Word: opiumeators
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...what the report describes as a number of slippery and slickly professional narcotics "cartels." Most of the heroin reaching the U.S. is funneled through Western Europe, where the lucrative U.S.-bound trade has long been dominated by rings of French Corsicans based in Marseille. Processed into morphine base, Turkish opium is easily smuggled to Marseille or, increasingly, through West Germany, most often aboard sealed trucks, which, under European customs agreements, are usually waved past border posts without even a cursory inspection. The morphine base is processed in clandestine laboratories, and the finished heroin reaches wholesalers in the U.S. aboard planes...
...another. But the effort has been frustrating. Many governments are not particularly receptive to U.S. pleas for cooperation and, as the Cabinet Committee report wryly observes, they are "regularly and skillfully exploited by the illicit international trafficker." The report unhappily notes that in Burma, where the annual opium harvest comes to a hefty 400 tons, the narcotics trade is "not viewed with great alarm." Authorities in Pakistan prefer to act as if their country's opium output, which runs as high as 170 tons a year, is really "quite small...
...success, Turkey, may turn out to be discouragingly hollow. In return for $35 million in various subsidies, Turkey agreed to curb the cultivation of opium after the 1972 crop was harvested. The Administration felt that it had achieved a "breakthrough" because the 80 tons of illicit opium produced by Turkish farmers last year produced 80% of the heroin entering the U.S. market. But now there are worries that the curb may be ineffective, in view of the large supplies of opium that canny Turkish smugglers are rumored to have begun to stockpile long...
Moreover, there is a growing realization that drug traffickers can draw on ample surpluses in the total worldwide illicit production of opium-1,200 tons last year, enough to supply the U.S. market many times over. India, Pakistan and Afghanistan grow some 360 tons of illegal opium each year, most of which at present goes to Iran. The "Golden Triangle" of Burma, Thailand and Laos is the largest single opium-producing area (700 tons a year). Dealers there have been supplying U.S. troops in South Viet Nam, and it is open to question, the report notes, whether they will accept...
Aside from opium and its derivatives (heroin and morphine), no drug has had a worse press than hashish. The resinous extract from the flower heads of female Indian hemp plants (Cannabis saliva) is five to ten times as potent as bulky, unrefined marijuana. Crusaders returning from the Holy Land brought back the tale that the chief of a Moslem sect used hashish to give fanatical courage to his hirelings before they set out on murder missions. Thus, from a corruption of hashshashin, they added the word assassin to the language. What has since been learned about hashish suggests that while...