Word: opium
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Before there was a British crown colony of Hong Kong, there was Jardine, Matheson. The 152-year-old trading company, or hong, helped start the Opium War, forcing China to cede the island to Britain in 1841. In the years since, Jardine has evolved into an empire with $500 million in assets that handles everything from oil to finance. Last week the firm shocked Hong Kong by announcing that it will recharter itself as a holding company in Bermuda...
...decade ago to 500,000 today. The slippage in this key market coincided with a 1979 drought in the Golden Triangle, the mountainous region where Burma, Thailand and Laos meet. The area has long produced much of the world's supply of poppies, from which opium and heroin are derived. The resulting rise in prices only accelerated the switch to cocaine...
...talks about people who perspire audibly; and he knows others who make opium out of the poppies sold by veterans...
...19th century. Throughout Historian Harvey Green's lively text, advertisements, advice columns, how-to manuals and diaries kept by women of the period attest to an oppressed existence, all too often foreshortened by death from childbirth. Small wonder that Victorian women ingested vast quantities of alcohol and opium patent medicines. Inveighing against these tranquilizers of the age, one physician declared, "Their manufacturers are deserving of a place in the deepest part of the bottomless pit." His foresight is an astonishment; Green's hindsight is an education...
...represented just a fraction of the exports from the so-called Golden Crescent, an area spanning parts of Pakistan, Afghanistan and Iran that produces the lion's share of the world's heroin. The raw material for the drug is grown in 100,000 acres of opium-poppy fields, processed in local laboratories and smuggled out through Pakistan. The Golden Crescent accounts for as much as 90% of the heroin sold in Western Europe and more than half that sold...