Opium

by Martin Booth

  To the present day, Britain is virtually the only country in the world where, under certain conditions, a doctor may prescribe heroin which is deemed elsewhere as so dangerous even doctors may not handle it: partly, of course, the general incorruptibility of the British medical profession allows this state of affairs. British doctors may prescribe heroin for pain relief, such as in the care of the terminally sick. Furthermore, it occasionally appears in other medical usage: a 1995 report, which created an outcry and was roundly condemned, stated that some doctors in Scotland were giving pregnant women injections of heroin to relieve the pain of childbirth, favouring it for its speed and efficacy.

  The Misuse of Drugs Act (1971) integrated existing drug laws, extending them where necessary and making the system sufficiently flexible as to add new drugs to the prohibited register. In the Act, drugs were also divided into three categories, A, B or C, according to their degree of harmfulness, with opium, morphine and heroin being placed in group A, penalties being decided according to the category of drug and the type of offence. However, due to the convoluted history of past legislation, anachronisms remain in the Act. It is still an offence to attend or permit premises to be used for opium smoking and to possess opium smoking or preparation equipment: even the ownership of antique opium pipes for aesthetic reasons is technically forbidden. The smoking of opium in Britain is rare today but not entirely unknown: the interception of 15 grams of raw opium in the mail led to the discovery of a seedy opium smoking divan in Dundee in 1989.

  These acts, with the Drugs Trafficking Offences Act (1986) mentioned later, remain the backbone of drug legislation and control in Britain.

  Britain has no equivalent of the DEA. H.M. Customs and Excise investigate illegal importation whilst police regional crime squads investigate distribution, often targeting the criminal rather than the crime, drug distributors being an important aspect of their work which may bring them into alliance with customs officials. Each police force in Britain has a drugs squad which investigates drug dealing within their jurisdiction whilst local police deal with drug possession and abuse. Scientific analysis of finds is conducted by the government chemist who has also developed a chemical fingerprinting system similar to the DEA signature programme.

  Despite the law, addiction has continued to rise with cheap heroin arriving in Britain and Western Europe as a whole. When prescribing became tightly monitored, heroin from South-east Asia began to come into Europe, smuggled in by Chinese crime syndicates: the British resident Chinese population provided cover for the traffickers. In later years, heroin from Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iran also appeared.

  One of the best known of the Chinese heroin traffickers was a young Malaysian-Chinese woman. Shing May Wong came from a well-to-do bullion dealer’s family and was educated at Roedean. At her trial in 1977, she claimed she had infiltrated a heroin-smuggling syndicate in order to avenge a Chinese criminal syndicate of her father’s death: he had been murdered in Singapore. She sold her beauty salon and shop, left her husband, became a hostess in Singapore and, with her lover Li Mah, who was a syndicate member, arrived in Britain to set up a heroin importation ring. With a second Chinese accomplice and an Australian, May Wong brought in heroin worth £20 million over a two-year period. She was entrapped by a police sting operation and sentenced to fourteen years.

  During the 1980s, heroin became the focus of both media and government attention. No longer was it seen as just a foible of bohemian jazz instrumentalists and aliens: it was capable of touching everyone’s lives and it showed no boundaries in claiming its victims. Even members of the nobility and the children of government ministers became enmeshed. Olivia Channon, the Oxford undergraduate daughter of government minister Paul Channon, died in 1986 of a heroin/alcohol overdose. The Marquis of Blandford has been addicted to heroin and has led a life peppered by petty crime, including being gaoled for stealing drugs, whilst Alice Ormsby Gore, the sister of Lord Harlech and an ex-girlfriend of rock guitarist Eric Clapton, himself a one-time addict, died of a heroin overdose in 1995.

  Rock musicians themselves, perhaps as an extension of the old jazz musician junkie tradition, seem very susceptible to drugs. Drummer Ginger Baker, one of the trio of the seminal super-band, Cream, first took heroin in the late 1950s after being told it improved his playing: his heroin addiction lasted twenty years. Baker has said it was difficult to kick his habit because fans who were also dealers frequently gave him drugs free – he was the ultimate endorsement of their product. As well as Baker and Eric Clapton (also a member of Cream), Boy George, Sid Vicious of the Sex Pistols and Keith Richard of the Rolling Stones, Pete Townshend of the Who and singer Marianne Faithfull have all at some stage been addicted: when Clapton and Boy George kicked their habit, much was made in the media of their success. Overseas, heroin took – and still takes – its toll on other rock musicians. Janis Joplin died of a heroin overdose in a Hollywood hotel in 1970. Lou Reed survived his addiction but wrote a famous song about it entitled, not surprisingly, ‘Heroin’. Kurt Cobain committed suicide by shooting himself, but he had also heavily dosed himself with heroin to which he was addicted. Jerry Garcia, the key member of the Grateful Dead, died in the summer of 1995 in his sleep – but at the famous Serenity Knolls drug-rehabilitation clinic. He had told friends he was going on a scuba-diving trip. He, too, was addicted to heroin for many years.

  Public education campaigns, school lectures, training for teachers in drug awareness and government advertising campaigns have targeted the vulnerable which is in effect every member of society. In 1985, the House of Commons Home Affairs Committee stated drugs – and heroin in particular – were the most serious peacetime threat to ever face the nation. It was a prophetic statement: addiction rose 20 per cent in 1989 and 1990. There were 34,000 registered drug addicts by the end of 1994 but the official estimate of overall addiction to opiates, including heroin, pethidine, methadone and morphine, was put at approximately five times that figure, most of the addicts young and addicted to heroin.

  Social workers across Britain have recorded a recent sharp increase in users particularly in the sixteen-to-eighteen age-range, although many are younger and some are addicted for several years before being identified. This said, it is a misconception that drug use is exclusively a youth issue. There has also been a recorded increase in the 1990s of middle-aged and elderly addicts. Some have been addicted from youth but others are newly addicted through searching for a relief from loneliness or chronic pain. Registered addicts aged over fifty increased by 52 per cent in 1993: many others are unregistered.

  Another increasing trend is the use of heroin by professional people who are confident they will not become addicted, usually starting with a casual experimentation. They claim heroin calms or relaxes: some believe it to be glamorous and take heroin as a social activity much as others might take alcohol. Many become ‘hidden’ addicts, supporting their habit with above average incomes and thus avoiding criminality. Such is the situation now that one recent study suggests high income earners are in some areas the majority of illegal drug users.

  Some addicts may hold important posts. Dr Clive Froggatt, a very senior government health adviser to both Margaret Thatcher and John Major, was addicted to heroin, allegedly taking up to eight fixes a day: colleagues put his mood changes down to overwork and the stress of responsibility. Four successive government health ministers remained ignorant of his secret which was uncovered when police conducted routine checks of pharmacists’ records to find he had been making out heroin prescriptions in either fictitious names or those of deceased persons. Froggatt was arrested and given a suspended prison sentence in April 1995. He stated he did not believe heroin had affected his clinical judgement but he did believe it made him much more ruthless and less compassionate as to the effects the wide-ranging and much criticised health service reforms he devised would have on patients.

  The professional addicts generally keep a low profile: it is the poor addict who most frequently comes to p
ublic notice. Just as was feared in 1965, British cities are beginning to resemble American ones. Heroin is rife on the housing estates of Manchester, the streets of Bristol and the inner suburbs of London: the horrendous Handsworth riot in Birmingham in 1985 was blamed by police on drug dealers. One of the underlying causes for the rapid growth in heroin usage is believed to have been the 1983 Brinks-Mat bullion robbery from a warehouse on a trading estate near London Heathrow airport, when much of the £26 million haul was invested in the drugs trade: it was – and remains – common practice for criminal gangs to finance drug deals with money gained from armed robberies, especially of security vans. A van robbery of, say, £500,000 could return up to £3 million from heroin.

  In 1994, chief superintendents of police warned Britain now has a drugs crisis as serious as that of the USA. Manchester police estimated the average heroin addict in their area spent £30,000 per annum on his habit, raising the money from burglary, theft, prostitution and street dealing. In Glasgow, heroin was, for a time, infamously sold through a network of ice-cream vans and mobile shops. Gangs from different cities have set aside their animosities to establish a national supply system. There are differences between Britain and America: the former has as yet no massive organised crime network and the British black population is not riddled with heroin as it is in America. Yet addicts are becoming younger and drugs are becoming synonymous with lawlessness. The fear of the junkie is now felt in the heartland of middle England.

  12

  Carpets, Condoms and Cats

  For a good deal of its history, other than for medical use, opium has been an illegal commodity: even the centuries-long, Indo-Chinese opium trade was, for much of its existence, nothing more than a smuggling enterprise, albeit a vast one. There has, thus, always existed a strong bond between opium and criminality.

  It is inevitable that so long as world opium production exceeds basic legitimate demand, for medicinal or research purposes, there will exist an illegal market developed for the surplus and controlled by criminal traffickers who will have a vested interest in maintaining or expanding this market at every opportunity, increasing the size of the surplus. Drug traffickers are, save in their illegality, no different from any other commodity entrepreneur operating in the best spirit of free trade and, because of the addictive nature of their wares, they will have no problem selling their product. As William Burroughs noted in the introduction to his novel, The Naked Lunch, published in 1959: ‘Junk is the ideal product … the ultimate merchandise. No sales talk necessary. The client will crawl through a sewer and beg to buy.’ Any risks traffickers take are countered by substantial profits: no addict can complain about the cost of his fix.

  Traffickers have always drawn supplies from one of two basic sources. First, they have purchased opium from countries where poppy cultivation is legal but where a percentage of the harvest escapes the attention of the authorities, despite state or tax controls. Quantities have depended upon governmental efficiency in the control of trading and farmers. An example of such a source was Turkey where, prior to 1972 when the government banned poppy growing, 25 per cent of the opium harvest vanished into a black market: in 1971, Pakistan legally produced 6 tons of opium, but approximately another 200 tons over-production was similarly diverted. The respective authorities could not prevent this ‘hidden’ trade as the farmers received higher returns from the illegal traders and were thus encouraged to grow more than was legally required.

  Second, supplies have been purchased from countries where poppy cultivation is officially forbidden but enforcement lacking due to inefficiency, undermanning of police and excise agencies, corruption or a governmental inability to address the general situation. Sometimes illegal poppy crops have been either undiscovered or officially regarded as non-existent and therefore ignored.

  The situation has changed little in three-quarters of a century. In the 1920s, it was reckoned for every medicinal ounce of opium sold internationally on the legitimate market, 10 ounces traded illegally on the global black market. A League of Nations publication in 1938 stated, between 1925 and 1930, at least 90 tons of morphine had been manufactured in excess of legitimate requirements and sold illegally: virtually no country was free from illicit opium, the trade increasing pro rata with the political instabilities in the Far East and Europe as the Second World War approached. At the time, most smuggled raw opium came from Iran or China with Turkey providing the clandestine factories for the manufacture of morphine.

  Then, as ever, the traffickers’ aim was profit at as high a margin over cost as the market (in other words, the addict) could sustain. Two vague categories of trafficking existed: the first was smuggling into countries where opiates were illegal, the second importing into countries where they were legal but controlled and subject to excise. The former were drug runners in the modern sense, the second contraband excise dodgers in the age-old tradition of the buccaneer.

  Merely by evading duty, the buccaneer-type smuggler stood to turn a tidy profit. A 1909 smuggling case illustrates the possible profit level involved in even a modest operation. Stewards aboard the North German Lloyd line passenger steamer, Kronprinzessin Cecilie, regularly smuggled opium and codeine into New York, where it was subject to an importation levy. With the co-operation of the ship’s watchmen and a corrupt customs inspector, they passed the drugs to an American confederate who sold them to pharmaceutical firms. Customs agents caught the ring in February 1909. It was discovered the stewards had purchased codeine in Germany for 440 Deutschmarks a kilogram, about $1 per ounce. The duty evaded was $1 an ounce and the supply was sold at $5 an ounce.

  High profit margins have always meant traffickers have been sufficiently well bankrolled to outwit or bribe the authorities. One example out of thousands was to be found in the early 1920s on the railway line running to the Chinese province of Shansi. A locomotive driver on a monthly salary of $40 would be paid $200 for carrying a small packet of morphine. The provincial governor promised a $3 reward for every packet seized: the traffickers paid railway inspectors $6 for every undetected packet. Every so often, the inspectors were permitted to make a worthwhile seizure to bring them credit and give their work viability. The remainder of the time, they carried out superficial checks and confiscated nothing. Almost everyone was a winner – the drivers got their smuggling fees, the inspectors got their bribes (and an occasional reward bonus) and the gubernatorial authorities thought they had the situation under control: the only loser was the addict who had to foot the bill.

  Traffickers have not just relied upon something as coarse as corruption to meet their ends. Many have been familiar with the legal systems of their target countries, using these to their advantage, especially in the early years of international control when legal complexities occurred because more than one country was involved in a transaction. What was legal practice in one place was not in another. The Advisory Committee was told in 1927 of three-quarters of a ton of morphine found in the possession of known traffickers who had purchased it through the French office of a Swiss pharmaceutical company which had imported it legally into France, there being no import licence required. Such loopholes were widened further because many governments were lukewarm to the idea of controls and usually set light punishments for trafficking. Other smuggling opportunities arose in the early years through the naming and classification of drugs. The constant invention of new drugs meant smugglers could trade in them before they were listed as controlled. The 1925 Convention controlled morphine and its salts. The smugglers promptly traded in benzoyl-morphine, a derivative but not a salt, yet from which morphine could be recovered.

  Smuggling networks have often been very complex and convoluted. From 1906, when opium was made illegal in China, there grew up a substantial smuggling network of both foreign opium into China and Chinese-grown opium out of it. In 1925, Hong Kong customs seized 3.5 tons of allegedly Chinese opium, along with a hoard of documentation outlining the existence and the modus operandi of several powerful
Chinese smuggling syndicates. The current total consumption of legal Indian opium in Hong Kong was 22.5 tons per annum. The documents showed just one syndicate was smuggling such an amount annually. They were not just dealing in Chinese product: 8.5 tons of raw Persian opium was found in a cave on an island near Hong Kong and a seizure of drugs and documents in Shanghai in 1925 proved the extensive importation of Turkish opium shipped from Constantinople via Vladivostok. At the same time, huge quantities of morphine were being smuggled into China via Manchuria by Japanese traffickers.

  Macau was also a smuggling centre. Under an agreement with China in 1913, Macau was permitted to import 260 chests of opium a year for domestic consumption and 240 chests for re-export outside China. However, this was usually smuggled into China, the destination disguised by erroneous way-bills or the opium substituted: one opium consignment bound for Mexico was seized by Chinese authorities but found to consist of molasses. The opium was en route for Canton. Such opium was often wrapped or labelled to appear to come from China itself, a trick employed globally to place the blame for trafficking upon the Chinese. A huge haul of 14,000 assorted packages of heroin, morphine and cocaine was made in an hotel on West 40th Street, New York City, in 1922: amongst the narcotics were printing plates for Chinese opium labels.

  Before the advent of the airliner, most smuggling was inevitably done by sea. Not only were ships trading internationally but a vessel offered a multitude of hiding-places. On 25 February 1929, 194 pounds of opium were found on SS Kut Sang in Hong Kong harbour, the drugs concealed in the hollow base of an anchor davit. The original rivets of the base plate had been replaced by screws with heads resembling rivets. This was no more ingenious than in many other instances, such as the morphine and heroin seized by Chinese customs at Tientsin in 1921 from the Japanese vessel, SS Awaji Maru, concealed in blocks of sulphate of soda. Customs records across the world are littered with reported hidey-holes: morphine in canvas sacks suspended down ventilator shafts; opium buried in coal bunkers and coke holds, tucked into blanket lockers or, on SS Montauk, hidden in a cavity cut into the aftermast. In 1938, 850 hermetically sealed tins of opium were found by New York customs in a false bottom to a fuel-oil tank on a British ship, SS Silveryew. Cargoes provided good camouflage: opium or heroin has appeared, amongst many others, in cargoes of dried shrimps, soap (with opium cakes looking like the bars of soap), in duck egg shells packed alongside real eggs, in Bologna sausage skins, in barrels of cement, in loaves of bread and in tins marked pickled cabbage. False labelling often disguised the true nature of a cargo, with just a few containers holding drugs, the remainder being the genuine article. Passengers also carried drugs, with the ubiquitous false bottomed suitcase being a favourite method.