Global Markets Pump Sea of Narcotics

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sold a kilo of hashish to make money for his son's birthday present.

FOR THE NEW SYNTHETIC drugs the amphetamines, the barbiturates, the hallucinogens the trail started on the beach in Hong Kong. There the pushers are trying to proposition American children from the international school nearby.

American schools in Bangkok, Thailand, and Ankara, Turkey, have encountered similar problems.

A leading Italian psychologist says 30% of young people 14 to 22 in Rome are using some kind of drug. Use of stimulants is so serious in Sweden that the Swedish government is in the forefront of a campaign for strict new international controls. Deaths from heroin use have startled France.

Even the Soviet Union has admitted some "thefts of narcotic drugs from pharmacies and hospitals." The Russians say illicit traffic poses no problems" in their country. Other sources say Soviet officials are quietly concerned about the smuggled inflow of drugs from the West.

Pep pills are in vogue with some Czechoslovakian youths. The Prague weekly Kvety says drug addiction in the capital is reaching alarming proportions. Some addicts have been getting high on cactus extract stolen from Prague's botanical gardens.

IN COUNTRIES LIKE Turkey and Lebanon, the narcotics seller is often an informer, too, particularly upon small-time or amateur trtaffickers. Having made the sale, he tells the police. For this service.

he gets immunity from prosecution. But the buyer is picked up.

In some countries, the police go out of their way to arrest foreigners. This helps build their case that foreigners, not local citizens, are responsible for the narcotics traffic.

Several hundred Americans have had tormented personal experience of this. They are serving long sentences for narcotics of fenses in such hellholes as Sands Prison, just outside Beirut.

Crammed 40 to 50 in a cell, the prisoners have one hole in the floor for a toilet, one faucet for a shower. Many have suffered the humiliation of violent homosexual assault. A fortunate few have bribed their way into mental institutions. where treatment is better.

Despite the hazards, the profits from drug smuggling are immense. If transported successfully to the United States and "cut" into 45,000 packets for individual users, a kilo of heroin that costs a few thousand dollars in Marseille sells for more than a quarter of a million dollars.

WITH THIS KIND of money to be made, involvement in the narcotics traffic extends into the most pseudo-respectable circles and into the highest ranks of several governments.

land.

In Lebanon, a leading politician is one of the largest owners of hashish-producing The uncle of one Middle Eastern monarch reputedly controls the transportation of narcotics through his country.

The sister of another head of state is persistently linked to the operation of a morphine-producing factory.

In one Asian country. an American diplomat told me:

WE WANT THE DRUG traffic out of here stopped. But we have a problem. If American narcotics agents start nosing around here too closely, they're going to uncover some links to pretty high places.'

In Laos the army is involved in the opium business. and Lao air force planes transport opium.

In Thailand the massive outflow of narcotics could hardly take place without collaboration at fairly high levels. In the past, involvement in the drug traffic has extended into the cabinet. It may still today.

The diplomatic bag, immune from customs scrutiny, is an ideal vehicle for narcotics traffic. Some Latin-American diplomats have been caught moving narcotics. including ambassadors from Mexico, Guatemale and Uruguay.

This year Italian police arrested a Pakistani ambassador on narcotics charges. Other diplomats are being watched. Personnel of certain international agencies with diplomatic privileges, particularly in Southeast Asia, are under suspicion.

IN LEBANON, THE traveler in trouble with the law who needs new documents can visit the ambassador of one Central-American country. No questions are asked. The fee for a brand-new passport of that country is $1,000 in cash. One recent purchaser

was an LSD chemist on the run from British police. He used his new passport to travel to North America.

Money, however, is not always the reason for involvement in the drug traffic. Sometimes the motive is political or ideological.

Western agents, for instance, believe the Israeli inteligence service permits Arab smugglers to move shipments of narcotics across Israeli held territory. The smugglers are Bedouin tribesmen. In return for the transit route, they give the Israelis military information about Arab positions.

There is also narcotics smuggling across the Arab-Israeli border for straight gain. The hashish that visiting Jewish hippies buy in Israel comes from Lebanon.

In Laos, some of the main growers of illegal opium are tough mountain tribesmen upon whom the American Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) relies heavily in the campaign against the Communists. Opium is the principal cash crop in the nonCommunist party of the country. Clearly. the CIA is cognizant of, if not party to. the extensive movement of opium out of Laes.

ONE CHARTER PILOT told me that "friendly" opium shipments get special CIA clearance and monitoring on their flights southward out of the country. The same source alleged two or three flights without this "protection" crashed under mysterious circumstances.

Communist intelligence agents are similarly involved with the use and transportation of narcotics.

Soviet agents posing as newsmen in India are known to have made use of narcotics in their intelligence work. In the no-

holds-barred world of espionage, it is a logical instrument.

The Russians accuse the Chinese Communists of manufacturing narcotics and unloading them on the world market with political design. The Chinese undoubtedly do manufacture drugs. But there is no evidence that they are employing them abroad on such a massive scale, for instance, as the Japanese did prior to their invasion of China in the 1930s. Before their military onslaught, the Japanese poured in opium to sap Chinese resistance.

For drug smugglers from Turkey and the Middle East, Communist countries on the road route to Western Europe are a sanctuary. Opium shipments are stored there. road trailers dropped off ΟΙ switched and truck registration papers and license plates changed.

A CAFE IN SOFIA, Bulgaria, is the known haunt of Arab smugglers. Yet rarely do the Communists interfere with narcotics shipments from Middle Eastern countries whose friendship they are eager to cultivate.

Whatever their motivation, the merchants engaged in this multimillion-dollar “junk," or narcotics, business resort to the most bizarre, the most extreme, the most ingenious methods to get their wares through.

Along the Turkish-Syrian border, the authorities have strung barbed wire and planted minefields. But the smugglers moving convoys of raw opium snip the wire and drive herds of goats ahead of them to explode the mines.

Camels carry opium in metal cylinders in their stomachs. One cheerful Afghan showed me how to slit the skin of a sheep, slip a wad of opium in, and sew the skin up again before herding the shaggy animal across the border in Iran.

From Laos. charter pilots air-drop opium in watertight bags in the Gulf of Siam. Deepsea fishing boats from Thailand pick it up. sail to Hong Kong, then sink it in shallow water off the coast. Chinese fishing junks trawl for it later and quietly run it ashore.

NARCOTICS ARE SMUGGLED in hollowed-out books, în scuba tanks and molded into chessboards. They are disguised as lemons, hidden in pierced watermelons and sealed in cans of peaches, coffee and olive oil. They are carried in dolls and toy horses, and even in babies' diapers.

Women couriers conceal them in girdles and brassieres. California customs agents caught one "pregnant" woman coming off a President liner with 40 pounds of narcotics in a false stomach. In Turkey, police found a "hunchback" with nine pounds of narcotics in his “hump."

From Colombia, one smuggler tried to ship 95 pounds of marijuana into the United States in a crate full of boa constrictors.

Others have tried molding narcotics as rosary beads.

But still favorite hiding places for traffickers are the false-bottomed suitcase and the concealed compartment in a truck or automobile. A surprisingly large amount of narcotics travels through the international mail labeled as innocent gifts. In

one big haul in Hong Kong, narcotics were packed in insulation in the walls of a shipment of refrigerators.

One more interesting fact about the major criminals behind the narcotics traific: Rarely do they use drugs themselves. They know better.

NEXT: The tragedy of the "pot trail. ̈*