Winners and losers in drug traffic

Press, Volume CXV, Issue 33965, 4 October 1975, Page 10

Winners and losers in drug traffic

Thu Heroin Trail. By the staff and editors of "Newsday." Souvenir Press. 322 pp. Illustrations and index. N.Z. price $B.lO. The Second Opium War. By Catherine Lamour and Michael R. Lamberti. Allen Lane. 278 pp. Index and maps. N.Z. price $10.15 approx. These books should be read together for they complement each other well. One is French. and its chief protagonist is America; the other is American and a good deal of its criticism is directed towards France. Both have been extremely well researched in many countries and the authors have succeeded in penetrating the incredibly secure and diverse international organisation of heroin trafficking. The French book, by Lamour and Lamberti, covers the greater part of all the countries involved in drug smugging today. The writers’ research took them through Europe, the Middle East and South-East Asia, but they concentrate in the latter areas. The “Golden Triangle” of Burma, Laos and Thailand has always had the reputation of being a major opium supplier, but at the same time no-one has ever really known just how much

was produced there. It is all very well for the Americans to say that 80 per cent of the heroin which enters their country comes from Turkey. They do not know exactly how much comes in or how much is produced in the “Golden Trinagle,” and therefore the estimates are suspicious, to say the least. The saddening thing about the American book, “The Heroin Trail”, is that it is merely a prop to President Nixon’s propagandist policies of the early seventies. A team of good journalists dug up all sorts of fascinating stories from Turkey, France and the United States. Most of these related to establishment theory that if Turkish supplies could only be cut all would be well. But more percipient Americans had already figured out for themselves that if Turkey was able to control her opium crop, — an unlikely event — at great United States expense, then the output from another source would simply double or treble. This is not to belittle the superb investigations carried out by the authors. These undoubtedly made good reading when they appeared as news. But in the book form the results are little more than an exercise in selfappraisal.

The original idea for the investigation was conceived by senior staff members of “Newsday” over dinner in a New York restaurant which had boycotted French wine because of the French part in heroin traffic. No doubt the restaurant’s idea of a protest would have been endorsed wholeheartedly by the journalists. They go to extraordinary lengths in their book to prove that the French have failed to control trafficking, and especially the conversion of base morphine into heroin, because too many important people in France are involved. Inevitably, of course, the drug pushers are linked to the French Secret Service, though the proof is tenuous. The authors record a chain of influence right up to Government Ministers and the Mayor of Marseilles. Not that the French authors are any the less diverted in their aim to nail the Americans for their part in the drug cultivation and trafficking of the “Golden Triangle.” Their book is about the campaign against the international drug traffic, and the campaign has, of course, been led by the United States. As the French have never been so self-righteous about their part in the whole affair (it would not have been futile because Marseilles is known as the European centre for opium conversion), Messrs Lamberti and Lamour do at least have some grounds to criticise American hypocrisy. Their investigations in the “Golden Trinagle” lead (inevitably) to the C.I.A. But they do not concentrate of castigating everyone else’s errors, as do their American counterparts. The French authors come much closer to the heart of the matter. They show that the American dream of Turkish control is hopeless, and international and national policing of any sort are quite ineffective. As long as there are enormous profits in smuggling heroin it will continue to flow around the world, with unknown quantities largely unchecked. “There can be no doubt that heroin addiction is here to stay and that it will take its place alongside poverty, racism and social injustice on the list of insoluble problems which, though ceaselessly deplored, are finally accepted by the majority as necessary evils,” write Lamour and Lamberti. Their point is that the United States has blamed other countries for what is essentially an indigenous problem. “While pandering to national selfesteem, this approach offers a cheap and politically expedient way of convincing the public of their leaders’ determination.”