Word: opium
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Masterly Confusion. Two months ago, Chan set out from the Burma fields on his way to Laos with a caravan of 300 men and 200 pack horses carrying nine tons of opium. He had no intention of paying the $80,000 in tolls usually collected on a shipment of that size passing through the Chinese generals' territory. When the caravan reached the Mekong River and the Laotian border town of Ban Houei Sai, the Chinese irregulars were waiting...
...place for man. Yet that inhospitable area has attracted as motley an assortment of tribesmen, fugitives, thieves, freebooters and smugglers as exists anywhere on earth. They come and they stay on for only one reason: be cause of certain distinctions of climate and soil, Papaver somniferum, the opium poppy, finds the place unusually congenial. Each spring the hillsides blossom into white and purple waves of flowers. The annual harvest produces 1,000 tons of raw opium - 90% of the world's supply...
...years, all the participants in the long, clandestine process from poppy field to market have worked together in comparative peace. Even renegade soldiers who support themselves by exacting tribute from every passing opium caravan have been accepted as part of the action. No more. Of late, the jungle has resounded to the crack of rifle fire, the roar of mortars, recoilless rifles and even fighter-bombers. An ugly, internecine little opium war is under way, and it rivals in complexity, if not in fire power, the struggle in nearby Viet...
...Modern Warlord. The squabble is not concerned with the growing or gathering of opium; that job belongs for the most part to such primitive tribesmen as the Meo, Ekaw, Bolong, Wa and Yao, who slit the poppy-seed pods for their resin, boil it into sticky raw opium, and roll it into loaves of one to five pounds. The fight grows out of a jurisdictional dispute between tribute-collecting soldiers and smugglers who deliver the stuff into the hands of the two Chinese syndicates that control the opium export from Laos...
...Worked as missionaries specializing in the opium trade" and became famous as the "junk priests." He obtained the manuscript by parachuting into China with the help of a "Francis Gary Powers Traveling Fellowship...