The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia
The Logistics of Heroin
America's heroin addicts are victims of the most profitable criminal enterprise known to man-an enterprise that involves millions of peasant farmers in the mountains of Asia, thousands of corrupt government officials, disciplined criminal syndicates, and agencies of the United States government. America's heroin addicts are the final link in a chain of secret criminal transactions that begin in the opium fields of Asia, pass through clandestine heroin laboratories in Europe and Asia, and enter the United States through a maze of international smuggling routes.
Almost all of the world's illicit opium is grown in a narrow band of mountains that stretches along the southern rim of the great Asian land mass, from Turkey's and Anatolian plateau, through the northern reaches of the Indian subcontinent, all the way to the rugged mountains of northern Laos. Within this 4,500-mile stretch of mountain landscape, peasants and tribesmen of eight different nations harvest some fourteen hundred tons a year of raw opium, which eventually reaches the world's heroin and opium addicts." A small percentage of this fourteen hundred tons is diverted from legitimate pharmaceutical production in Turkey, Iran, and India, but most of it is grown expressly for the international narcotics traffic in South and Southeast Asia. Although Turkey was the major source of American narcotics through the 1960s, the hundred tons of raw opium its licensed peasant farmers diverted from legitimate production never accounted for more than 7 percent of the world's illicit supply. (20) About 24 percent is harvested by poppy farmers in South Asia (Afghanistan, Pakistan, and India). However, most of this is consumed by local opium addicts, and only insignificant quantities find their way to Europe or the United States. (21) It is Southeast Asia that has become the world's most important source of illicit opium. Every year the hill tribe farmers of Southeast Asia's Golden Triangle region-northeastern Burma, northern Thailand, and northern Laos-harvest approximately one thousand tons of raw opium, or about 70 percent of the world's illicit supply. (22)
Despite countless minor variations, all of Asia's poppy farmers use the same basic techniques when they cultivate the opium poppy. The annual crop cycle begins in late summer or early fall as the farmers scatter handfuls of tiny poppy seeds across the surface of their hoed fields. At maturity the greenish-colored poppy plant has one main tubular stem, which stands about three or four feet high, and perhaps half a dozen to a dozen smaller stems. About three months after planting, each stem produces a brightly colored flower; gradually the petals drop to the ground, exposing a green seed pod about the size and shape of a bird's egg. For reasons still unexplained by botanists, the seed pod synthesizes a milky white sap soon after the petals have fallen away. This sap is opium, and the farmers harvest it by cutting a series of shallow parallel incisions across the bulb's surface with a special curved knife. As the white sap seeps out of the incisions and congeals on the bulb's surface, it changes to a brownish-black color. The farmer collects the opium by scraping off the bulb with a flat, dull knife.
Even in this age of jumbo jets and supersonic transports, raw opium still moves from the poppy fields to the morphine refineries on horseback. There are few roads in these underdeveloped mountain regions, and even where there are, smugglers generally prefer to stick to the mountain trails where there are fewer police. Most traffickers prefer to do their morphine refining close to the poppy fields, since compact morphine bricks are much easier to smuggle than bundles of pungent, jellylike opium. Although they are separated by over four thousand miles, criminal "chemists" of the Middle East and Southeast Asia use roughly the same technique to extract pure morphine from opium. The chemist begins the process by heating water in an oil drum over a wood fire until his experienced index finger tells him that the temperature is just right. Next, raw opium is dumped into the drum and stirred with a heavy stick until it dissolves. At the propitious moment the chemist adds ordinary lime fertilizer to the steaming solution, precipitating out organic waste and leaving the morphine suspended in the chalky white water near the surface. While filtering the water through an ordinary piece of flannel cloth to remove any residual waste matter, the chemist pours the solution into another oil drum. As the solution is heated and stirred a second time, concentrated ammonia is added, causing the morphine to solidify and drop to the bottom. Once more the solution is filtered through flannel, leaving chunky white kernels of morphine on the cloth. Once dried and packaged for shipment, the morphine usually weighs about 10 percent of what the raw opium from which it was extracted weighed. (23)
The heroin manufacturing process is a good deal more complicated, and requires the supervision of an expert chemist. Since the end of World War 11, Marseille and Hong Kong have established themselves as the major centers for heroin laboratories. However, their dominance is now being challenged by a new cluster of heroin laboratories located in the wilds of Southeast Asia's Golden Triangle. Most laboratories are staffed by a three-man team consisting of an experienced "master chemist" and two apprentices. In most cases the master chemist is really a "master chef" who has simply memorized the complicated five-part recipe after several years as an assistant. The goal of the five-stage process is to chemically bind morphine molecules with acetic acid and then process the compound to produce a fluffy white powder that can be injected from a syringe,
STAGE ONE. To produce ten kilos of pure heroin (the normal daily output of many labs), the chemist heats ten kilos of morphine and ten kilos of acetic anhydride in an enamel bin or glass flask. After being heated six hours at exactly 185' F., the morphine and acid become chemically bonded, creating an impure form of diacetylmorphine (heroin).
STAGE TWO . To remove impurities from the compound, the solution is treated with water and chloroform until the impurities precipitate out, leaving a somewhat higher grade of diacetylmorphine.
STAGE THREE. The solution is drained off into another container, and sodium carbonate is added until the crude heroin particles begin to solidify and drop to the bottom.
STAGE FOUR. After the heroin particles are filtered out of the sodium carbonate solution under pressure by a small suction pump, they are purified in a solution of alcohol and activated charcoal. The new mixture is heated until the alcohol begins to evaporate, leaving relatively pure granules of heroin at the bottom of the flask.
STAGE FIVE. This final stage produces the fine white powder prized by American addicts, and requires considerable skill on the part of an underworld chemist. The heroin is placed in a large flask and dissolved in alcohol. As ether and hydrochloric acid are added to the solution, tiny white flakes begin to form. After the flakes are filtered out under pressure and dried through a special process, the end result is a white powder, 80 to 99 percent pure, known as "no. 4 heroin." In the hands of a careless chemist the volatile ether gas may ignite and produce a violent explosion that could level the clandestine laboratory.(24)
Once it is packaged in plastic envelopes, heroin is ready for its trip to the United States. An infinite variety of couriers and schemes are used to smugglestewardesses, Filipino diplomats, businessmen, Marseille pimps, and even Playboy playmates. But regardless of the means used to smuggle, almost all of these shipments are financed and organized by one of the American Mafia's twenty-four regional groups, or "families." Although the top bosses of organized crime never even see, much less touch, the heroin, their vast financial resources and their connections with Chinese syndicates in Hong Kong and Corsican gangs in Marseille and Indochina play a key role in the importation of America's heroin supply. The top bosses usually deal in bulk shipments of twenty to a hundred kilos of no. 4 heroin, for which they have to advance up to $27,000 per kilo in cash. After a shipment arrives, the bosses divide it into wholesale lots of one to ten kilos for sale to their underlings in the organized crime families. A lower-ranking mafioso, known as a "kilo connection" in the trade, dilutes the heroin by 50 percent and breaks it into smaller lots, which he turns over to two or three distributors. From there the process of dilution and profitmaking continues downward through another three levels in the distribution network until it finally reaches the stree t.25 By this time the heroin's value has increased tenfold to $225,000 a kilo, and it is so heavily diluted that the average street packet sold to an addict is less than 5 percent pure.
To an average American who witnesses the daily horror of the narcotics traffic at the street level, it must seem inconceivable that his government could be in any way implicated in the international narcotics traffic. The media have tended to reinforce this outlook by depicting the international heroin traffic as a medieval morality play: the traffickers are portrayed as the basest criminals, continually on the run from the minions of law and order; and American diplomats and law enforcement personnel are depicted as modern-day knightserrant staunchly committed to the total, immediate eradication of heroin trafficking. Unfortunately, the characters in this drama cannot be so easily stereotyped. American diplomats and secret agents have been involved in the narcotics traffic at three levels: (1) coincidental complicity by allying with groups actively engaged in the drug traffic; (2) abetting the traffic by covering up for known heroin traffickers and condoning their involvement; (3) and active engagement in the transport of opium and heroin. It is ironic, to say the least, that America's heroin plague is of its own making.