Has Turkey won the opium war?

Press, 8 December 1976, Page 24

Has Turkey won the opium war?

By

RALPH JOSEPH

in Ankara

Turkey has just completed its second year of opium cultivation under a new system which it says has beaten the narcotics smuggler. At any rate there have been no complaints since 1974, when Turkey resumed opium cultivation on a limited scale, that heroin originating from Turkish opium is finding its way to underground markets, particularly in the United States.

Under the controlled system of cultivation now being used, Turkish farmers have little opportunity to extract the opium gum from the poppy pods. It was morphine base extracted from this gum that was formerly being smuggled to underground laboratories in Marseille, France, to be converted to heroin. With a tradition of two millennia of poppy cultivation in Anatolia behind them. Turkish farmers were able to produce a high quality opium that converted into a pure white type of heroin easily identifiable to underground traffickers—and antinarcotic agents.

Not much of this type of heroin is found in the underground market any longer, and the little that has surfaced is being put down as having come from old stocks of Turkish opium (produced before the 1972 government ban on poppy cultivation went into effect). “As far as we know,” one Turkish official told me in a recent interview, “most of the heroin being sold in the United States comes from opium produced in a neighbouring country.” He was referring to the brownish variety of heroin that comes from Mexico. Moreover, he pointed out, drug smuggling from the socalled “Golden Triangle” in South-East Asia still continues. nothing being apparently done about it. The official’s tone reflected the irritation most Turks now feel towards the United States, since the cooling of relations between the two

countries two years ago. United States authorities, he believed, had taken the wrong approach in trying to check drug addiction in their own country. The underground traffic existed “because the demand is there.” It would have been more appropriate for the United States to have taken “proper precautions to diminish the desire” for drugs among its population, rather than try to impose controls on a foreign country. He was referring to the pressure brought to bear by the United States on Turkey before the ban in 1972 — making the imposition of the ban a sensitive political issue. When Bulent Ecevit (then. Prime Minister) lifted the ban two years later, it was more a reassertion of Turkish sovereignty rather than a wish to see opium production flourish. The opium policy applied since then, though it maintains tlie defiant attitude of political independence, has been to keep poppy cultivation under controls suggested by United Nations experts. Besides, Turkey would be thoroughly embarrassed if it found the finger of the world pointing at it again, which would happen if the opium it produces began falling into the hands of smugglers again. Among the controls now in force are: • Restriction of the cultivation to certain provinces —now seven as compared to 42 before the ban. • Limitation of the acreage allowed to each farmer growing the poppy crop. The current maximum allowed is 2000 square metres, or less than half an acre. • Rural police teams keep under surveillance the areas where the crop is being cultivated. These teams go into the poppy fields during the crucial two-week period when the gum can be extracted from the poppy pods. Incision of the pods (an age-

old method of extracting opium gum from them) is strictly prohibited. The penalty for a farmer caught with incised pods, is destruction of his entire poppy crop and the withdrawal of his licence to grow the crop again. • At harvest time, after the pods have hardened, the farmer is permitted to extract the seeds from them, but must sell the dry husks of the pods to the Agriculture Ministry’s Earth Products Office (T.M.O. from the Turkish initials). The dried husks still contain the morphine base in them, but this can be extracted only by a complicated chemical method considered well beyond the farmer’s abilities. Some farmers are now known to have tried to extract the morphine by boiling the dry husks, but gave up when they found they were getting nowhere. Over the last two years Turkey has been exporting the husks to pharmaceutical companies in Europe where the morphine is extracted for medicinal purposes — mainly for the preparation of codeine. Turkey’s earnings, in foreign exchange, have totalled some $4l million in the first year, well beyond the $35 million offered it in grant aid as compensation for a complete ban on opium cultivation. (Ankara asked for about 10 times as much at the time). Now the T.M.O. has plans to multiply the profits several times over by extracting the morphine in a factory of its own. being built at a cost of about $3O million. It is expected to be built “in less than two years,” according to a T.M.O. source. With a capacity to handle 20,000 tons of poppy pods each season, it is considered large enough to just about absorb the present (targeted) production. T urkey has two opium crops a year, one in winter and the other in summer. The winter crop usually has a higher morphine content in the pods, and the farmers are

paid a higher rate for these pods — 23 Turkish lira, or roughly $1.56 per kilogram this year, compared to 19 TL or about $1.20 per kg for the summer pods. Since each kg produces roughly 40 to 50 grams of morphine, the high price of heroin in the black market today could still tempt some clever drug traffickers to set up their own underground

laboratories to extract the drug from the unincised pods. Even if they paid the farmers twice the amount they are getting from the T.M.0., they could still make huge profits. But the risks remain high for the Turkish farmer, and so far there have been no reports of unincised pods being sold to underground labs, either inside or outside Turkey.