OpiumOpium History, 1979 To 1994Production Increase In Asian Zone (1979-1989)After a decline in US drug use from the mid-1970s to the mid-1980s, a complex of factors encouraged a steady recovery in America's demand for heroin. During the 1980s, global production and consumption of the drug increased steadily, laying the foundation for a sudden surge in supply during next decade that would make heroin a world drug by the early 1990s. During the 1980s, complex factors led to an increase in Asian opium production. Unusual weather patterns led to a failure in the monsoon rains, bringing a two-year drought that slashed the Golden Triangle's opium production drastically to some 165 tons in 1979 and 225 tons in 1980. Responding to the market opportunity, heroin production in South West Asia--Afghanistan and Pakistan--suddenly expanded to fill gaps in the global market. By 1979, South West Asian heroin had captured the European market. As Dutch seizures of Southeast Asian heroin dropped from 193 pounds in 1979 to 6.5 in 1980, so European seizures of South West Asian heroin jumped from 911 pounds to 1,980 in the same period. From insignificant levels of heroin use in 1970, Western Europe had developed an addict population estimated at 190,000 to 330,000 users by the end of the decade--a heroin market larger than America's. In 1980-1981, heroin from South West Asia also fueled a new surge of use in the United States. After a quarter-century of rising heroin addiction, America had enjoyed a brief respite during the late-1970s. U.S. diplomacy in Turkey and DEA interdiction in Bangkok had slowed Asia's drug exports, allowing America its first prolonged heroin drought since World War II. By late 1980, however, the flood of heroin from Pakistan and Afghanistan captured 60 percent of the US market and brought a renewed heroin crisis. As heroin-related injuries climbed 25 percent during the year, the US addict population climbed back to 450,000. With an estimated production of 1,600 tons, South West Asia's opium crop was three times larger than the 450 tons that the Golden Triangle had produced in its last good year, 1977-1978. There were signs that the situation would worsen. Without any restraint on production or processing, heroin exports from Pakistan and Afghanistan continued to grow. Rising from about 100 tons in 1971, Afghanistan's opium production reached 300 tons in 1982 and then doubled to 575 tons in the next harvest. Recovering from a two-year failure of the monsoon rains, Southeast Asia's Golden Triangle produced a bumper opium crop in 1981 that would, in the words of the U.S. Attorney-General, provide enough heroin to glut the world market. Other illicit drug sales were also rising. Between 1979 and 1980 alone, street sales of all illicit drugs in the United States increased by 22 percent to $79 billion. While America's heroin imports rose by 7 percent to four tons worth about $8 billion, cocaine supply jumped a remarkable 57 percent to 44 tons worth $29 billion. Despite some initial success, America's drug war had thus produced a paradoxical strengthening of the global narcotics traffic. By the late 1970s, the simplex of the Turkey-Marseilles-New York heroin pipeline had been replaced by a complex of international smuggling routes that tied the disparate zones of First World consumption to Third World narcotics production. With production and consumption now dispersed about the globe, the international traffic was far more resistant to suppression than ever before. Changes in Italy's heroin market during the 1970s are one example of the negative impact of the US drug war. In effect, the Nixon initiative propelled the mafia to a new plateau of development. After US diplomatic pressure forced French police to close Marseilles' heroin laboratories in 1973-74, the Corsican syndicates moved their refining operations across the border into Italy in alliance with the mafia. When the Afghan War started in 1979, moreover, the mafia's role in the Atlantic heroin trade reached an unprecedented peak. By 1981, Pakistani laboratories, with the Sicilian mafia as their intermediaries, were supplying over 60 percent of the US heroin demand and an even greater proportion of Europe's market. By the mid-1980s, an individual mafia cosce, the Badalmenti, was distributing bulk heroin directly across America through the facade of local pizza parlors and accumulating extraordinarily profits. As seen in Operation Green Ice of 1987-88, the Madonia family of Palermo allied with the Medellin cartel to import 596 kilograms of cocaine from Colombia for distribution in Europe. In effect, during the 1980s, the mafia had emerged as the prime narcotics broker between Asia, Europe, and the Americas--exporting Asian heroin to North America and importing Latin American cocaine for distribution across Europe. The influx of heroin profits into Sicily during the 1970s and 1980s expanded the mafia's political power. The sudden wave of high-rise construction in corridors beyond Palermo's central city were financed largely by mafia factions laundering their drug profits, allowing major families to increase their local power. While the modern mafia may have grown Mercury's wings to move drugs across Asia to the Americas, the logic of laundering brought its cosce back home to Palermo to seek a safe haven for narco profits. Such an expanded local base may also have contributed to mafia's growing penetration of the Italian state. With a vast capital from its role as heroin broker, the mafia increased its control over the hidden politics that operated at the intersection of the Italian state, parties, corporations and criminality. Specifically, the better capitalized mafia cosce were able to begin dictating the agenda for public works and the allocation of their illegal profits, reaching beyond the South to the whole of Italy. Heroin trafficking also had negative consequences for the mafia. In the 1980s, Europe emerged as the world's second major drug market, with an explosive growth and unprecedented profits. Between 1982 and 1991, Europe's seizures of heroin increased from 1,355 kilograms to 6,770, while its cocaine seizures jumped from 396 kilograms to 13,773. As heroin leached from the mafia's international routes into local traffic, the number of Italian addicts grew sharply. Between 1977 and 1982, heroin overdose deaths in Italy rose from 40 to 252--a clear indication of a rapidly expanding drug problem. As heroin became a Italian affliction, the mafia's involvement in trafficking contributed to a de facto delegitimation, redoubling public and official opposition. Paralleling these changes in Italy, by the early 1980s the global opiates market had survived the reverses of the previous decade, emerging with the capacity for explosive growth. In part through U.S. interdiction efforts in the 1970s, narcotics consumption had spread to new continents and global production had expanded, rendering the illicit drug trade far more resistant to suppression. The Reagan-Bush drug wars of the 1980s provide further evidence of the counterproductive impact of U.S. efforts at supply-side suppression. During the 1980s, America experienced an unprecedented drug crisis. Between 1982 and 1985, U.S. cocaine consumption more than doubled to 72 tons. As supplies grew and prices dropped between 1981 and 1986, the number of Americans using cocaine rose by 38 percent to 5.8 million. Responding to public panic over cocaine, the Reagan and Bush administrations deployed an escalating repression that drew the military into their drug wars. By early 1991, the Bush White House, citing survey results showing a decline in cocaine abuse, claimed a near-victory in its war on drugs. A closer look at long term trends indicated, however, that the illicit drug trade had again reacted to repression by adjusting in unexpected ways. When Bush's campaign reduced the cachet and quantity of illicit cocaine, the drug market filled the void with a new heroin that appealed to both lower-class crack addicts and middle-class cocaine users. As the war on cocaine escalated in the 1980s, there were signs that the era of experimentation and casual soft drug use was, after twenty years, coming to a close. While casual use faded, the numbers of regular, or hard core, cocaine and heroin users remained high. As Dr. James Van Wert noted in mid 1991, cocaine-related deaths have increased by 10 percent since 1988, daily cocaine users increased by 15 percent. Moreover, there were indications of an overlapping demand for either heroin or cocaine in America's illicit drug culture. Although some local markets showed a preference for a particular drug, such as Miami for cocaine or New York for heroin, there was a growing tendency across the country for regular drug users to take both. Between 1981 and 1985, for example, deaths from speedballs, a mixture of cocaine and heroin, rose by 754 percent. Eclipsed by media focus on cocaine and crack, global heroin production and U.S. consumption rose steadily during the 1980s. World opium production tripled from an estimated 1,500 tons in 1982 to 4,100 in 1989. The U.S. population of heroin addicts had stabilized at about 500,000 in the early 1980s, but there were subsequent signs of rising use. Between 1983 and 1986, the number of heroin-related deaths doubled. Moreover, a new Mexican black tar heroin appeared in the mid 1980s with a high purity and low price that made it competitive with crack in the western United States. While supplies from Mexico and South West Asia waxed and waned, the Golden Triangle increased its share of the US heroin market from 18 percent in 1987 to 45 percent in 1990. As the long drought in the Golden Triangle ended in 1980, farm-gate opium prices in Burma soared from $91 in January 1979 to $399 the following June, boosting production from a low of 160 tons in 1979 to 2,528 tons in 1989. Thus, between 1984 and 1990, Southeast Asia's share of the New York City heroin supply jumped from 5 to 80 percent. Following this significant local trend, in 1993-94, Southeast Asia supplied an estimated 80 percent of the total US market for heroin. Then, in 1989-1990, a flood of Southeast Asian heroin lowered the wholesale price of China white in New York from $100,000 a kilogram to only $60,000, undercutting the cocaine market and creating a new clientele for the drug. Crack addicts seeking an easier withdrawal were reportedly using heroin in large quantities, as were those mixing the two drugs for a more prolonged euphoria. The heroin situation is growing on a daily basis, reported the DEA's heroin specialist in mid 1990. There's big profits, and the production of opium has doubled...It is the tip of the iceberg. Although White House drug policy treated cocaine and heroin as discreet drug markets, there was in fact an overlapping demand for both narcotics. Within America's polydrug culture, Asian heroin could and did supply a shortfall in demand for Latin American cocaine. Increase/decrease in World Opium Production: --During this single decade, world opium production tripled from 1,450 tons in 1981 to a postwar peak of 4,105 tons in 1989. Changes in Opium Cultivation by Region: --South West Asia (Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan) increased its opium production from 800 tons in 1981, to 1,060 in 1989, remaining the world' leading producer until 1986 when it was passed by Southeast Asia. --Production in Southeast Asia's Golden Triangle rose sharply from 650 tons in 1981 to 2,956 tons in 1989, becoming the source of 72 percent of world opium supply. --In Burma, opium production grew from 550 tons in 1981 to 2,528 in 1989, making this single country the source of 62 percent of world opium supply. --Under its new communist regime, Laos increases its opium production from 50 tons in 1981 to 378 tons in 1989. --In Mexico opium production shot from 16 tons in 1982 to 76 tons in 1989. Changes in Quantity of Opium Consumption by Region: --US addict population increased from 200,000 in the late 1970s to 450,000 in 1982. Summary and Analysis of Trends within Epoch: Rise of the Drug Lords: During this period, highland drug lords, for the first time in the history of the traffic, began to act as independent entrepreneurs, responding creatively to market opportunities and taking significant initiatives to expand production and markets for their product. In Burma, for example, opium production increased exponentially from 550 tons in 1981 to 2,500 in 1989, in large part through the efforts of leading warlords like Khun Sa who controlled some 75 percent of the country's heroin production by the late 1980s. Although there, of course numerous underlying ecological and economic factors, Khun Sa's centralization of control over the Shan revolt and his determination to expand heroin production had a significant impact on the global traffic and the US drug problem. Similarly, the emergence of Gulbuddin Hekmatyar as the dominant rebel leader in Afghanistan created a parallel figure of power who could control much of the country's opium production, heroin processing, and export. The capacity of powerful warlords such as these to both produce and export has had a growing influence on Western heroin markets--sending vast new supplies of Burmese heroin to America and giving the Sicilian mafia a major new role as brokers for South West Asian heroin to Europe and the United States. Failure of Tolerance: While bilateral attempts at suppression may compound the problem beyond the target nation, extreme tolerance or simple inaction over drugs within a producing nation had led to an explosive growth in opium cultivation. After 1984-85, the Burmese government capitulated to the drug lords and Khun Sa formed a powerful new opium army--a combination that led to a surge in the country's opium production from 550 tons in 1981 to 2,500 in 1989. Similarly, Afghanistan, the collapse over government control over the countryside since the early 1980s is another apt case of the same proposition. The lesson: if a government abandons any attempt at suppression in its opium areas, the capacity for increased production is restrained only by land and labor. Failure of Drug Wars: If the United States is to purse a strategy of international repression, then focusing on a single drug seems a prescription for long-term failure. By focusing on cocaine in Colombia and, in effect, ignoring heroin in Burma, the United States allowed Burma's opium production to grow without restraint, creating an ample supply of an alternative narcotic for the US market. Global Proliferation of Opium (1989-1994)In the early 1990s, heroin recovered its historic preeminence as a leading illicit narcotic and became something of a world drug. After 1989, Southeast Asia began a sustained heroin export drive to the US that captured over 80 percent of our market by 1993. Simultaneously, the end of Afghan war and repatriation of refugees led to expanded local heroin production. Increasing Central Asia's potential for opium cultivation, the break-up of Soviet Union led to independence for its former Central Asian Republics and, through ethnic links with Afghanistan, an extension of poppy farming into Tajikistan and Uzbekistan. Facilitating the export of Central Asian heroin, the rise of new criminal syndicates in Eastern Europe and Russia, in alliance with Colombian cartels and Sicilian mafia, is creating new smuggling routes that lead from Afghanistan across Russia to the West. Driven by the unequaled profitability of heroin, the Cali cartel has introduced opium cultivation to the northern slopes of the Andes, harvesting some 20 tons annually since 1991. Increased opium supply has led to a dramatic proliferation of heroin abuse around the globe--a phenomenon so vast that we can speak, without hyperbole, of a globalization of heroin consumption. Paralleling the rise of use in established consuming regions like Western Europe and North America, heroin abuse shot upward in new areas--Eastern Europe, southern China, mainland Southeast Asia, India, and Pakistan. Rising from a situation of zero heroin addicts in 1979, Pakistan had, according to official statistics, 5,000 addicts in 1980, 1.2 million in 1985, and 1.7 million in 1993. As cheaper grades of heroin have encouraged mass addiction, intravenous drug use spread across Asia from Pakistan to Thailand, leading to a sudden surge in HIV infection through injection. By early 1994, Burma's estimated 400,000 heroin users had the highest HIV rate of any addict population. Between January and June 1988, the seropositive rate for sample addict populations in Thailand had jumped from 1 to 40 percent, the edge of an epidemic that is leading to an HIV rate now approaching a fifth of the country's population. Increased poppy production in the Golden Triangle is being felt on the streets of American cities. In the 1990s, heroin is back is a drug of choice and Southeast Asia is our main source. Between 1984 and 1990, Southeast Asia's share of the New York City heroin market rose from five to eighty percent. Following these trends, in early 1991 Southeast Asia's contribution to the US heroin supply shot to forty-five percent, up from just eighteen percent in 1987. Today, over eighty percent of all heroin seized in the United States comes from the Golden Triangle. In the early 1990s, as heroin surged into New York in unprecedented quantities, the City's wholesale price per kilo dropped from $100,000 to $60,000--creating a new clientele for this purer, smokeable drug. Ten years ago the purity of street heroin averaged about four percent, but today it has jumped to sixty-five percent. In the first half of 1993, heroin-related hospital emergencies soared to 30,800 nationwide, up forty-four percent over 1992. With high purity allowing smoking or snorting, heroin no long carries the risk of AIDS infection through shared needles, shattering a barrier that had long restrained its rediscovery. Stigmatized during the 1960s as a ghetto drug, the mark of the social marginal, heroin has been reborn in the 1990s as the badge of the hip American nihilist. For those at the cutting edge of a young, creative crowd known as Generation X, heroin is the drug of choice, the symbol of authentic alienation. On the East Coast heroin is back as an old friend, a simple respite from the roller-coaster rip of crack-cocaine and all its craziness. It is on the West Coast that heroin's rebirth as a style statement has been most complete. In Los Angeles, films such as Drug Store Cowboy and My Private Idaho have mythologized the drug, adding an allure to addiction for the city's edge actors. In San Francisco, bands like Pale Horse and Morphine celebrate the drug, making its trademark dragon iconography a fashionable logo for club-cruising gear, stylish caps and T-shirts. Seattle's grunge movement is wrapping the drug in an ambiguous embrace, and the heroin-related deaths of local rock icons Andrew Love and Kurt Cobain give it a cultish degeneracy. Although the surge in global heroin supply in the late 1980s had complex causes, it can be traced, in part, to two key factors--the failure in US interdiction efforts and a larger complex of changes springing from the end of the Cold War. Specifically, the increasing opium harvests in Burma and Afghanistan, America's major suppliers, were, in part, the legacy of Cold War operations past and present. Just as US support for Nationalist Chinese (KMT) troops in the Shan States increased Burma's opium crop in the 1950s, so Western covert aid to the mujaheddin guerrillas expanded opium output in Afghanistan and linked Pakistan's nearby heroin laboratories to the world market. After serving as the sites of major Cold War operations that intensified indigenous ethnic insurgencies, Burma and Afghanistan ranked, in 1993 estimates, as the world's first and second largest suppliers of illicit heroin. After Soviet support for the Kabul regime and US arms shipments to the rebels ended in January 1992, Afghanistan's role as a major heroin supplier increased sharply. Indeed, in late 1991 the United Nations anti-drug commission had reported that the Afghan guerrillas, anticipating a cut in US covert support, were already planting a greatly expanded opium crop as an alternative source of finance. There is, moreover, a strong economic and ecological logic drawing Afghanistan into a sudden and sustained increase in opium cultivation. In 1992-93, the four to six million Afghan refugees who have lived for a decade in camps along Pakistan's Northwest Frontier began returning to war ravaged farms with less than a thousand dollars in UN resettlement funds. Since much of Afghanistan's agriculture involves perennial crops that take several years to regenerate after damage or neglect, Afghan farmers have an obvious need for a profitable annual crop. Even without the disruption of war, opium has long been the country's most viable crop. In 1972, a US cabinet committee reported that Afghan farmers made $300-$360 per hectare from opium, twice the average of $175 for fruit: There is no substitute crop--except for hashish--that can...provide anywhere near an equal income. With the recent eruption of civil war in Kabul, Afghanistan does not have government to negotiate either foreign aid or trade agreements for the export of primary products, so its farmers have fallen back on an established illicit commodity with ready markets and an informal laissez-passer at every customs barrier. Since opium cultivation is already well established, heroin processing is skilled, and syndicate connections with Europe are in place, the poppy is becoming is fast becoming a major economic support for rural Afghanistan in this epoch of economic crisis. A recent UN report published in Pakistan claimed that Afghanistan's 1991 opium crop was already 2,000 tons, while privately UN anti-drug officials predicted a vast Afghan crop of some 4,000 tons for 1992--a harvest large enough to double the world's entire illicit opium supply. Although unseasonable rainfall during harvest destroyed much of that crop, the UN's field agents still estimate, often privately, that within the next two to three years Afghanistan has the potential to produce bumper crops of 3,000 to 4,000 tons of raw opium. If these estimates are correct, the Afghan crop will soon exceed Southeast Asia's, and nearly double the supply of heroin for the world market. Indeed, in the US State Department's conservative estimates, Afghanistan's opium production increased from 415 tons in 1990 to either 685 or 900 tons by 1993. As in Burma twenty years before, Afghanistan experienced a mix superpower confrontation and local ethnic conflict that facilitated formation of drug networks that can continue to grow long after Cold War intervention had ceased. Moreover, by attacking heroin trafficking in separate sectors of Asia's extended opium zone in isolation, the DEA inadvertently influenced the market in ways that diverted heroin exports from America to Europe, and also shifted opium production from the South West Asia to Southeast Asia and back again--raising both global consumption and production with each move. Compounding this problem, White House fixation with Latin America's cocaine traffic diverted resources from the interdiction of Asian heroin. By using a massive interdiction effort to cut supplies of Latin American cocaine without reducing the overall U.S. demand for drugs, the White House created a void in the cocaine/crack market that was soon filled by increased supplies of Southeast Asia heroin. Rising without any threat of disruption by law enforcement, the Asian heroin trade expanded during the 1980s to provide ample supplies of an alternative narcotic when cocaine sales finally declined. Similarly, in Latin America itself, Colombia's Cali cartel recognized the new market opportunity and in 1991 introduced opium into the northern slopes of the Andes. Within a year Colombia was harvesting 20 tons of opium, half of Mexico's output of 40 tons. Since the United States only consumes about 6 tons of heroin per annum, or 60 tons of opium, Mexico and Colombia combined could supply the entire US heroin market. In the mid 1990s, the global narcotics trade, operating with the dynamics of a resilient commerce, seems highly resistant to any renewed war on drugs, no matter how extreme the strategy. Since ongoing US and UN policies seem incapable of restraining the opium trade, there is reason to be pessimistic about trends in the global drug problem over the medium term. Although any prediction about a complex social phenomenon like drugs is prone to error, there are indications that we are at the threshold of a major change in the world drug market. In its recent spread across Central Asia, the opium poppy may have found a natural home where economy, ecology, and society may encourage an quantum increase in production during the next decade. Just as Szechwan Province once produced 10,000 tons of opium, so Afghanistan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan are capable, individually or severally, of comparable harvests. Assuming that production in Southeast Asia continues, there is no reason that world opium supply cannot double from the present 4,000 tons in five years and double again in another five. Looking into the future of the opium trade, there seem four apparent trends: Increase/decrease in World Opium Production: --During this five-year period, world opium production dropped slightly from 4,105 tons in 1989 to 3,969 tons in 1993. Changes in Opium Cultivation by Region: --In Southeast Asia's Golden Triangle opium production dropped slightly from 2,956 tons in 1989 to 2,797 tons in 1993. --Burma's opium production remained constant, changing from 2,528 tons in 1989 to 2,575 in 1993. --In Southwest Asia (Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Lebanon) production was constant, changing from 1,060 in 1989 to 1,099 in 1993. --In Afghanistan opium production rose from 585 tons in 1989 to more than 900 tons in 1993. --Starting opium cultivation, Colombia's production remained largely unchanging, dropping slightly from 27 tons in 1991 to 20 tons in 1993. Changes in Quantity of Opium Consumption by Region: --In the United States, the heroin addict population rose from 450,000 in 1982 to some 750,000 in 1993. --Rising from low levels in the late 1970s, Burma's estimated addict population reached an estimated 400,000 in early 1994. --In Thailand, the estimated population of heroin addicts rose from 125,000 in 1986 to 375,000 in 1993. Summary and Analysis of Trends within Epoch: Globalization: In the early 1990s, world opium supply is growing without any apparent restraint. Since all opium produced is always consumed, rising supply is now a powerful force driving a sharp increase in world heroin consumption, creating powerful demands that may, in turn, yield further production increases in Latin America or Central Asia. In the 1990s, we are perhaps witnessing a recurrence of the pattern first evidenced in late 18th Century China: once mass opiate addiction is introduced to a market, demand becomes nearly insatiable and serves to stimulate further increases in global supply. Opium Production & Consumption: In the past decade, both production and consumption of opiates have increased in established zones and spread quickly into new areas. Prognosis: If current trends continue, there is no reason that world opium production, and consumption, should not double every five years into the foreseeable future. Books Opium: A HistoryTraces opium's history from the first evidence of poppy cultivation (possibly as early as 4,000 B.C.) to the drug wars of today. Explores its uses in different cultures, its roles in British and Chinese political affairs, its use by artists and musicians, and its horrifying ramifications for addicts. Written with admirable attention to detail. Informative book details opium and its derivatives such as morphine and heroin. It is fascinating to learn about the effect this drug has had on various cultures such as China and India. Anyone wanting to obtain information for academic purposes or just to learn more about this drug will enjoy this book. Opium: A HistoryOpium: |
