmer is security cleared by the police and all fields are regularly inspected before sowing to ensure a minimal security risk. It is even illegal to enter a poppy field.

Where legitimate production is not as highly mechanised, such as in parts of Turkey, poppy farmers leave the pods to desiccate on the stem then harvest them by snapping off each head by hand. These are then sliced horizontally to allow for seed collection for oil extraction or subsequent sowing. Needless to say, this activity is carried out under the supervision of armed guards.

However, the greatest opiate trade today continues to be the illegal one and, during the last thirty years, opiate use has become a global problem, the number of heroin addicts continually increasing, the demand on the street promoting an escalation of poppy growing, heroin manufacture and trafficking, with the political or economic instability of many opium producing countries making effective control measures well nigh impossible.

In May 1995, Giorgio Giacomelli, the Executive Director of the UN International Drug Programme, estimated that there were 40–50 million drug addicts world-wide and that there was an even more worrying distinct trend of addiction spreading from rich to poor nations which are less equipped to tackle the problem.

From the 1930s, illicit world opium production continued to fall steadily, only to rise from around 1970: in 1934, world output stood at 8000 tons, in 1970 it was 1000 tons but by 1993 it was 4200 metric tonnes. Production decreased to 3409 in 1994, due primarily to drought in South-east Asia. The Golden Triangle and Golden Crescent are still the main illicit opium sources although other areas are moving into the trade with higher production targets being expected in the foreseeable future. According to statistics contained in the International Narcotics Control Strategy Report of 1994, Burma produced 2030 tonnes of opium, about 60 per cent of illicit world production, Afghanistan holding 28 per cent of the market at 950 tonnes. Other players were Pakistan with 5 per cent of global output, Laos 2.5 per cent, India 2.4 per cent and Mexico with 2 per cent: output figures for Colombia and Iran, however, are not included and would, if known, greatly alter the statistics. Satellite image-based assessment by the USA of opium poppy fields in Burma put the estimated 1995 harvest at 2500 tonnes. Of course, such figures are to a degree a matter of guesswork, liable to fluctuation from year to year as new areas come into production and growing conditions change.

South-east Asia is, therefore, still the largest illicit producer, a situation unlikely to change in coming years. Furthermore, opium continues to play a part in the traditional way of life throughout the region, as it has done for centuries, being an important medicine as well as a social pastime: up to 400 tonnes of opium are used by hill tribesmen annually although elsewhere heroin is now more common, with drastic results. It is estimated there are over 80,000 heroin addicts in metropolitan Bangkok alone.

Many means of eradication have been tried. Military action has proven unsuccessful. Crop substitution programmes are evaded by the farmers merely shifting their poppy fields. Plants sprayed with herbicide can sometimes be washed clean and fields are camouflaged with other crops which, if effective, not only fool air reconnaissance aircraft but confuse satellite imaging. The arrest of key personnel in the trade is ineffectual because they are soon replaced by others.

Crop eradication can conceal ulterior motives. In 1986, the Burmese government started using a herbicide, a compound of the controversially dangerous Agent Orange defoliant used by the Americans during the Vietnam War. This was sprayed from aircraft, contaminating water supplies and damaging crops other than poppies, and it was done without warning as to the possible side-effects to health caused by the chemical. The government was using it as a weapon against minority tribes as much as the opium trade, destroying the livelihoods and health of peasant farmers in a form of ethnic social cleansing.

The only way to counter poppy growing is through massive social, political and economic change in the Golden Triangle and surrounding states: the chances of this are slim indeed. The American government was so dismayed by the bloody suppression of the pro-democracy movement in Burma in 1988, it suspended aid, including $7 million for an anti-narcotics programme. Since then, Burma presents Washington with a frustrating dilemma. The Americans want to halt Burmese heroin but do not want to associate with the repressive military junta, known as the State Law and Order Restoration Council (SLORC). The junta jails political opponents, forces peasants into unpaid labour and kept the country's most popular political figure, the Nobel Peace Prize-winning writer, Aung San Suu Kyi, under house arrest from 1989 until her release in July 1995. Yet some US foreign policy experts now question how long Burma can be left to its own devices in the light of its heroin trade.

The UN has started a modest programme in Burma to help build roads and provide alternative crops, but the amount of aid needed to get results is not likely to materialise until there is better political rapprochement between SLORC and the international community. In September 1994, SLORC announced an 11-year Master Plan for the Development of Border Areas and National Races but the US State Department has commented that economic development remains ‘largely in the planning stage and there have been no results as yet in the counter-narcotics aspect'.

Burma has over 160,000 hectares of land dedicated to the agriculture of poppies, virtually all of it in the Golden Triangle and much of it under the control of insurgents who buy the harvest for their own heroin factories along the Thai or Chinese borders. The main controllers today are the Wa tribal groups on Burma's border with Yunnan, the ethnic Chinese in the Kokang district of the Shan states and, until very recently, Khun Sa's followers, now referred to as the Mong Tai Army (MTA), a name adopted in 1987, formed by the merger of the SUA and the Tai-Land Revolutionary Army (TRA): Mong Tai Army means the Army of the Tai (or Shan) Land. Such organisations not only manage production but also operate trafficking rings to internationally transport their heroin, even taking an active part in wholesale distribution in the USA. Most, but not all of these rings, are run in collaboration with Chiu Chau Triad groups but some are independent organisations with their own autonomous infrastructure.

In March 1990, the US Attorney-General filed an indictment against Khun Sa for heroin importation into the USA. The indictment accused Khun Sa of being New York City's primary supplier. The filing of the papers was little more than good public relations for, unlike American action against General Noriega in Panama, the capture of Khun Sa would rely upon Burmese government co-operation: Burma has warned it would not tolerate any violation of its sovereignty in an attempt to seize him.

Khun Sa, now in his 60s, has until recently run a mini-state within a state, being regarded by some as a head of government. He established schools and hospitals and built a textile works, a mushroom farm and a gemstone-cutting factory near his base at Ho Mong, thirty kilometres from the Thai border, bringing in street lighting, telephones, hi-fis and electrical goods and beginning a hydro-electric dam project. He did not deny poppies were the main local crop but, in recent years, he preferred to declare he did not produce heroin himself, merely taxing those who did in order to fund the Shan nationalist cause. Other income derived from taxes levied on contraband, jade, precious stones, teak and cattle. Allegedly, personal enrichment was not Khun Sa's aim.

The Mong Tai Army, at its height possibly 20,000 strong and one of Asia's biggest tribal armies, was as well equipped as the Burmese state militia. No doubt aware of the harm opiates can do to an army, Khun Sa dealt mercilessly with addicts in his ranks. A first offence had the offender left in an 18-foot well for 10 days' withdrawal: a second offence was punished with death by a blow to the back of the neck.

A charismatic figure, Khun Sa has over the years invited overseas journalists, even politicians, to Ho Mong where he portrayed himself as a clean-living man who chain-smoked 555 brand cigarettes, had a penchant for a good cognac and declared his only other vice was women. Unlike Big-eared Tu, for example, he has been astute enough not to sample his own wares. He is also a collector of and said to be an authority on rare South-east Asian orchids. At the lunar new year festival in 1993, he performed karaoke songs to his troops, flanked by – it is said – a young woman crooner and a red-lipped transvestite. At a dance later that day his second-in-command, a veteran KMT soldier called General Sao Hpalang, known as General Thunder by the troops, waltzed with the young woman. On the same day, the Shan State Restoration Council declared independence from Burma, electing Khun Sa its president.

Prompted by such declarations, the Burmese government has made some attempt to either militarily crush or politically buy off separatists. In 1989 the Burmese military junta signed peace agreements which effectively allowed some hostile ethnic minorities, particularly the Wa, to trade in narcotics as long as they kept politically inactive and recognised governmental authority. The Burmese provided rice, medical care and money, allowing rebel leaders the freedom to engage in heroin production and trafficking. A main beneficiary of this situation was the warlord, Lo Hsing-han, Khun Sa's long-standing arch-rival for control of the opium trade.

Born in 1934 in Kokang state Lo Hsing-han, with his brother, Lo Hsing-min, was the most powerful opium warlord during the late 1960s and early 1970s especially when Khun Sa was in prison, having also started his opium career in the KKY. Lo's position reduced after the American withdrawal from Vietnam due to his failure to use the boom years of the war to build links with overseas traffickers and extend his distribution network. In the face of this decline, Khun Sa started to become dominant once more. Lo was arrested in Thailand in 1973, extradited to Burma and sentenced to life imprisonment. However, in 1980, his sentence was commuted by Burmese President Ne Win – there were rumours of a substantial pay-off – and he was given troops and arms by the Burmese in the hope he would slow down the expansion of Khun Sa and other groups. With such backing, Lo started to gain power again. Today, as well as his involvement in drugs, he is reported to be substantially investing in several Rangoon hotels.