The Southeast Asian opium economy
emerged from World War 11 essentially unchanged. The amount of opium harvested
in what would later become the world's largest opium-producing area, Burma and
northern Thailand, had increased very little, if at all. True, Indochina's total
production had grown to sixty tons-a 600 percent increase-but Laos's total, only
thirty tons, was still a long way from its estimated 1968 production of one
hundred to one hundred fifty tons. On balance, the Golden Triangle region of
Burma, Thailand, and Laos was still producing less than eighty tons
annually-insignificant when compared with today's production of one thousand
tons.
While Southeast Asia had not produced enough opium to make itself selfsufficient, the moderate increases in local production, combined with smuggled Yunnanese opium, were sufficient to maintain the seriously addicted and the affluent. Although Southeast Asian consumers faced rising prices-monopoly prices in Indochina for a kilogram increased 500 percent from 1939 to 1943-they experienced nothing comparable to the collective "cold turkey" of American addicts during World War 11. (97) Thus, the core of Southeast Asia's opium consumers emerged from the war intact.
Immediately after the war foreign opium supplies reappeared; Iranian opium was imported legally by the Thai and French opium monopolies, while overland smuggling from China's Yunnan Province flourished. Not only was prewar consumer demand restored, but the addict population grew steadily. Prior to World War 11 in Thailand, for example, there were an estimated 110,000 addicts; there are now 250,000. (98) While there were such promising exceptions in the region as Singapore and Malaysia, whose addict population dropped from an estimated 186,000 before the war to 40,000 today, (99) the number of addicts in Southeast Asia as a whole has increased substantially since the prewar period.
Yet within ten years after the end of World War 11, Southeast Asia was totally cut off from all the foreign opium on which its addicts had depended. By 1955 three governmental decisions created a serious crisis in international opium trade and denied Southeast Asia all its foreign opium. In 1953 the major opiumproducing countries in Europe, the Middle East, and South Asia signed the U.N. Protocol and agreed not to sell opium on the international market for legalized smoking or eating. Although this international accord ended large shipments of Iranian opium to the Thai and French opium monopolies, international smugglers simply took over the Iranian government's role.
A far more serious blow to the Southeast Asian opium economy had come in 1949, when the Chinese People's Liberation Army won the civil war and drove the last remnants of Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalist Army out of Yunnan Province. Yunnan had always been too far from large urban centers along the coast to supply any significant percentage of China's addicts, and almost all of its vast poppy harvest had been smuggled southward into Southeast Asia. When the People's Liberation Army began patrolling the border in the early 1950s to prevent an expected counterattack by CIA-supported Nationalist Chinese troops, most opium caravans were halted. By the mid 1950s People's Republic agriculturalists and party workers had introduced substitute crops, and any possible opium seepage into Southeast Asia ceased. (100)
In a 1970 report entitled The World Opium Situation, the U.S. Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs described the magnitude of China's decision:
The world market for opium has experienced dynamic change-including two major upheavals-from the beginning of the post war period down to the present. In order of importance the landmark events were (I) the shut down of China's vast illicit market with the change of governments there in 1949 and (2) the abolition of cultivation in Iran after 1955 coupled with the rapid suppression of China's illicit production at about the same time. (101)
With the end of China's illicit contribution to Southeast Asia's opium supplies, Iran became the region's major supplier in the early 1950s. In 1953, for example, Iranian opium accounted for 47 percent of all opium seized by Singapore police and customs and a higher percentage in Southeast Asian nations. (102) Most of Iran's illegally diverted opium smuggled eastward to Southeast Asia, but a substantial portion was sent to Lebanon, the Arab states, and Europe. However, in 1950 began to reduce production sharply; exports declined from 246 tons in 1950 to 41 tons in 1954. (103) The final blow came in 1955, when the Iranian government announced the complete abolition of opium growing. After Iran's abolition in 1955 Turkey filled the void in the west, but Southeast Asia was now at a crossroads. (104)
These dramatic events, which had changed the pattern of the international narcotics traffic, were the result of governmental action; and it would take equally bold initiatives on the part of Southeast Asia's governments if mass opium addiction were to survive. Decisions of this magnitude were not within the realm of the petty smugglers and traffickers who had supplied the region's poor addicts with Yunnanese and Shan States opium. Almost without exception it has been governmental bodies -not criminals-whose decisions have made the major changes in the international narcotics trade. It was the French colonial government that expanded Indochina's production during World War 11, the Chinese government that had scaled the border and phased out Yunnan's opium production, and the Iranian government that had decreed that Iran would no longer be Asia's major supplier of illicit opium.
And in the 1950s the Thai, Lao, Vietnamese, and American governments made critical decisions that resulted in the expansion of Southeast Asia's opium production to feed the habits of the region's growing addict population and transform the Golden Triangle into the largest single opium-producing area in the world.