Word: opium
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Marshal Pibulsonggram, Thailand's strongman Premier, who was much impressed by democracy (and by presidential press conferences) on his trip to the U.S. and Europe last year. As a result of his temporary lifting of press controls, accounts of the corruption that normally flourishes in Asian regimes−opium trading, influence peddling−have been brought into the light of day by Pibul's enemies. The stories have tended to discredit, by association, the Pibulsonggram regime's longtime ally, the U.S. An American businessman reported his upcountry customers asking: "If America is giving so much money...
Inside the house on Goethe Street police found a well-equipped laboratory complete with all the necessary equipment for making heroin out of opium. Calmly washing her hands after making a fresh batch was the chatelaine, grey-haired, motherly Mme. Kalyopi Kalo-gridi, a Greek woman whose title "Queen of the Smugglers" had been well earned in two criminal convictions and the bet ter part of a lifetime spent in the illicit drug trade. Kalyopi's Teheran plant was capable of turning out each week up to 110 Ibs. of deadly dope worth nearly $500,000 on the wholesale...
...Heart of the Matter, The End of the Affair-were religious dramas about the human soul struggling amid gin-or-tea trivialities between salvation and damnation. In his latest novel, he writes of individuals who stand for worlds and nations-the U.S., Britain, Asia-struggling amid blood-and-opium enormities between relative degrees of misrule. Yet in a sense, the heart of the matter is still the same. Whatever uncozy corner Greene chooses for his settings, whether West Africa, Mexico, Indo-China or England, the climate is always adultery and guilt. And the source of drama is always the fact...
Orangeade and Opium. The first subject Norodom took up with his people last week was foreign policy. Cambodia, he said, would join Nehru's neutralist bloc, and at the same time it would accept U.S. military aid to equip an army of 40,000. If this seemed a little contradictory, Norodom added without batting an eyelid: "With this aid we will maintain a strong army even if America and Russia shake hands tomorrow." His public murmured assent at their Premier's wisdom...
Sipping orangeade (supplied by Norodom at 30? a glass), the congressmen next took part in a discussion of domestic policy, about which they had firmer ideas. The burning issues (raised by the country's 30,000 Buddhist monks) : prohibition of opium smoking, alcohol, prostitution, the slaughtering of cattle, working on Buddhist holidays. The spokesman for opium-den owners (frequented mainly by Chinese) was shouted down, and Norodom promised a ban on opium. But the use of alcohol was held to be legal because of the danger that "our peasants will ruin their health brewing their...