Word: opium
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Sensing the doubts, Dick Nixon set out last week to dispel them with a pledge of a dynamic, hard-hitting campaign that is already in the works. "Anyone who does not recognize that we are in for the fight of our lives must be smoking opium," he told a huge Republican rally in Lincoln, Neb. "I believe we will win, but we must expect this to be one of the closest and hardest fought campaigns in America's political history...
...Leopard, built in the form of a hunting lodge. Last month the boys were gathering at the Snow Leopard to sip their pastis, discuss business conditions, and wait for the tribesmen on their way down from the hills with their annual offering of confiture (jam), the local nickname for opium. Most of the boys have a Mediterranean origin: Couscous, a wiry North African; Carlo the Corsican; a Eurasian called Moitie Gnakouey; and a clutch of characters of vaguely French antecedents-Petit Pere, La Seche Noire (the Black Cigarette), Le Gorille Gris (the Grey Gorilla...
Though the 40-odd tribes of Northern Laos are permitted to raise poppies and extract opium from their pods-it is the only cash crop available to them-the export of the drug is illegal. The boys at the Snow Leopard get around the ban by maintaining a fleet of half a dozen Single-engine Beavers and Pipers outfitted with auxiliary gas tanks. They fly into South Viet Nam and parachute the jam to agents in isolated valleys, who carry it to Saigon...
From there it is often smuggled by ship to Hong Kong, e.g., concealed in a crate of oranges or hidden inside the cable drum of a deck winch. Hong Kong's more than 150,000 dope addicts require an estimated 40 tons of opium a year, and though British narcotic agents search all arriving planes and boats, they seldom recover as much as 1½ tons of opium annually...
Last week the British at Hong Kong seized 340 lbs. of opium on a plane that had just flown in from Laos. But the boys at the Snow Leopard were not disconcerted. Said Couscous contemptuously: "That was the work of pure amateurs. A few days before the shipment they were drunk in a Vientiane bar, and boasting about the killing they were going to make...