4. Cold War Opium Boom

It is March or April, the end of the dry season, in Southeast Asia's Golden Triangle. From the Kachin hills and Shan plateau of Burma to the mountains of northern Thailand and northern Laos, the ground is parched and the rains are only weeks away. In every hill tribe village-whether it be Meo, Yao, Lahu, Lisu, Wa, or Kachin-it is time to clear the fields for planting. On one of these hot, dusty mornings men, women, and children gather at the bottom of a wide hillside near the village, where for weeks the men have been chopping and slashing at the forest growth with single-bitted axes The felled trees are tinderbox dry,

Suddenly, the young men of the village race down the hill, igniting the timber with torches. Behind them, whirlwinds of flame shoot four hundred feet into the sky. Within the hour a billowing cloud of smoke rises two miles above the field. When the fires die down, the fields are covered with a nourishing layer of wood ash and the soil's moisture is sealed beneath the ground's fire-hardened surface. But before the planting can begin, these farmers must decide what crop they are going to plant-rice or poppies?

Although their agricultural techniques harken back to the Stone Age, these mountain farmers are very much a part of the modern world. And like farmers everywhere their basic economic decisions are controlled by larger forces-by the international market for commodities and the prices of manufactured goods. In their case the high cost of transportation to and from their remote mountain villages rules out most cash crops and leaves only two choices--opium or rice. The safe decision has always been to plant rice, since it can always be eaten if the market fails. A farmer can cultivate a small patch of poppy on the side, but he will not commit his full time to opium production unless he is sure that there is a market for his crop.

A reliable market for their opium had developed in the early 1950s, when several major changes in the international opium trade slowed, and then halted, the imports of Chinese and Iranian opium that had supplied Southeast Asia's addicts for almost a hundred years. Then the Thai police, the Chinese Nationalist Army and French and American intelligence agencies allowed the mass narcotics addiction fostered by European colonialism to survive-and even thrive-in the 1950s by deliberately or inadvertently promoting local poppy cultivation in the Golden Triangle.

As a result of the activities of these various military and intelligence agencies, Southeast Asia was completely self-sufficient in opium and had almost attained its present level of production by the end of the decade. Recent research by the U.S. Bureau of Narcotics has shown that by the late 1950s Southeast Asia's Golden Triangle region was producing approximately seven hundred tons of raw opium, or about 50 percent of the world's total illicit production. (1)

The Meo of Indochina had long been the subject of pressures for large-scale poppy cultivation. During World War 11 the French colonial government was cut off from international supplies, and had, as has already been mentioned, imposed an opium tax to force the Meo of Laos and Tonkin to expand their opium production to meet wartime needs. But in 1948 the French government responded to international pressure by mounting a five-year campaign to abolish opium smoking in Indochina. However, French intelligence agencies, short of funds to finance their clandestine operations against the Communist Viet Minh, quickly and secretly took over the narcotics traffic.

In the Burma-Thailand area, during the early 1950s the CIA tried to use remnants of the defeated Chinese Nationalist Army (Kuomintang, or KMT) in an attempt to seal the Burma-China borderlands against a feared Chinese invasion of Southeast Asia. Nationalist troops turned out to be better opium traders than guerrillas, and used their American-supplied arms to force the Burmese hill tribes to expand production. They shipped the bumper harvests to northern Thailand, where they were sold to the Thai police force, which, coincidentally, was another CIA client. Under the direction of their commander, General Phao, the police used CIA-supplied equipment to transport the opium to Bangkok for export to the new markets of Malaysia, Indonesia, and Hong Kong. In 1954 a British customs officer in Singapore stated that Bangkok had become the opium capital of Asia and was distributing 30 percent of the region's opium. There was so much Burmese and Thai opium on the illicit market that it was selling for 25 percent less than Iranian opium and 40 percent less than the famous Indian brands. (2)