The Opium Eaters

     The term 'opium eater' first came to prominence with an autobiography written by Thomas De Quincy,  'Confessions of an English Opium-Eater' (1821) which recounted his torments and pleasures brought on by his laudanum (opium mixed with alcohol) addiction and its effect on his life (see post: The Author and the Addict). But well before De Quincy's time, opium was already a scourge on societies in the Middle East, the Far East as well as in Europe.

Thomas de Quincy

     There is evidence that opium has been actively collected since prehistoric times. Some postulate that opium may be the 'mythical'  'soma' plant mentioned throughout the Hindu holy book, the Rig Veda. Indian scholars maintain that the verses and the history contained in them have been orally transmitted thousands of years before.
     'Soma 'is Sanskrit for moon, describing both the shape of the opium poppy bulb and its nocturnal juice emission, which in ancient times would have been visible by moonlight only. In Afghanistan, the male name 'Redey', means 'poppy' in Pashto; the same word 'rddhi' in Sanskrit meaning 'magical', 'medicinal plant', 'heart-pleasing'.  Today, the countries of Afghanistan, Pakistan, northern India, and Burma still account for the world's largest supply of opium.

The Opium Poppy - Soma?

     Soma was an important ritual drink for the early Indo-Iranians. The Rig Veda calls the plant the 'God for Gods giving it precedence above Indra and the other Gods.

     Not everyone agrees that 'soma' was indeed the opium poppy. Ephedra sinica (E. sinica)could also have been the original 'soma'. Ephedrine and pseudoephidrine are bot hactive constituents of E. sinica, compounds which are related chemically to amphetimines (see post: The Author and theAddict).

     Evidence of Papaver somniferum (the opium poppy) has been found in archaeological site of Neolithic settlements in Switzerland, Germany, and Spain, including the placement of large numbers of poppy seed capsules at a burial site. (dated to 4200 BC) The first known cultivation of opium poppies, the domestication of the plant, was in Mesopotamia, approximately 3400 BC, by Sumerians who called the plant Hul Gil, the 'joy plant'. Opium was used as a medicine but also, in combination with poison hemlock, to euthanize patients (or prisoners).

Nyx and Hypnos

     In Egypt, opium use was restricted to priests, warriors and magician. In Crete, a statue of the Minoan 'goddess of narcotics shows the figure wearing a crown of three poppies (1300 BC) and, along with the statue, equipment to smoke the drug. In ancient Greece, the gods Hypnos (sleep), Nyx (night), and Thanatos (death) all were adorned with wreaths of poppies around their necks - recognition of bothe the 'favorable' and less 'favorable' effects of opium.

     Arab traders introduced opium to China between 400 and 1200 AD.which perhaps was the start of a long and painful history of addiction in that country. The Persian physician Avicenna (Abu Ali al-Husayn ibn Sina) considered opium as the most powerful of the stupefacients. His book The Canon of Medicine was translated into Latin in 1175 and later into many other languages and remained authoritative into the seventeenth century.

Avicenna

     In Europe, publication of travellers' tales described the non-medicinal use of opium by the peoples of the Middle East. Pierre Belon (1517-1564) wrote 'There is no Turk who would not buy opium with his last penny. They eat opium because they think that they become more daring and have less fear of the dangers of war'. Cristobal Acosta (1515-1592) noted that opium was used throughout the East Indies 'both as medicine and food in a way that a worker looks upon his bread'.

     Opium came to Europe as a medicinal drug but soon was also adapted, as in the Middle East, as a way to see the world through different eyes, a means to deaden the sorrows of life. In the west, one of the most famous of the 'opium eaters' was King George IV of the United Kingdom and Ireland (1762-1830). King George led an extravagent life style with little attention paid to the governance of the British Empire. He died, obese and addicted to opium (laudanum).

King George IV

      

   
     Thomas De Quincy's 'Confessions of an English Opium-Eater' was well-received (at first published anonymously) but criticized for presenting a picture of the opium experience that was too positive and too enticing to readers. Up to that point in history, there has been little systematic study of narcotics and De Quincey's account assumed an authoritative status, dominating the scientific and public views of the effects of opium for several generations.  
     De Quincy's influence spread to the world of writing with one of the characters of the Sherlock Holmes story, The Man with the Twisted Lip (1891), an opium addict who began experimenting with the drug as a student after reading De Quincy's 'Confessions'; to the world of music as inspiration to one of Hector Berloiz's most famous pieces, Symphonie Fantastique which a powerful section that included an 'opium dream'. More generally, De Quincey's 'Confessions' influenced psychology and abnormal psychology as well as attitudes towards dreams and imaginative literature.

Berlioz's Symphonie Fantastique

     Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772 – 1834) was an English poet, literary critic and philosopher best known best known for his poems 'The Rime of the Ancient Mariner' and 'Kubla Khan'. Throughout his life, he suffered from bouts of anxiety and depression (possibly bipolar disorder). As a child, Coleridge suffered from poor health that may have stemmed from a bout of rheumatic fever and other childhood illnesses. He was treated for these concerns with laudanum, resulting in opium addiction.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

     Prosper Mérimée (1803 – 1870) was a French dramatist, historian, archaeologist, and short story writer,  best known for his novella Carmen, which became the basis of Bizet's opera of the same name. When not on his travels, Merimee required sedation to cope with the 'strain of living' and found comfort with drugs. He feared that, without laudanum, he would be 'sterilised by irritable boredom'.

     Beyond these figures of history, there were many more who became 'opium eaters', names unknown to history. Many of these addicts were to be found in the Far East, a result of the Opium Wars (Anglo-Chinese Wars) - the First Opium War from 1839 to 1842 and the Second Opium War from 1856 to 1860 - in which the British empire forced the Chinese Qing Dynasty into accepting import of opium into their country.

Rime of the Ancient Mariner

     One more prominent individual should be mentioned in the history of the English 'opium eaters'. Sir Richard Burton (1821-1890) was a British explorer, soldier, translator, writer, poet, hypnotist, orientalist scholar, fencer, ethnologist, folklorist, linguist, diplomat and long-time smoker of opium smoker. Burton called it ;'hat sweetest of all smokes' and first discovered it while in India, where he translated the Karma Sutra. 

     Burton was an adventurers who went  on a search for the source of the Nile in Africa and while searching always brought along his skilled Indian pipe boy whose sole purpose opium-smoking paraphernalia and prepare his opium pipes for smoking.

Sir Richard Burton

     Anna Seward (1747 – 1809), not an addict herself,  was an English poet, known as the 'Swan of Lichfield'.
Seward said it best in her sonnet: 'To the Poppy'

So stands in the long grass, a love-crazed maid,

Smiling aghast; while stream to every wind
Her garish ribbons, smeared with dust and rain;
But brain-sick visions cheat her tortured mind,
And bring false peace. Thus, lulling grief and pain,
Kind dreams oblivious from thy juice proceed,
Thou flimsy, showy, melancholy weed.

Anna Seward

       *The history of narcotics use: subject of research for the novel Whip the Dogs - Amazon Kindle

A History of Heroin

     Heroin, also known as diamorphine, is an opiate analgesic first synthesized in 1874 by the English chemist  and lecturer on chemistry in St. Mary’s Hospital Medical School, C. R . Alder Wright who cooked morphine with acetic anhydride and obtained  a white crystalline powder. Little used or even examined over the next twenty years, the substance known then as diacetyl morphine proved to be eight times as powerful a pain-killer as morphine.

Chemical Structure of Heroin

     It was Heinrich Dreser (1860 – 1924 ), the chief pharmacologist at the German pharmaceutical company 'Bayer AG who pursued investigation into this new morphine derivative. Dresler was responsible for both the aspirin (ie Bayer Aspirin) in association with colleague, Felix Hoffman and the heroin research projects'. That is, he was instrumental in the development of the most successful legal drug in the world (aspirin) as well as the most successful illegal drug (heroin). Later, he was also a major contributor to the most the widely used modern drug, Codeine.  

     Bayer launched its new analgesic in 1899 under the trade name Aspirin, just one year after it had launched heroin as a cough suppressant. This new cough treatment was called Heroin, a name likely derived from the German word for 'powerful' (heroisch).

Felix Hoffman (with hat) and Heinrich Dreser

     Before it hit the market, Dreser had tested the new product on stickleback fish, frogs, rabbits, on some of Bayer's workers as well as on himself. The workers loved it, some saying it made them feel 'heroic' or 'powerful' (heroisch).

     In November 1898, Dreser presented the drug to the Congress of German Naturalists and Physicians, claiming it was 10 times more effective as a cough medicine than codeine, but had only a tenth of its toxic effects. It was also more effective than morphine as a painkiller. It was safe. It wasn't habit-forming. In short, it was a wonder drug.

Bayer AG

     Tuberculosis and pneumonia were then the leading causes of death, and even routine coughs and colds could be severely incapacitating. Heroin, which both depresses respiration and, as a sedative, gives a restorative night's sleep, seemed a godsend. Heroin filled the desperate need of the time, not for a pain-killer but rather for a remedy for the cough.

     The initial response to its launch was overwhelmingly positive.  Free samples were sent out by the thousand to physicians in Europe and the US. The label on the samples showed a lion and a globe. (There is a notorious brand of Burmese heroin, Double Globe, that uses remarkably similar packaging today.)

Bayer Heroin

     By 1899, Bayer was producing over a ton of heroin a year, and exporting the drug to 23 countries, most of it to the US, where there was already a large population of morphine addicts. Manufacturers of cough syrup were soon lacing their products with Bayer heroin.

     There were heroin pastilles, heroin cough lozenges, heroin tablets, water-soluble heroin salts and a heroin elixir in a glycerine solution. Bayer never advertised heroin to the public but the publicity material it sent to physicians was unambiguous. One flyer described the product: 'Heroin: the Sedative for Coughs . . . order a supply from your jobber'.

     The Boston Medical and Surgical Journal in 1900 wrote: 'It's not hypnotic, and there's no danger of acquiring a habit'.

     By 1902, when heroin sales were accounting for roughly five percent of Bayer's net profits and French and American researchers were reporting cases of 'heroinism' and addiction.

'Double Globe' Heroin

     In 1906, the American Medical Association approved heroin for medical use, though with strong reservations about a 'habit' that was 'readily formed'.

     But with the accumulation of negative reports, the heroin bubble eventually burst. But for Bayer and Dreser, the financial 'hole' was easily filled by their other even more famous product, Aspirin.

     In 1913, Bayer decided to stop making heroin. There had been an explosion of heroin-related admissions at New York and Philadelphia hospitals, and in East Coast cities a substantial population of recreational users was reported. Some of these users supported their habits by collecting and selling scrap metal and came to be known as 'junkies'. Prohibition seemed inevitable and, sure enough, the next year the use of heroin without prescription was outlawed in the US.

Junkies

     In 1924, fifty years after the drug had first been synthesized, the US banned the use and manufacture of heroin altogether, even for medical purposes. Today, in the United Kingdom, the medical use of heroin is still legal and accounts for 95 percent of the world's legal heroin consumption.

     The same year as the US banned the use of heroin, Dreser died of a stroke. Conceivably, he might have been able to avert the stroke by simply taking an aspirin a day (a common recommendation by physicians today). Dreser had been taking one of the products produced by Bayer, however. The pharmacist had spent his twilight years taking a daily dose of the wrong wonder drug, heroin.

     The impact of Aspirin has been enormous, bringing in billions for Bayer even today when aspirin (ASA) is manufactured generically. The impact of heroin is harder to assess. In 1898, there were an estimated 250,000 morphine addicts in the US (twice as high as today, per capita). But the appearance of heroin played a crucial role in cementing the link between drug abuse and crime.

   

Heroin in a Bottle-Bayer

     Pharmacologically, heroin has the same effect as morphine. But you need only about a quarter as much to get the same 'high'. It is also cheaper, quicker and easier to use. As national and international legislation against opiates gathered force after 1914, addicts who wished to continue their habit inevitably switched to heroin. By 1924, 98 percent of New York's drug addicts were thought to be heroin addicts. With legal channels of supply closed, criminal gangs (first Jewish, then Italian ) began to monopolise the trade. By the end of the 1930s, the Mafia was inextricably involved.

   

The Mafia and the Heroin Trade

   


     Today, heroin use in Britain and the US is increasing faster than at any time since the 1960s: heroin seizures rose by 135 percent between 1996 and 1997. There are thought to be between 160,000 and 200,000 heroin addicts in the UK.

     The other great change resulting from Dreser's marketing of a faster-acting and more conveniently consumed opiate has been a change in the profile of the average opiate abuser. In 1898, the typical morphine addict in Britain or the US was a middle-class woman in her forties. Today's typical addict is an 18-year-old male.

    As with any human endeavour, the manufacture of heroin has evolved. Today, heroin comes in various forms.

Pure Heroin

     Pure heroin is a white powder with a bitter taste. The wide hue of color ranges in heroin is due to the impurities left from the manufacturing process or the presence of additives. Heroin is typically sold as a white or brownish powder or as the black sticky substance known on the streets as 'black tar heroin.'

     Although purer heroin is becoming more common, most street heroin is 'cut' with other drugs or with substances such as sugar, starch, powdered milk, or quinine. Street heroin can also be cut with strychnine or other poisons. Because heroin abusers do not know the actual strength of the drug or its true contents, they are risking overdose and possible death with each purchase of the drug.

     Brown (base) heroin is what's known as a 'base' rather than a salt, which means it doesn't dissolve in water very well. It is less pure than white heroin, making it less strong in the same quantities. Brown heroin burns at a lower temperature than white heroin, making it ideal for smoking and is much easier to make than white heroin.

Brown Heroin

     White (pure) heroin is a lot more difficult to manufacture than brown heroin. It requires an extra process that turns it into a salt, making it very pure and water-soluble. However, special chemicals, expertise and equipment are required and the last stage of the process can be very dangerous - it involves the use of ether which can explode and destroy an entire laboratory. Because white heroin is a salt it burns at a much higher temperature than brown heroin, so it is not much good for smoking. White heroin dissolves in very easily in water, making this variety the preferred method among intravenous users.

     Black tar heroin is mainly produced in Mexico. The color may vary from dark brown to black and may be sticky like roofing tar or hard like coal. The color and consistency of black tar heroin result from the crude processing methods used to illicitly manufacture heroin in Mexico.

Black Tar Heroin

     Black tar heroin is most frequently dissolved, diluted, and then injected. Black tar heroin addicts place a small amount of black tar heroin in a spoon. The spoon they use is bent so that it sits level without spilling the heroin when it is placed on a table. Then they add a small amount of water and it is heated over a flame. Once the black tar heroin has melted, it is drawn up into a syringe and injected.
     This method of administration poses special problems because of the transmission of HIV and other diseases that can occur from sharing needles or other injection equipment.  Black tar heroin is cheaper and faster to produce than true heroin producing a 'high'  that  usually lasts from four to six hours.

     The origins of the present international illegal heroin trade can be traced back to laws passed in many countries in the early 1900s that attempted to regulate the production and sale of opium (and its derivatives such as heroin). At first, heroin flowed from countries where it was still legal into countries where it was no longer legal. By the mid-1920s, heroin production had been made illegal in many parts of the world. An illegal trade developed at that time between heroin labs in China (mostly in Shanghai and Tianjin) and other nations.

     Heroin trafficking was virtually eliminated in the U.S. during WWII because of temporary trade disruptions caused by the war. Japan's war with China had cut the normal distribution routes for heroin and the war had generally disrupted the movement of opium. After World War II, organized crime took advantage of the weakness of the postwar Italian government and set up heroin labs in Sicily, along the historic route taken by opium from east to west into Europe and the United States. At about the same time, with the Communist takeover in China in 1949, large-scale international heroin production effectively ended in China further supporting Sicily's role in the heroin trade.

     Although it remained legal in some countries until after World War II, health risks, addiction, and widespread recreational use led most western countries to declare heroin a controlled substance by the latter half of the 20th century.

World Regions of Heroin Production

     In late 1960s and early 1970s, the anti-Communist Chinese Nationalists supported by the C.I.A. settled near China's border with Burma (Myanmar) which led to the development of the Golden Triangle opium production region, which supplied about one-third of heroin consumed in US after 1973 American withdrawal from Vietnam. As of 1999, Burma, the heartland of the Golden Triangle remained the second largest producer of heroin, after Afghanistan.

     By 1980, 60% of all the heroin sold in the U.S. originated in Afghanistan.

     The onset of heroin's effects depends upon the how the drug is taken. Studies have shown that the subjective pleasure of drug use (the reinforcing component of addiction) is proportional to the rate at which the blood level of the drug increases. Intravenous injection is the fastest route of drug administration, causing blood concentrations to rise the most quickly, followed by smoking, suppository (anal or vaginal insertion), snorting, and swallowing.

Intravenous Heroine

     Large doses of heroin can cause fatal respiratory depression, and the drug has been used for suicide or as a murder weapon. The serial killer Dr. Harold Shipman used heroin on his patient/victims, as did Dr. John Bodkin Adams (see post: Death by Physician).

     Respiratory depression (loss of spontaneous breathing) is the most common cause of lethal overdose of heroin. Many in the entertainment industry have fallen victim to this disease of addiction. Heroin overdose, whether by accident or by purposeful suicide or homicide is part of a sad history, sometimes resulting in the 'Last song of the Opium Eaters'.

     *The history of drug addiction: subject of research for the novel Whip the Dogs - Amazon Kindle

The Dawn of the Drug Dealers

     At the time of the Armistice ending the First World war in 1918, 'the supply of drugs for the purposes of abuse was not actually illegal in most countries'. It was the advent of international drug regulations - supervised by the League of Nations (precursor to the United Nations), which created new opportunities to make money. Smugglers exploited the loopholes and the cracks in the systems which tried to restrict or suppress the import of drugs.

     Imperial Britain ruled the opium trade in the 1800s by selling Indian (under British control) produced opium to China in exchange for tea and silk, and fought (and won) the 'Opium Wars', preserving its power to distribute the narcotic into China. As a result, an estimated two million Chinese people became addicted to the drug. It was the drug prohibitionist policies of the USA and Europeans, however, which spurred the eruption of the crime of drug smuggling on a global basis.

     But even before restrictive laws concerning drug transport were established, the trafficking of drugs for profit was a large (and profitable) market, controlled, not by organized crime, but by the pharmaceutical companies which produced the addictive products.

The Opium Wars

     The Swiss pharmaceutical dynasty of Hoffman-La Roche (H-LR) began with the marriage between Fritz Hoffman (the son of a Basle merchant) and Adele La Roche who, together grew their successful business through the sales of their orange-flavoured cough syrup. Growth of the firm hit a wall with the Russian revolution and the loss of the Russian market in 1917  at which point in time the company decided to exploit every opportunity to stay afloat.

     In 1925, the Canton Road smuggling case revealed that Hoffman-La Roche had shipped 180 cases of opium from Constantinople (Istanbul) to China along with 26 boxes of heroin from Basle, Switzerland.

     The League of Nations claimed that H-LR had supplied 760 kilograms of narcotics to a known convicted Polish drug smuggler in 1927 through the free port of Hamburg. The Chinese representatives of the 'Opium Advisory Committee' in 1923, claimed that Germany, Great Britain, Switzerland, Japan and the USA were producing morphine 'by the ton' which was then sold to smugglers.

     A Frenchman, Henri de Montfried settled in Djibouti in 1911, deciding that 'Europeans lived too artificial a life', learned the local dialect, converted to Islam and started his career by running guns into Abyssinia (Ethiopia).

Henri de Montfried

     By 1920, he had started to smuggle hashish, exporting the drug from Djibouti in boxes marked as flour and macaroni. His next step was the purchase of morphine and cocaine, legally and under licence, from the pharmaceutical company Merck.

     Montfried then sold these drugs on to international traffickers. Merck had been established in 1891 as the American subsidiary of the German company now known as Merck KGaA. The US branch was confiscated by the US government during WWI and subsequently established as an independent American company and is currently one of the world's seven largest pharmaceutical companies.

     The Prussian Wars of 1866 and 1870 followed by the First World War (1914-1918) resulted in large numbers of narcotic-addicted soldiers (and nurses) who had been exposed to the drugs following injury as well as through the stress of work.

     American drug laws and drug prohibition forced its way into European laws and treaties. The Opium Conference of Geneva of 1924-1925, greatly influenced by US delegates, attempted to push for the absolute abolition of the importation of non-medicinal use of drugs such as opium.

     Signatories were committed to control the manufacture, sale, and transport of dangerous drugs, the individual governments accepting responsibility for al import and export trade. By 1932, the legal quantity of manufactured morphine in the world fell by nearly 50% and heroin by 66%.

Prussian Wars

      But some European governments were not entirely 'on-board' with the restrictions of the agreement. From 1927 to 1928, the Chemische Fabriek Naarden, a company licensed by the Dutch government, exported 3000 kilograms of heroin, 950 kilograms of morphine and 90 kilograms of cocaine to the Far East.

     In France, the factory of Roesler et Fils, located close to the Swiss border city of Basle supplied 6414 kilograms of heroin and 943 kilograms of morphine to a Polish intermediary who then shipped the drug to India in diplomatic baggage between 1925 and 1930.

   
     The world's cocaine supplied originated from Latin America and the Dutch East Indies. In 1917, a Japanese firm, Hoshi Pharmaceuticals bought 3000 square kilometers of land in Peru, specifically to grow coca plants. But the Japanese plan failed as it became difficult to compete with Dutch exports of coca from colonial Java.

Chemische Fabriek Naarden

     The Nederlandsche Cocainefabriek ( Dutch Cocaine Factory) opened in Amsterdam in 1900, and was soon the world's largest supplier of cocaine. European cocaine producers attempted to create a cartel  1920s (in order to 'stabilize' prices) but the medical use of cocaine was in rapid decline and cocaine production by the large manufacturers, Nederlandsche Cocainefabriek, Hoffman-La Roche, C.F. Boehringer Sohne and Merck soon went 'black market'.

     In February 1926, the Viceroy of India announced the reduction of non-medicinal opium exports, an act which opened the door to the much cheaper, illegal opium from China. Opium poppy cultivation shifted from India to China and Persia then to Serbia, Turkey and Bulgaria.

Nederlandsche Cocainefabriek - Java Plantation

     In 1924, a French company, Comptoir Central des Alcaloides purchased land in Serbia for poppy cultivation. In 1927, a Japanese-financed company in Istanbul was producing 10 kilograms of heroin daily for export. Within a few years, two French companies established factories for heroin production in Istanbul, each factory with an output of 2000 kilograms of heroin every month.

     In Bulgaria between 4 and 8 narcotics factories were in operation by 1933, the heroin production alone  being more than twice that which was legitimate for the entire world.

     In the Japanese colony of Taiwan became a large and legal producer of opium. Hoshi Pharmaceuticals began as  a challenge to the German domination of the morphine business but with he firm's collapse following a smuggling scandal in 1921, heroin and morphine production shifted to ronin (soldiers of fortune) with close contacts in the Japanese military. In 1934, the Japanese invaded Manchuria and brought with them drug traffickers under military protection.

     British colonies in the Far East, before WWI granted the (legal) opium monopoly to local governments. Income from the opium trade became a major source of government revenue. In 1925, Malaysia (the Straits Settlements) obtained 37% of its taxes from opium; Brunei, 21% and North Borneo, 24%. At the same time, as much illegal (mostly from China) as legal opium was being consumed.

Japanese Ronin (Soldier of Fortune)

     As with any attempt at regulation or prohibition, there were people who always tried to circumvent the rules and corrupt officials to help them. In the late 1800s, habitual opium smokers were licensed to buy a fixed amount of drug with 'new' smokers prohibited purchases without a licence. But legal opium, bought from government stores, found its way into the black market and to unregistered users with the knowledge of the local (paid off) police force.

     After the Russian revolution of 1917, Soviet officials as well as exiles set up drug trafficking enterprises in Harbin, central Manchuria. The fall of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1918, led to trafficking opportunities in Vienna where multilingual immigrants and refugees were able to cross cultural lines and spread their product across Europe.

     In 1924, Austria's annual medical requirements for morphine was 60 kilograms but wholesalers took possession of over 210 kilograms, leaving 150 kilograms 'unaccounted for' (used by addicts locally or exported). At the same time, the post war German Weimar Republic, inflationary pressures led to productive capacities too great for local demand in large pharmaceutical firms such as Merck, resulting in the smuggling of the 'excess' product to the rest of Europe and the world. Even soldiers of the occupying forces became traffickers, drawn by the huge profits the drug trade offered.

Flag of the Weimar Republic

     During the 1920s, Swiss producers exported 95% of their morphine and cocaine production in chocolates, toilet preparations, light bulbs and chair upholstery. The premises of Hoffman-La Roche was even sometimes used to package narcotics on-site, the narcotics then smuggled overseas, labeled as 'Carbolic Acid' or 'Sulphide of Soda'.

     In the 1920s, Chile had become a center for the distribution of opium throughout the Americas. Using diplomatic passports, officials passed through customs with immunity and without inspection, bringing into North America and Europe heroin and other narcotics.

     But, by then, at the American end, organized crime had already entered the business. In 1928, the Peruvian consul, Carlos Fernandez Bacula took 150 kilograms of heroin to New York in diplomatic baggage, passing the product on to a man named Wilhelm Kofler. The next day, Kofler's body was found, exsanguinated through slashes in both wrists. The heroin was gone and had fallen into the hands of Jack (Legs) Diamond, a New York mobster.

Jack (Legs) Diamond

     In the Middle East, a narcotics decree in 1925 in Egypt made trafficking as well as possession, criminal offences. Opium poppy cultivators were expelled from the country and the prisons filled with narcotics convictions. The price of narcotics sky-rocketed and heroin use surged.

     Supplies of the drug were traced to a Swiss factory near Zurich where a chemist had designed a compound called 'Dionyl', indistinguishable from heroin but different enough chemically that it could be sold without infringing Swiss narcotics laws. Other organized 'gangs' imported narcotics from Vienna through diplomatic baggage.

     In Asia, around 1900, the Celestial Empire (China) produced over 20 million kilograms of opium each year. In the first 10 years of the 20th century, $40 million worth of opium entered the international port of Shanghai. Merchants formed groups the market their (legal) product, one group known as the Swatow (Chaozhau) Clique which later conspired with local warlords and organized criminals known as the Green Gang (qing-bang) to monopolize the illegal opium trade.

     Four licensed merchant houses (David Sassoon and Co., E.D. Sassoon, S.J. David, Edward Ezra) supplied the opium to the local smoking houses and the Sassoons later formed the Shanghai Opium Merchants Combine which later used their Dahloong Tea Company as a front to continue the trade which involved not just Chinese (semi-legal) opium but also illegal product imported from India. Turkey and Persia. Eventually the Shanghai opium trade grew into the world's largest illicit drug cartel.

     In 1939, the smoking of opium was still a legal practice in British Malaya, Brunei, Formosa (Taiwan) Sarawak, Burma, India, Ceylon, Hong Kong, the Dutch East Indies (Indonesia), French Indochina (Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos), British North Borneo, Thailand, Macao and Iran. During and following the Second World War, with the threat of American forces not coming to their aid from Japanese invasion, opium use and cultivation was halted in these regions.

President Nixon and Operation Intercept

     In 1969, less than seven months after taking office, President Richard Nixon declared a global campaign against drugs and drug traffickers. Under the name Operation Intercept, 2500 miles of US-Mexican border was closed and over a three-week period, nearly half a million individuals were searched.

     This resulted in more marijuana being grown within the US borders. Small, independent Mexican drug suppliers were driven out of business, opening the way for the larger and more sophisticated gangs to take control. Production of Colombian marijuana increased and soon these groups were also bringing in their own local product, cocaine.

Chasing the Dragon

     By the early 1970s, the average age of US army draftees arriving in Vietnam was 19 and military rules prohibited the sale of alcohol to soldiers aged below 21 years.

     Marijuana arrests escalated and when the cannabis supply was cut, soldiers began to use the more easily concealed and compact drug, heroin. Due to the purity of the heroin in South-East Asia, users could obtain an effective  'hit' by smoking the drug in cigarettes or inhaling the heroin ('chasing the dragon').

     The CIA became involved in the heroin trade through their support of anti-communist Chinese Nationalists near the China-Burma border whose income derived largely from the import of opium from Shan province.

Hmong Tribesmen

     The CIA also supported Hmong tribesmen in Laos, battling communists at the North Vietnam frontier. The Hmong's main cash crop was the opium poppy and the CIA helped transport the product to laboratories in the 'Golden Triangle' (the converging borders of Laos, Burma and Thailand). The heroin produced from these poppies found its way into South Vietnam and to American servicemen.

     President Nixon's Operation Intercept, put into effect in 1969, resulted in many traffickers of (the relatively innocuous) marijuana focusing on cocaine (easier to transport, easier to hide and much more profitable).

The 'Golden Triangle'

     In 1973, the  democratically elected president of Chile, Salvador Allende (see post: Death by Physician) was overthrown with the help of the CIA and power of government seized by General Augusto Pinochet.

     Pinochet immediately handed over several drug traffickers to the US government, resulting in Chile losing its predominance as the leading South American source of illegal drugs. Within a short time, Colombian organized crime group were in command of the business and had taken over cocaine production in Peru and Bolivia and cocaine refining in Chile.

General Augusto Pinochet.

     The Colombian drug cartels used couriers on commercial flight with drugs hidden within their luggage to bring the product into the US. By the early 1980s, cocaine had surpassed coffee as the primary earner of foreign exchange for Colombia.

     Since the 1970's, Colombia has been home to some of the most sophisticated drug trafficking organizations in the world.  Colombian traffickers today have enough capital under their control to build sophisticated smuggling equipment, such as a high tech submarine that was recently discovered by the Colombian National Police.

     The largest center of cocaine business was the city of Medellin, capital of Antioquia province, Colombia.    

     Huge profits (so much greater for smuggling cocaine than marijuana) attracted a mix of characters into the business.

     Fabio Ochoa Vasquez was a smuggler of alcohol and electrical equipment until 1978 when he was convinced by a man named Pablo Escobar to apply his smuggling skills to the drug business.

Colombian Smuggler Submarine

      Jose Gonzalo Rodriguez Gacha had roots in Colombia's murky emerald trade. The Ochoa brothers were from a well-respected ranching and horse-breeding family and Pablo Escobar began his criminal career stealing cars and stealing headstones from graveyards then re-selling them in other villages of Antioquia as well as to smugglers from Panama. But it was Pablo, the common street thief  who was the mastermind of the criminal enterprise that became known as the Medellin cartel.

Medellin, Colombia

     These men from Medellin joined together with a young marijuana smuggler named Carlos Lehder, who convinced the leaders that they could fly cocaine in small airplanes directly into the United States, avoiding the need for countless suitcase trips.

     The large quantities and the growing appetite for cocaine in the United States led to huge profits, which the cartel began re-investing into more sophisticated labs, better airplanes and even an island in the Caribbean where the planes could refuel. By the end of 1981, the team had smuggled more than 19 tons of cocaine into the US.

Pablo Escobar

     Pablo Escobar was an extremely violent man and, in his quest for power, bribery, threat and murder led to a stand-off between the cartel and the government. During the 1980's, the cartel revolted against the government's threats to extradite the traffickers to the United States.

     In 1989, the Medellin cartel assassinated a presidential candidate and the Colombian government became more 'focused'. Rodriguez Gacha was gunned down by the Colombian police. Fabio Ochoa turned himself in to the Colombian government in the early 1990s in exchange for lenient prison terms.

     Pablo Escobar was hunted down and killed by the Colombian police after a long series of battles.

The Death of Pablo Escobar

     

     The Cali cartel was Medellin's true rival and was probably responsible for much if not most of the information about Escobar and his group that fell into the hands of the Colombian government.

   
     The Rodriguez Orejuela brothers and Santacruz Londono were the founders of the Cali cartel and they focused their work on the New York City market, preferring bribery to murder as their first line of persuasion.

     The Cali leaders were astute businessmen and invested heavily in political protection. Both a former president of Colombia, Ernesto Samper and hundreds of Congressmen and Senators have been accused of accepting campaign financing from the Rodriguez Orejuela brothers. When cocaine use in the United States began to drop, the Cali group began shipping more and more into Europe and Asia. The leaders are thought to own huge swaths of land in Colombia, along with dozens of very successful legitimate businesses.

     The leaders were finally arrested in the mid-1990s and sentenced to 10 to 15 year prison terms. Many believe they actually worked out an arrangement with the Colombian government under similar terms to the Ochoas, that they would not be extradited to a US prison cell. Agents of the US Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) believe they are still running their empire from their prison cells.

     Since the take-down of the Cali and Medellin cartels, the cocaine business has fragmented. Smaller groups smuggle drugs from Colombia to Mexico. Another group controls the jungle labs. Other organizations deal with transportation of coca base from the fields to the labs.

     Colombian Marxist guerillas (FARC) protect the fields and the labs in remote zones of Colombia in exchange for a large tax that the traffickers pay to the organization. Information provided by the DEA and the Colombian National police suggest that there are more than 300 active drug smuggling organizations in Colombia today. Cocaine is shipped to every industrialized nation in the world and profits remain incredibly high.

FARC Controlled Areas (red) of Colombia (1998-2005)

       
     The Juárez Cartel is another well-organized enterprise, a Mexican drug cartel based in Ciudad Juarez, Chihuahua, across the border from El Paso, Texas. The Juarez group has been violent and ruthless, known to decapitate their rivals, mutilate their corpses and dump them in public places.

     The Sinaloa Cartel is another Mexican drug gang, considered by some to be 'the most powerful drug trafficking organization in the world' and 'Mexico's most powerful organized crime group'. The Sinaloa Cartel is based in the city of Culiacan, Sinaloa, operating in the Mexican states of Baja California, Sonora, Durango and Chihuahua.

     The Sinaloa Cartel is associated with the label 'Mexico's Golden Triangle', which refers to the states of Sinaloa, Chihuahua and Durango, this region being a major producer of Mexican opium and marijuana.

     In 2010, over one thousand U.S. cities reported the presence of at least one of four Mexican cartels. In July, 2012, a video was found which showed members of the Mexican Gulf Cartel using machetes to behead five men from the rival Zetas Gang. This was apparently in revenge for what had occurred one month before when a Zetas Gang member dumped 49 mutilated bodies in a northern Mexico town square.

     The drug trade through Mexico is worth an estimated $13-billion annually. In the past 5-6 years, authorities have seized more than $10.9-billion worth of drugs. Despite multiple arrests, there have been more than 55,000 drug-related killings and more than 6,000 disappearances since President Felipe Calderon’s six-year offensive against the cartels began in 2006. A recent report by the U.S. Department of Justice says drug demand is increasing and Mexican cartels are positioned to meet the rise and keep the drugs flowing across the U.S. border.

     Mexican labs supply 70% of all the methamphetamine consumed in the US. Mexican cartels grow marijuana in large open plantations in Mexico but also as far north as Oregon and Washington State. Cocaine, the most lucrative of illegal drugs brings in more than $88 billion each year on the street. Two-thirds of all Andean cocaine which is transported from South America to the US passes through the hands of the Mexican cartels, meaning that the largest smuggling organisations, once based in Colombia, are now centered in Mexico.

The Mexican Drug Routes

      It seems that despite all the effort, laws and drug enforcement officers throughout the world, the disease of drug abuse simply keeps on growing. According to a report from 1997, one full year's heroin supply for all users in the USA can be manufactured from poppies grown on 20 square miles (less than 5200 hectares or 12,800 acres) of farmland. One year's supply of cocaine for all entire US can be carried in 13 truck trailers.

In 1998, in Colombia alone, there were 101,500 hectares of coca and 6000 hectares of opium poppies under cultivation.

     In 1995, the cost of producing one ounce of pure powder cocaine was about $9 US. Once this ounce had been packaged (and adulterated), it was worth over $2000 US in East Harlem -  a difficult-to-resist incentive to work in the illicit drug trade.

     In 1929, the Egyptian Central Narcotics Intelligence Bureau was created, in part as a response to an epidemic of  malaria caused by needle-sharing among drug addicts. In 1934, three heroin users in New York City were infected with malaria through needle-sharing.

Mexico's Golden Triangle

     Hepatitis C was documented as being transmitted through needle-sharing as early as 1968. Transmission of the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) due to needle-sharing became evident in the 1980s. In the US, drug users being treated for HIV infection rose from 3% in 1981 to 17% in 1984. Even the threat of disease is not effective in diminishing or discouraging illicit drug use.

     History shows that, in the beginning, drug trafficking was carried out by big business, mostly in Europe, some in Asia - Hoffman-La Roche, Hoshi Pharmaceuticals and others - along with hundreds of smaller players and independent 'businessmen' along with the aid of military, police forces and politicians.

Plasmodium (Malaria) Parasite

     Today, the drug trade is still big business (such as the Medellin and Juarez cartels), along with smaller players, aided by corrupt police and military forces and politicians. The only aspect that has changed, perhaps, is that the 'big business' is not a recognized legal enterprise (such as Hoffman-La Roche in the early 20th century) and the base of these businesses is not in Europe but rather in places like South America and Mexico.

      Times may change but the workings of the world never really do.

   
     *The history of drug addiction: subject of research for the novel Whip the Dogs - Amazon Kindle