Opium (48 page)

Developments such as these pose a potential problem for narcotics agencies, for, if they do reduce opium in the Golden Triangle, production may shift to Vietnam or to another, even less approachable country such as North Korea. As long as the Golden Triangle exists, opium and heroin are at least somewhat contained.

Another twist in the story concerns China. When the Communists took over, Mao Zedong wiped out opium and addiction. China was clean for the better part of forty years with only pharmaceutical opium being produced. Now that has changed.

It is estimated illicit poppies are farmed in about sixteen provinces, mainly for domestic consumption but increasingly for export, to such an extent that China is now deemed to be a major producer, perhaps as important as Laos, but its output is unquantifiable. Although the Chinese government refutes it, substantial poppy production is going on and increasing in Yunnan province (the farmers related to the hill tribes of Burma and Laos) whilst, in as diverse an area as Inner Mongolia, the authorities found and destroyed six million poppy plants in 1991. Heroin is readily available in Yunnan and the Beijing government admits it has a problem there: 2.85 tonnes of heroin were seized in Yunnan in 1994. In May 1995, the Chinese government and the UN Drug Control Programme signed an agreement for a $2.9 million project to fight drug trafficking in Yunnan. The three-year plan is to improve the capacity of enforcement authorities by providing specialised training and equipment.

Heroin use is increasing at an alarming rate throughout China. According to the International Narcotics Control Board, Kunming (the capital of Yunnan) has an addict population of around 100,000. Recent economic reforms in China have given peasants money which some have invested in opium, whilst spare cash in the pockets of the young has fuelled the drugs trade, which in turn has caused crime figures to soar. For the infrequently or un-employed – of which China has an estimated 300 million – drugs are a release from boredom. The state's reaction is draconian. Despite pressures to set up American-style heroin clinics, the government regards addiction as a crime and arrested addicts are forced to withdraw alone, in prison cells. The army is used to attack dealers and even their home villages, with not infrequent success. A raid in the summer of 1994 upon one Yunnan village netted a reputed staggering $500 million's worth of No. 4 heroin. Traffickers, producers or retailers are shot after a show trial, frequently at public executions stage-managed in football stadia or market-places: possession of 50 grams of heroin automatically carries the death penalty.

China executed over 100 drug traffickers in 1993, in recognition of international drug reduction day celebrations. Shenzhen, the special economic zone city just over the border from Hong Kong, is currently a base for Chiu Chau heroin, banking and money laundering operations. Here, 40 per cent of criminals are drug addicts. In the spring of 1995, 126 drug syndicates were discovered in the city: 1910 drug addicts were arrested, those not considered criminals being taken for three-month compulsory rehabilitation, chronic cases being further subjected to re-education camps for up to three years. A three-day crackdown in Guangdong province at the end of April 1995 led to the arrest of 1200 dealers, with 400 drug dens being destroyed and about 10,000 addicts being rounded up. A month later, fifty-one traffickers were publicly denounced at a series of rallies and paraded in front of crowds before being shot by firing squad.

Regardless of these measures, addiction grows unabated, critics of economic reform loud in their condemnation, stating liberalisation has allowed heroin in and quoting a Chinese proverb: if you open the window, sunlight comes in but so do mosquitoes and evil spirits.

Concerned at the South-east Asian situation, Beijing hosted a conference in May 1995 with representatives from China, Thailand, Burma, Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam, to draw up their first co-operative strategy to curb the drug trade. A three-year action plan was tabled, aimed at reducing drug demand, promoting alternative development for drug-producing regions and strengthening law enforcement. In a post-conference declaration, the six nations agreed the situation required immediate attention and acknowledged no country could solve the problem alone. The plan, expected to cost $10 million, including seeking a 75 per cent aid package from international sources.

Despite governmental concern, some official factions in China are involved in their own shady dealings: the PLA, for example, have invested tens of millions of dollars in Hong Kong property, some of it proceeds from foreign arms-for-drugs deals, having used the collapsed Bank for Credit and Commerce International (BCCI) for many of their transactions. They now use other Chinese banks with overseas offices or branches in tax havens around the world, such as the Cayman Islands.

Hong Kong is still a major heroin port, heroin arriving by sea from the Golden Triangle. In March 1994 police, acting on a tip-off, seized 67 kilograms of Double UOGlobe heroin in 96 blocks, wrapped in nylon, waxed paper and plastic and hidden on the sea floor south of Lamma Island: many recent seizures world-wide have been of heavily compressed blocks of powder. In the same year, the Royal Hong Kong Police and Customs and Excise Department discovered a total of 446 kilograms of heroin. Despite maritime smuggling, well over 50 per cent of heroin now comes overland from the Golden Triangle by way of Yunnan and Guangxi provinces and the cities of Guangzhou and Shenzhen. The Hong Kong–Chinese frontier being essentially open, smugglers use the huge daily cross-border traffic of pedestrians, train passengers and vehicles to hide couriers who carry heroin in body belts and baggage from stockpiles maintained in Shenzhen. Rarely, commercial cargo flights are used.

Double UOGlobe heroin is the most common brand brought into Hong Kong but, just as Hong Kong is famous for its fake watches, computer software and designer clothes, so is it for heroin. Some heroin cutting mills and packing houses, often located in the northern New Territories near the Chinese border, have been importing Double UOGlobe product, adulterating it to 50 per cent purity with rice powder, caffeine, antipyrine or talc, recompressing it in hydraulic presses, repackaging it in fake Double UOGlobe labels and sending it on as the genuine 100 per cent pure article. In 1994, twenty heroin manufacturing or cutting centres in Hong Kong were neutralised with thirty-eight drugs syndicates being closed down. Not only traffickers are involved in opium and heroin: as throughout its history, drugs remain an important commodity in Hong Kong's free market-place and it has been suggested that several otherwise legitimate Chinese multimillionaires have substantially invested in narcotics.

Heroin use within Hong Kong has soared since the spring of 1994, purity at street level decreasing from 41.3 per cent in 1993 to 23 per cent in 1994, whilst the street price rose from HK$322 to HK$463 per gram. Over 93 per cent of the addict population consumes heroin, No. 4 heroin the most widely used, with most addicts smoking rather than injecting it: No. 3 smoking heroin is now almost non-existent. Only a very few elderly traditional opium smokers remain: the author was offered a block of fifty-year-old opium with an antique opium pipe in nearby Macau in May 1995, the vendor, a man in his eighties, still referring to it as
nga pin.
In 1994 there was just one arrest in Hong Kong for keeping an opium divan.

A major concern in Hong Kong is the growing number of school-age heroin addicts; 15-year-old girls and even 10-year-old boys are coming to the notice of clinics, one 10-year-old telling a social worker ‘I feel happy on heroin.' This ‘happiness' may be somewhat dented if, in 1997 when Hong Kong reverts to Chinese sovereignty, the authoritarian measures applied by Beijing are brought to bear.

Hong Kong street dealers and addicts, perhaps because they have such a long history of opiate use, are most artful in their methods of doing business. Heroin is sold either in plastic packets of between 1 gram and 1 ounce, in either powder or rock form, in 2-gram
Po Chai
(Chinese traditional medicine) bottles or as single doses in ‘straws'. A ‘straw' is a 2-centimetre long piece of plastic drinking straw, filled with heroin and heat sealed at each end. It may be carried either under the tongue, in the cheek or in the hand, held between thumb and middle finger. At the approach of a police officer, it can be flicked up to 10 metres away. Few addicts are caught in possession in the street unless they are exceedingly careless.

Most Golden Triangle heroin is intended for Western markets. Demand in Asia – not including China, which has a huge potential addict population – is not expected to increase significantly. Cultural or economic barriers to drug use exist in some countries, whilst others have reached a peak. In places, heroin is not the preferred drug: for example, in Japan, which has the economic potential to increase heroin use, addicts prefer to use stimulants.

Chiu Chau syndicates still control the majority of the trade but other groups, such as the Hokkien Chinese, also move Golden Triangle drugs, often through Taiwan where there are also excellent money laundering facilities. The Triads, who continue to hold a near-monopoly over international shipments from South-east Asia and control sizeable wholesale distribution networks in the West, are relocating out of Hong Kong in readiness for the 1997 hand-over of sovereignty. As well as moving to London, the European Union and to the USA, they are building up a presence in Australia and Canada. Organised Chinese gangs exist in Sydney, Toronto, Vancouver, San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York, London, Manchester, Amsterdam, Rome, Paris and in places where a Chinese ethnic presence is not traditional, such as the German cities of Frankfurt, Stuttgart, Munich, Cologne and Berlin.

In a potentially alarming development, Chinese gangs have moved to Italy, often using Chinese restaurants as fronts for heroin trafficking. In Rome alone, there are over 400 Chinese restaurants, whereas only a handful existed in 1990. The Italian police are worried about how the Triads and the Mafia may co-exist for, although there has so far been some co-operation between them, the police fear gang warfare if the Triads try to rival Mafia drug interests.

Triad contacts with organised crime syndicates in Australia have existed since the early 1970s when they started importing heroin. By 1994 an evaluation by Australian law enforcement agencies showed 85–90 per cent of heroin entering Australia was owned by Chinese groups associated with organised crime in Hong Kong and China: the same gangs also linked to other groups operating in Vietnam, the Lebanon, Italy, Turkey, Romania and New Zealand. The Chinese are often vital links in the communications network of international organised crime. In Australia, they are allied to motorcycle gangs who are major heroin distributors, thus following a pattern, for Hell's Angels motorcycle gangs, found in seventeen countries, are frequently related to international crime.

Wealthy expatriate Chinese (some of them members of, or related by business to, Triad societies) also run world-wide smuggling networks. On the surface they may be involved in hotels, banks, tourism and manufacturing but a percentage of their profits is invested in trawlers and tramp steamers which carry heroin and illegal immigrants to the West and stolen luxury cars into China. In 1992, more than 100,000 Chinese were smuggled into the USA alone and the trade continues to grow.

Although it is known the Yakuza bankroll bulk shipments of drugs to Western markets, the extent of their involvement in present day international drug trafficking is hard to assess. They are virtually impenetrable and, given their organisational skills and financial prowess, not to say the cover Japanese world trade can afford them, almost impossible to combat.

The Golden Triangle producers and traffickers do not, of course, have it all to themselves. There are other players involved.

Afghanistan is the second largest illicit opium producer and in recent years there has been an increase in the numbers of poppy farmers, refugees returning after the Russian withdrawal growing poppies as a quick and easy cash crop with which to rebuild their country and set themselves up. In some parts of the country the Russians destroyed irrigation systems so poppies have been an ideal crop because they do not need irrigation.

The year 1994 saw a 38 per cent increase over the 1993 production estimate and a bumper harvest of poppies, most of which are grown in Nangarhar Province and the Helmand Valley where poppies have traditionally been raised and poppy head medicine commonly used for stomach ailments. There are approximately 250,000 opium smokers in Afghanistan, with a swelling number of heroin smokers, but most opium is sold for processing into morphine base or heroin over the Pakistan border, or converted into morphine base locally and transported through the Central Asian republics to Europe. Former Mujaheddin fighters and their one-time Communist enemies are now doing a brisk business together by selling arms – either left behind after the Russian withdrawal from Afghanistan or specifically purchased as military surplus from Russia – for drugs which they then market into the international trade.

Neighbouring Pakistan is in some ways the Thailand of western Asia for it is a producer, a processor and a transit country. The price it pays is similar to that of Thailand, too: Pakistan has well over 1.5 million heroin addicts at a minimum estimate. A government ban exists on poppy farming and some crop eradication has occurred, but traffickers have no problem persuading smallholding peasant farmers to break the laws when they can earn ten times as much from poppies as they can from fruit, vegetables or tobacco. Most Golden Crescent heroin is refined in Pakistan in the lawless areas of the North-West Frontier Province where central government rule is still usurped by local tribal chieftains. To attempt to combat the problem, the government offers incentives to compliant chieftains but compliance is usually ignored once the incentive is taken: the drug traders can out-bid and out-bribe the authorities and corruption amongst even senior local officials is rife. There has even been reported a heroin factory inside a United Nations managed refugee camp in the Khyber Pass.