Milk of Paradise

by Lucy Inglis

  The most terrifying of their operations was based at the notorious Auschwitz camp in southern Poland. The Auschwitz III Camp, known as Monowitz, was a satellite labour camp of the IG Farben factory, a gigantic gasoline and rubber factory. Compulsory medical testing of new drugs by IG Farben doctors was designed to see if different races responded in different ways; some drugs were therapeutic, and some were biological weapons. At Auschwitz, where Dr Joseph Mengele subjected 1,500 sets of twins to genetic experiments, the project was on a terrifying scale, as was the complicity of IG Farben employees. Dr Fritz ter Meer in particular, who helped design the Monowitz camp, was involved in the testing. Outside testing was performed by other companies in the IG Farben fold, such as Bayer Leverkusen, which ordered hundreds of prisoners, many of them women, for testing. Bayer had to pay for these women, and haggled with the superintendent over the price, considering 200 Reichsmarks too high, offering 170 instead. These 150 were to be subjected to the testing of a new ‘sleeping drug’. Bayer confirmed receipt of its human cargo, and, ‘Despite their macerated condition they were considered satisfactory.’28 Bayer later reported that all the women died. As inhuman and incredible as these tests are, what is almost more incredible is that after the trial of twenty-four IG Farben employees at Nuremberg on 30 July 1948, Dr Fritz ter Meer, after serving two years in prison, was appointed chairman of AG Bayer in 1956. The actions of the IG Farben group during the war are a prime example of the extremes of which the pharmaceutical industry is capable. In his opening statement against them at the trial, Telford Taylor, the US chief prosecutor, was damning: their ‘purpose was to turn the German nation into a military machine and build it into an engine of destruction so terrifyingly formidable that Germany could, by brutal threats and if necessary by war, impose her will and her dominion on Europe and later on other nations beyond the seas. In this arrogant and supremely criminal adventure, the defendants were eager and leading participants.’29

  These tiny glimpses of those camps are reflected in the Camp Campbell medic’s descriptions of Dachau, which are markedly more impassioned than his retelling of battles, blood and chest wounds, and when confronted with the true horrors of the camp he says only, ‘We were not prepared for this.’30

  Korea

  ‘One great irony of warfare is that the more humanity increases its ability to inflict injury on human beings – through technology, tactics and psychological manipulation – the more humanity must advance its capability to deliver emergency medical care to the swelling number of casualties.’31

  Unfortunately, for many young men who served in the Second World War, the call-up to Korea in June 1950 was not that far away. Korea had been ruled by Japan from 1910 until the end of the Second World War. Under Japanese rule, Korea emerged as a major producer of opium in the 1920s. At the time of the Manchurian Incident in 1931, the International Military Tribunal for the Far East identified Korea as the ‘principal source of opium and narcotics’.32 In addition, they deemed that emigrant Koreans played an extensive role in drug trafficking in China, particularly Manchuria, but as Japanese citizens, Koreans were immune from prosecution by the Chinese authorities owing to extraterritoriality. During its time as a Japanese colony, Korea had developed a substantial domestic drug problem. Japan ruled that opium smoking would be punished as it was in Japan, but that Korean addicts could wean themselves off on a reducing dose, before it was prohibited altogether in 1914. As with all prohibitions, this seemed to fuel the problem. Japanese pharmacists were allowed to issue substitute morphine injections in Pyongyang, but this only created another type of addict. In 1924, the Korean newspaper Toa Nippo reported there were 4,000 morphine addicts created this way in Seoul alone.33 As of December 1930, all addicts had to be registered, but the problem was still out of control, and the Korean Society for the Prevention of Drug Abuse was formed in 1934.

  Poppy growing in Korea had been undertaken in response to the worldwide shortage of opium resulting from the outbreak of the First World War, but in Manchuria, Japan had found a ready market for opium and had established an opium and narcotics monopoly. After creating 1.5 million addicts, the demand upon Korea’s opium supply was enormous. (Japan is one of the few nations in the world that has almost zero domestic market for heroin: amphetamines are far more popular.)

  After the Soviet Union liberated Korea north of the 38th parallel in August 1945, Japan withdrew, poppy farming was banned and farmers were urged to return to planting food and plant crops, with limited success. US forces moved into South Korea, and as a result, Korea was split into two regions, governed separately. Four years later, on 1 October 1949, Mao Tse-tung declared the foundation of the People’s Republic of China.

  Chairman Mao remains the only leader to successfully eradicate poppy farming and the opium trade in any country in the world, and he achieved it within a few years of coming to power. Poppy production simply moved elsewhere, however. Remnants of the Chinese Muslim Kuomintang Army, the KMT, fought their way into Burma and hid out in the jungles of Burma’s Shan states. There, the Wa and the Acka people have grown opium as part of a subsistence existence for hundreds if not thousands of years. Like the Japanese, the Wa have almost no levels of opiate addiction, despite farming it themselves for medical use. What was left of the KMT seized the opium fields and expanded production, making a commercial alliance with General Phin, prime minister of Thailand, who had taken control of the Thai opium trade after the Second World War. From Shan state, the KMT undertook to put in place a transport network to Thailand. This was no mean undertaking: there are few roads in and out of the Shan states, and those there are often become washed out during monsoons, so to guarantee regular movement of goods would not be easy. As they were a distinctive thorn in the side of Chairman Mao and his Communist Party, the CIA, through its Sea Supply Company, funded the KMT with about $35 million worth of equipment between 1950 and 1953, during the years of the Korean War.34 The CIA’s involvement with the KMT had a practical benefit that the organization did not need when dealing with the Corsican Mafia in Marseilles: opium is a currency on its own. Funding covert anti-Communist operations in the Far East is not easy, but, much as in the old Silver Triangle, opium opens a ready line of credit.

  In June 1950, with the support of Russia and China, the North Korean People’s Army crossed the 38th parallel into South Korea, and open warfare began. Two days later, on 27 June, the United Nations authorized the deployment of troops to address the North Korean invasion.

  In South Korea, the vast majority of troops were American, forming the 8th Army. They were assisted by the Republic of Korea Army, the Commonwealth Division and other UN forces. Supporting all of these assorted soldiers were the Mobile Army Surgical Hospitals, or MASH. Made famous by the television show starring a world-weary Alan Alda as Hawkeye, and his equally jaded companions, the reality was that most of the MASH teams were very young, ‘perhaps too young’, writes Richard Hooker in his book that inspired the film and television series. Although a gifted surgeon, Otto Apel, who arrived from Cleveland as chief surgeon for a MASH team, was only twenty-eight, and had left a wife and three young children at home. Many of the surgeons had less than three years’ experience.

  American casualties in Korea were high, with the official death toll at 33,629 and 103,284 wounded. Despite these numbers, the comparative death toll from Korea is far lower than in the two world wars, where in the First World War 8.5 per cent of US troops died, in the Second World War 4 per cent and Korea 2.5 per cent.35 The last figure would have been significantly higher without the MASH units, which were conceived in 1945 as a go-between from the front line to the field hospital, and first deployed effectively in Korea.

  The core MASH team or auxiliary service group (ASG) was tiny compared to military field hospital units, consisting of a chief surgeon, an assistant surgeon, an anaesthetist, a surgical nurse and two enlisted technicians. A pilot and a medic operated in a precariously small Bell helicopter, ferrying the wounded back from the fro
nt line to the ASG station on stretchers or ‘skids’ mounted on the sides of the helicopter. This had the disadvantage that the casualty could not be treated in flight, but the advantage that they were tightly strapped in and immobile. Back at the ASG hospital, treatment was administered, including surgery if necessary, before the casualty was moved out to a large army hospital. The living conditions for the ASG teams were hard, often in mountainous terrain with extremes of temperature, moving several times a month to keep up with the combat units – the tent had to be down and ready to go in six hours – coupled with long hours of tedium followed by frantic activity. It was not unusual for a MASH team to treat over 3,000 patients in one month.36 Otto Apel performed eighty hours of non-stop surgery as soon as he arrived at his first MASH assignment, and wrote a letter to his wife to say he wouldn’t care if he never saw another surgery. But unlike previous field hospitals, if a wounded soldier made it to a MASH unit, he had a 97 per cent chance of survival. The quick and efficient establishment of a blood bank by Far East Command was crucial in this success rate, as the shelling injuries patients often presented with were horrific, involving the loss of whole hips and buttocks. Despite this, the amputation rate from the Second World War dropped by two-thirds owing to improvements made in ligation techniques, rather than just a straight tying off of the artery and removal of the limb.

  In the Korean War, there were no shortages of opiates. The army even sent a specialist out to trial methadone compared with morphine, finding the results ‘favourable’.37 The army was, however, having some problems with drug use amongst the troops. It continued to dole out amphetamines, but heroin and marijuana were both so freely available that there was no way to regulate use. Heroin was also cheap, ‘between eighty and ninety cents for 65 milligrams’, and surgeon Albert Cowdray thought it was used socially, ‘similar to the ordinary use of alcohol’.38 Cases of addiction were more likely to happen in troops stationed further from the front line with less to do, as were cases of venereal disease, which ran rife in downtime. Around the port cities some officers reported that about half of all their men were involved with drugs, especially heroin. And it was during the Korean War that the first mentions appear of the practice of mixing amphetamines with heroin and injecting it intravenously. There were some deaths from overdoses. Because of the difficult fighting conditions, there were also numerous cases of self-inflicted wounds, which at one stage reached epidemic proportions in the New Zealand ranks, with up to 75 per cent of wounds presented being self-inflicted.39

  The Korean War ended on 27 July 1953 in a stalemate. An armistice was called and the UN, US and Commonwealth troops withdrew. Yet the adage ‘Medicine is the only victor in war’ held true for the Korean War perhaps more than any other. The young MASH teams had achieved extraordinary things and made advances in the fields of vascular reconstruction, the use during surgery of artificial kidneys and ligation, and they also researched the effects of heat and cold on the body. From the Korean War we now have lightweight body armour and cold-weather gear. They tested the anti-coagulant heparin, and the sedative nembutal. In-depth records were kept, allowing for the best battlefield data comparisons that had been made to that point. The list goes on.

  North Korea still insists it won the war.

  Vietnam

  ‘Public enemy number one, in the United States, is drug abuse.’40

  Richard Nixon

  Vietnam is America’s longest war, lasting from 1 November 1955 to the fall of Saigon on 30 April 1975. As with Korea, the Vietnam War was fought between the north and south, with Russia and China backing the north, and the US with allies – South Korea, Australia and Thailand – backing the south.

  In the south, the Viet Cong was a Communist group who wanted to reunify Vietnam, and engaged in guerilla warfare with the US and its allies. They fought with mines, booby traps and snipers, attacking mainly in the jungle. For infantry with an average age of twenty-two, the mental pressure, coupled with the physical pressure of the climate, was exhausting. They were assisted in Vietnam not by MASH, but by MUST, the Medical Unit Self-Contained Transportables, which were tents with inflatable ward sections and expanding parts for radiology, laboratory, pharmacy, and other areas. Because of the jungle warfare in southern Vietnam, the front line was not defined as it had been in Korea, so no one knew where to set up the hospitals. MUST solved that problem, coupled with the large UH-1D Huey helicopters carrying six to eight casualties with an average evacuation time of thirty-five minutes. High-velocity missile wounds were common, involving burns as well as injury, and the Vietnam War saw innovation in their treatment, and a 50 per cent drop in fatalities from the Korean War.41 By 1968, the air force was evacuating over 6,000 casualties per month.

  Films and media have often perpetuated the idea of the junkie soldier in Vietnam, high on heroin and marijuana. This stems largely from a 1971 report to Congress about levels of drug addiction in soldiers serving in Vietnam. It claimed that 15 per cent of US troops serving in Vietnam were addicted to drugs, especially heroin. The media went into a frenzy, and President Richard Nixon created a new office called the Special Action of Drug Abuse Prevention, headed up by drug czar Jerome Jaffe. The president called a press conference where he announced a ‘new offensive’ on the drugs trade, for which no expense would be spared.

  What wasn’t mentioned in the press conference was the role that America itself had played in creating what was a new heroin-producing cradle of the world, called ‘the Golden Triangle’ by Vice Secretary of State Marshall Green in a press conference the same week. He was referring to the triangle of Laos, Burma and Thailand, which by 1968–9 was harvesting 1,000 tons of raw opium a year, which was refined into morphine base, mainly in Laos, and exported straight to Europe or to the US through Hong Kong. The heroin they produced was known as No. 3, a chunky, low-grade heroin that looks a little like broken sugar cubes, meant for smoking. No. 4 is high-purity, high-grade white heroin powder, produced from opium often orginating in Afghanistan, intended for rendering into an injectable solution. In late 1969 and 1970, Chinese heroin cooks had been brought in from Hong Kong to try and chemically render the cheaper No. 3 production of the Golden Triangle into something more like Afghan heroin. This heroin was then sent to southern Vietnam with the express intention of selling it to serving troops there. It became very popular almost immediately and many divisions were reporting high rates of both use and addiction. Packaged in small, neat phials that cost around $3 each, many of the bored, anxious soldiers in Vietnam turned to it for relief.

  The My Lai Massacre of 16 March 1968 had only fuelled the controversy. My Lai, where US soldiers killed approximately 500 elderly men, as well as women and children, was a key moment in how Vietnam veterans came to be viewed by those back home. Photographs of the incident, taken by US army photographer Ron Haeberle, were not published until November 1969, after Haeberle’s discharge, and when panic about the narcotics situation amongst serving soldiers was taking hold of the American establishment. Evidence of the rape and mutilation of the female victims caused further outrage.

  There have been many explanations for the My Lai Massacre, including collective madness (at least thirty soldiers took part in the killings), as well as drug abuse and addiction. The reality is that My Lai took place before the heroin crisis among US soldiers in Vietnam, and that the American government had underestimated the mental strain of fighting a prolonged guerilla war in a hostile and alien environment.

  Meanwhile, at the end of the Korean War, and funding the KMT, the CIA decided it needed to set up a transport hub somewhere in the South-East Asia area, and chose Laos, conveniently the place where Burma and Thailand refined their opium into morphine for export. Air America ran the CIA’s covert operations in Laos for nineteen years, their longest ever disclosed covert operation. There are credible allegations that the CIA ran heroin and morphine out of Laos during these years, using it to fund their work in South-East Asia, which it denies. Nevertheless, there is the inescapab
le fact that it was present and using Air America as a front, dealing with the Hmong who used opiates as hard currency, and hence in all likelihood the US was involved in establishing the Golden Triangle on which President Nixon declared war on 17 June 1971.

  It seems unlikely to be a coincidence that Nixon’s war was declared just as America began to experience one of its cyclical heroin epidemics. With the Golden Triangle on the rise, and the Asian gangs organizing their operations to aggressively target Western users, in addition to the enormous growth of international travel and shipping, bringing heroin to the West was becoming easier and more lucrative. This created excellent opportunities for men like Frank Lucas to build empires from Vietnam. Lucas was born in North Carolina in 1930, and as a child watched as his twelve-year-old male cousin was murdered by the Ku Klux Klan for looking at a white woman. Lucas claimed later that this drove him into a period of delinquency that resulted in him leaving for New York in fear of his life. He fell in with a criminal memorably named Bumpy Johnson, and worked for him for over a decade. When Johnson died in 1968, Lucas decided to take a risk. The New York heroin business was at the time run by the Italian Mafia, namely the Lucchese family, out of Harlem, with a seven-man African-American group called The Council and a drug dealer known as Mr Untouchable – Nicky Barnes. Until he was touched by arrest in January 1978, Barnes had an astonishing career that saw him running significant parts of the eastern seaboard and Canada. Another drug-runner from North Carolina, Frank Matthews, was making a fortune with acquaintances he had made in South America, bringing in huge quantities of both cocaine and brown heroin. Inspired by these two operations, Frank Lucas had his own ambitions. Knowing he had no chance of getting into the heroin scene in Harlem without bypassing the Mafia somehow, he decided to visit Bangkok, and in a bar ran into Leslie ‘Ike’ Atkinson. Atkinson – a former US army sergeant who was well connected with serving soldiers in Vietnam, and in Bangkok – was also from North Carolina, and the two men were distantly related by marriage. Through his bar – Jack’s American Star Bar – he had come into contact with a Chinese-Thai man named Luchai Rubiwat, who had contacts in the Golden Triangle heroin trade. Atkinson and Lucas began buying straight from the manufacturers, bypassing the Italian families back in New York. They employed American servicemen returning to the US to carry heroin for them, arriving home usually through Fort Bragg, North Carolina. But they also had other, less aware mules: dead servicemen, in whose coffins they secreted the drugs.