Word: opiumeators
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...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...
...Shanghai (pop. 11.9 million) was once the wildest seaport in the world, but the Communists outlawed all its traditional sins when they captured it in 1949. About 30,000 prostitutes were shipped off to rehabilitation centers to learn another profession, and thousands of opium addicts were detoxified and put to work. At the same time, however, much of the reformed city's commercial life also withered. Only in the past few years has Shanghai regained the right to launch private busi nesses, attract foreign investments and keep some of the profits. The physical city is much the same...
DIED. Brassaï, 84, internationally renowned photographer who recorded the nighttime Parisian underworld of whores, hoodlums and homosexuals, of brothels, cabarets and opium dens, with a unique combination of directness, detachment and generosity; of a heart attack; in Eze sur Mer, France. Born Gyula Halász in Brassó (the origin of his pseudonym), in what is now Rumania, he went to Paris in 1924 to sculpt and write, then turned to photography to illustrate his articles. In 1933 his first major collection of seamy scenes, Paris de Nuit, was a sensation; a larger, franker version published...