Asia's Narco-Politics

Hole of Justice
By Peter G. Jimenea

Asia’s Narco-Politics

(The Golden Triangle)

The book Warlords of Crime was written by US investigative journalist Gerald L. Posner with assistance from editors and staffers of Asiaweek, The South China Morning Post, The Far Eastern Economic Review, Bangkok Post and the Asian Reader’s Digest, all with offices in Hong Kong.

It tells about the history of drugs like opium. The most expensive eventual product of this poppy plant is not opium but heroin. As a matter of fact, the US Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) has reported the best heroin in the world is “China White” produced from the Golden Triangle.

The two main sources of heroin are the Golden Triangle in Southeast Asia and the Golden Crescent in the Middle East. But the Golden Crescent which is situated in the provincial boundaries of Afghanistan and Pakistan produces less compared to the Golden Triangle.

The Golden Triangle is found in the mountainous, mist-shrouded boundaries of Burma, Thailand and Laos. Burma alone produces nearly 1,500 tons of raw opium every year. When processed into heroin, it is enough to supply the heroin population of the US for ten years.

Three months after planting, a poppy seed blossom into a narrow stem nearly four feet tall and topped with brilliant large flower petals with colors ranging from neon oranges, shocking pink and deep purples to blood reds. But the most beautiful sight from this plant is in late November.

Thousands of acres in the Golden Triangle are drenched in a solid floral carpet of glorious colors. It is hard to imagine that a plant so beautiful can produce a product that causes misery and heartache. It is from these flowers that destructive consequence of opium flows through Bangkok and Hong Kong on its way to the streets of America.

After the poppies have blossomed into their beautiful flower phase, the petals gradually dropped to the ground and green seed pod about the size and shape of a small egg is left standing. Botanists cannot explain the reason why but the green pod produces a thick white sap called opium.

Once the pod produces the milky sap, the farmers have only few days to harvest the drug.  In the early evening hours the farmer’s entire families go to the field with knives to cut the green pod with shallow incisions overnight.

The white sap that oozes out of the pod becomes thick and hard. Exposed to the air overnight, it turns in a brownish-black color and at sunrise the farmers enter the field again to scrape the dark sap off the pod surface. Each poppy yields a morsel of opium a little larger than a pea.

After wrapping it into a poppy petal, the opium is placed in a wooden box carried on a string around the worker’s neck. Within the next four to six hours the box is filled with foul-smelling muddy sap similar to bitter mold. Each acre produces only two kilos (4.4 pounds) of opium.

While opium was used by physicians for thousands of years, it was not until the early 1800s when the medical science finally extracted pure morphine from pure opium. Considerably more potent than opium, it is injected directly to the vein for past relief of pain. It was later named “wonder drug.”

But In 1874, English researcher C.R. Wright chemically bonded morphine and a common industrial acid to unexpectedly synthesizes a new drug. The Bayer Company of Germany, founders of Bayer Aspirin mass-market the newest “wonder drug” under the trademark Heroin.

By early 1920s the US alone had a quarter million heroin addicts. In New York City, 95 percent of crimes were attributed to addicts. in 1924, Congress realized that the darker lining of Heroin far outweigh the benefits. Yes, the drug was eventually banned, but the damage had been done.

Worse, when Mao Tze Tung and his Red Guards army marched towards the China Capital in 1949, some of Gen. Chiang Kai Shek top army commanders were left behind and fled to the boundary of China and Burma. Out there, they eventually discover gold from poppy flowers and the saga of the Chinese Triads begins.