Word: opium
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...golden hair is considered lucky by the Chinese, who cannot resist touching it. "I was a walking talking talisman," he writes. This, plus his status as a gweilo ("ghostly man," or Caucasian), allows him to walk undeterred into Hong Kong's brothels and opium dens to befriend coolies, Triad gangsters and the real-life model for Hiroshima Joe. Perhaps Booth's biggest coup is talking his way into Kowloon Walled City, a notorious no-go area of vice, violence and opium dens. Afterward, his guide, a young Triad member named Lau, gestures toward a pig being slaughtered in a nearby...
...emergence of Khan's network reflects the challenges the U.S. still faces in Afghanistan as the U.S. struggles to hunt al-Qaeda's leaders, disarm Afghanistan's warlords and shore up President Hamid Karzai against a revived Taliban-led insurgency. The renewed trade in opium has worsened all those problems. The World Bank calculates that more than half of Afghanistan's economy is tied up in drugs. The combined incomes of farmers and in-country traffickers reached $2.23 billion last year--up from $1.3 billion in 2002. Heroin trafficking has long been the main source of funds for local warlords...
...Taliban and al-Qaeda don't grow the opium poppies. Their involvement is higher up the drug chain, where profits are fatter, and so is their cut of the deal. Yasini says the terrorists receive a share of profits in return for supplying gunmen to protect labs and convoys. Recent busts have revealed evidence of al-Qaeda's ties to the trade. On New Year's Eve, a U.S. Navy vessel stopped a small fishing boat in the Arabian Sea. After a search, says a Western antinarcotics official, "they found several al-Qaeda guys sitting on a bale of drugs...
Antidrug officials say the only way to cut off al-Qaeda's pipeline is to destroy the poppy farms. U.S. military commanders have been reluctant to commit the nearly 20,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan to opium eradication, fearing that doing so would divert attention from the hunt for terrorists. The U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan, Zalmay Khalilzad, has tapped top Drug Enforcement Administration official Harold Wankel to lead an intensified drive to nail kingpins, shut down heroin-production labs, eradicate poppy fields and persuade farmers to plant food crops. If the drug cartels aren't stopped, the U.S. fears, they...
...golden hair is considered good luck by the Chinese, who cannot resist touching it. "I was a walking talking talisman," he writes. This, plus his status as a gweilo ("white devil," or foreigner), allows him to walk undeterred into Hong Kong's brothels and opium dens to befriend coolies, Triad gangsters and the real-life model for Hiroshima Joe. Perhaps Booth's biggest coup is talking his way into Kowloon Walled City, a notorious no-go area of vice and violence, where he watches old men smoke opium and prostitutes while away the afternoon waiting for business. Afterward, his guide...