Word: viets
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Fields of poppies have bloomed for centuries in the remote, jungle-clad valleys of northern Laos where five nations-Laos. Red China, Burma. Thailand and Communist North Viet Nam-meet in a tangle of ill-defined boundaries. The local Meos and kindred tribesmen delicately pierce the flowering buds, extract the sticky raw opium. Some of it they use themselves: when a Meo child complains of an ache, his mother may blow opium smoke into his mouth to ease the pain; for Meo adults, opium smoking provides a goofing-off pleasure that is their substitute for the combined attractions of alcohol...
...kilo to middlemen, hardheaded types who belong to something known as the Corsican brotherhood. From here the business gets into illicit channels and high prices. By pony caravan, or by light planes that take off from jungle airfields built by the French during their five-year war with Communist Viet Minh, the raw opium is transported to Bangkok and Hong Kong, bought by Chinese dealers at up to $1,000 a kilo and refined into morphine and heroin, as well as smokable opium. Smugglers then take possession, hoping for the vast profits to be gained from selling the narcotics...
Apathy. Life in Hanoi today is no laughing matter. People are not starving, but anything beyond the necessities, anything like oil, flour or sugar, is prohibitively expensive. The dong-North Viet Nam's unit of currency-has no standing whatsoever in international exchange...
Obsession. The Communists have so far not tried to impose Chinese people's communes on North Viet Nam. But less than 20% of the peasants have joined government-sponsored cooperatives, and the party magazine, Nguyen Dam, berates the farmers' "obsession to produce individually." Despite a Soviet loan of 100 million rubles. North Viet Nam's three-year plan (1958-60) is lagging...
...week's end, after seeing the best that North Viet Nam had to offer, Sukarno departed for home, where he has troubles of his own, and where Lieut. General Abdul Haris Nasution, who has run Indonesia in Sukarno's absence, summed up Indonesia's current situation in one word: "Gloomy...