DRUG GANGS IN FRANCE

Press, Volume LXXXIX, Issue 26944, 21 January 1953, Page 3

DRUG GANGS IN FRANCE

OFFENSIVE ACTION BY POLICE FIVE LABORATORIES SEIZED (From a Reuter Correspondent.) PARIS. The French Government and police have launched an all-out offensive against the international drug traffickers who have turned this country into one of the centres of a worldwide network for the manufacture and distribution of deadly white powders. The police, working with members of Interpol (International - Police), pounced on five clandestine laboratories in France last year. In nine months they seized 15 kilogrammes (331 b of heroin and 12 kilogrammes (about 261 b) of morphine. Cities such as Paris and Marseilles have become the vital junctions on the “white death” line, whose principal terminus is the North American continent. Manufacturers operating in or near the two centres are believed to have produced more than 500 kilogrammes of heroin last year for the drug market price of 3600 dollars a kilogramme (over £l5OO for 2.21b) or three times the price of gold. The long, underground route from producer to consumer starts in the opium poppy fields of the Middle East and parts of the Balkans. Packed into tight blocks like plug tobacco, the opium is smuggled across perhaps a dozen frontiers in false coffins, the toilets of international trains, spare tyres, car seats, double-bottomed suitcases and even hollowed-out Bibles. Seamen hide it aboard their ships-and throw it overboard attached to rubber tubes off the French coast where it is picked up by men in small boats. The ingenuity of the drug “travellers” usually defies police searches, although in 1951 290 kilogrammes of opium were discovered in the propeller shaft of a ship in Marseilles Harbour. Refining Process Once in France, the “chemists get to work on the raw opium in their clandestine laboratories, refining it first into morphine and then from morphine into heroin. Heroin, in spite of its fabulous price, is the most sought after drug. Opium, morphine, and cocaine are declining in popularity. , , x . Some of the secret laboratories have been .located in isolated parts of th*, country. The powerful pungent smells given off in the process of preparation are less liable to attract attention in • lonely regions. But others have been found in the suburbs of Paris and Marseilles. sometimes behind the facade of legal drug-produc-ing establishments. The next leg of the journey for those products not set aside for sale locally, is to one of the Atlantic ports, such as Le Havre or Cherbourg. Again employing all sorts of smuggling devices, the smugglers transport the drugs over the ocean to the main consumption countries—the United States, Canada, and some South American states. The police believe that one of the reasons for the sudden increase in drug trafficking in France is the success of the Italian authorities in arresting Serafino Mancusa and other ItalianAmerican leaders of the trade. In the 20 years between the two world wars only two cases of opium being illegally refined into heroin were discovered in France —as against five in the last nine months.