Word: opium
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...this week's story was Caribbean Correspondent Bernard Diederich, who has reported on Latin American drug trafficking for the past 20 years, first from Mexico City and now from Miami, one of the main U.S. entry points for cocaine. Says he: "From Mexico's Sierra Madre, where I covered opium-eradication programs in the 1970s, to Colombia's La Guajira Peninsula, which I visited late last year, the mark of the drug trade is the littered wreckage everywhere of smugglers' planes that didn't make it." The drug trade has apparently also wrecked the image of Colombians. Says Diederich...
Worldwide production of illicit opium, coca leaf and cannabis is many times the amount currently consumed by drug abusers. Some governments do not have control of the narcotics growing regions, and prospects in several countries are dampened by corruption, even government involvement in the narcotics trade...
...Sicilian Mafia began to provide heroin. In the old days, say federal authorities, opium was grown in Turkey, shipped to Marseilles, France, where it was processed by Corsicans, and then imported into the U.S. by American Mafia families headed by the Genovese family and others. The cracking of the so-called French connection in the early 1970s and the virtual elimination, under U.S. pressure, of opium growing in Turkey all but closed that international trade route...
...fill. As law-enforcement authorities have suspected-and Buscetta has now confirmed-Palermo has replaced Marseilles as the center of Europe's heroin business. Authorities estimate that some two tons of pure heroin (worth billions of dollars at street prices) are produced in Palermo each year from opium smuggled into Italy from the Golden Crescent of Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan. Heroin can often be bought in New York City's Times Square 48 hours after it leaves Sicily...
...sellers, and nine years before the passage of the Federal Food and Drugs Act in 1906, Sears attributed all kinds of curative powers to its treatments. Among them were obesity powders "to get rid of superfluous fat," a hair restorer and remedies for rheumatism, asthma, heart disease and an "opium and morphine habit." The bulk of the 1897 edition is devoted to the essentials of late-19th century life, at prices that today are pure nostalgia. Shoppers could find a 200-lb. barrel of corned beef for $9, a 35-lb. wooden pail of gumdrops at $1.65 and a dozen...