Opium (33 page)

The BNDD and US Customs received substantially larger budgets. Agent numbers increased severalfold. Political pressure was applied to other governments to adopt a more hard-headed attitude towards opium production and trafficking. Nixon augmented a Special Action Office for Drug Abuse Prevention and, a year later, the Office of Drug Abuse Law Enforcement and the Office of National Narcotics Intelligence. So many different organisations were unwieldy so, in 1973, the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) was created with all the functions of the various agencies rolled into one.

The DEA's mission included – and still includes – enforcing federal drugs laws, freezing and seizing drug traffickers' assets, liaising with Interpol and foreign enforcement agencies and furthering co-operation and co-ordination of international, federal, state and local law enforcement programmes. It is, furthermore, established on a world-wide footing with agents in overseas offices.

Before 1940, American narcotics agents operated only inside America. In the late 1940s, a few agents started to work overseas out of American embassies and consulates. By 1995, the DEA had over seventy-five offices in fifty countries. In those from which opium or heroin originate, DEA agents are almost paramilitary personnel who actively participate with local enforcement agencies, dressed in camouflage combat clothing and armed with the latest automatic weapons. Their role is to arrest opium traffickers and producers, seize evidence and destroy heroin laboratories. The DEA is also at the forefront of the scientific war against drugs: for example, the Heroin Signature Program is capable of identifying the geographic source of a heroin sample by the recognition of specific chemical characteristics. The organisation has an official annual budget of nearly $1000 million: it has been estimated though by some observers that, in total, counting every aspect of its work both nationally and internationally, the US war on drugs is a $13.3 billion dollar a year effort.

Initiatives created by the DEA have proved to be as effective as they have been innovative. One of these is called asset-sharing. When DEA agents succeed in seizing a drug trafficker's assets, the income is shared with those countries which assisted in the case on the condition the sum earned (which can be substantial) is spent on furthering the fight against drugs. This system of co-operation has proven very popular with almost every participating country. Only Britain has ever rejected the share offer, saying the money earned would be placed in the general exchequer and spent as the government saw fit: on that occasion, the DEA withheld what amounted to several million dollars. Another initiative, within the USA, is the Demand Reduction Program, based on the obvious fact that demand drives the drug business – if no one was buying, then no one would be selling. The user is targeted, not with custodial penalties but with social ones which strike home harder. For example, in Tennessee, a juvenile convicted of a drug offence loses his driving licence, even if the drug offence was unconnected to a motor vehicle.

For a while, in the 1970s, the DEA had some outstanding successes which resulted in the American addict population dropping from 500,000 to 200,000. But then, in 1979, there was a new heroin importation explosion. Even the DEA was swamped. Addiction soared to former peaks. New laws were passed with mandatory prison terms, including an Anti-Drug Abuse Act (1986), and the American police forces stepped up arrests and convictions of traffickers, doubling the country's prison population in the 1980s.

Today, the DEA operates what is called its Kingpin strategy. This concentrates American and international law enforcement against key personnel and organisations in the global drug underworld, deliberately seeking to destabilise their businesses and generally making it difficult for them to operate at full efficiency: in other words, they legally hassle them and keep the illegal trade on the hop.

Additionally, the USA has a National Narcotics Intelligence Consumers Committee (NNICC), set up in 1978 to collect, analyse, disseminate and evaluate drug related intelligence from both foreign and domestic sources. NNICC plays a seminal part in providing the data which informs the development of drug policy, the deployment of anti-drug resource and operational tactics.

Despite all the efforts of the DEA, the USA has a huge drugs problem, exacerbated by the number of street pushers who are themselves addicts. It is a known fact when heroin addiction reaches a certain stage, the addict finds it advantageous to become a dealer rather than feed his habit with other criminal activity. The trade therefore has to expand to self-perpetuate itself: a vicious circle is formed. Heroin addiction has declined amongst the middle class but it is rampant in inner-city areas amongst the poor, blue-collar workers and unskilled labourers. In Harlem, New York City, where over 60 per cent of households have incomes below the federal poverty line, it is hardly surprising heroin is rife for it not only alleviates the drudgery of life but it also affords a lucrative way out of the poverty trap. Many poor youths turn to the drug trade to make a living for heroin, whilst it will not make a street dealer rich, will bring him in more than many a legitimate wage packet might.

Urban drug dealing inevitably leads to high crime rates. Gangs fight for territory. Automatic weapons are readily available. Drug related murders are commonplace. By 1989, the situation was so bad President Bush followed Nixon's example. He announced a new $7.8 billion programme, declaring war on Latin America's
Narcos,
the narcotics barons, raising the budgets of the DEA, the US Coast Guard, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and other agencies and giving hundreds of millions of dollars in aid to Peru, Bolivia and Colombia. In December of that year, he ordered US troops into Panama to capture General Manuel Noriega who was taken to Miami to face cocaine smuggling charges. This was a new and important development for it was the first time regular military units had overtly joined the battle.

It has been reckoned at least 50 per cent of all crimes committed in American cities are drug related: this figure may be considerably higher in inner-city zones, although in rural areas it is significantly lower. An article in
Newsweek
as far back as 1971 stated that New York was in a virtual state of siege. The city, the article declared, was being killed by heroin and there were other cities on the death list. The situation is little changed today. Drugs are still at the forefront of the American consciousness, as opinion polls show: most Americans consider drugs the greatest problem facing their nation.

11

DORA, Isabella and Olivia

Over the Atlantic in Britain, the rate at which the problem developed had been slower and the manner different.

A shifting Chinese community, mainly seamen on leave between vessels, had existed in Britain since the eighteenth century, centred almost entirely upon the London East End boroughs of Stepney and Poplar, close to the docklands, where it occupied just two streets, Pennyfields and Limehouse Causeway. Its numbers were insignificant. By 1861, the resident Chinese population of the entire country was 147, rising to 665 over 20 years. Several opium dens existed but they catered exclusively for Chinese.

Few non-Orientals ever went into a den. Indeed, as with modern London Chinese gambling establishments, outsiders were positively discouraged. The only foreigners to enter them were Victorian sensationalist press journalists looking for sleaze, corruption and vicarious excitement or exotic danger. What they wanted to find, they found. Dens were described quite uncensoriously as humble, wretched places but they were not regarded as sinister: they were objects of curiosity and opium smoking was considered as little more than an exotic foible of John Chinaman.

This concept is well described in an essay about a London den at Palmer's Folly, published in the
Daily News
during 1864, which reads:

A dreadful place … We become conscious of a peculiar smell of burning, the aroma from which is not unpleasant … We push at a half open front door, and at once find ourself in a small, half-lit, shabby room on the ground floor, in which a large French bedstead occupies the most conspicuous place. The smell has grown in intensity as we neared this house, and, once here, it becomes trying both to eyes and head … On the bed, which is devoid of sheets or counterpane, and has its pillows and bolster placed lengthwise along its sides, are three Chinamen, sprawled round a small japan tray, in the centre of which is a tumbler half full of a thick brown syrup, of the consistency of treacle, some brass thimbles, one or two bits of wire about the size known as ‘blankets'; a burning taper and some pipes … The old Chinaman on the end of the bed nearest the window seems in a half trance, though he smokes vigorously, and in his cadaverous face, painfully-hollow cheeks, deeply-sunken eyes, open vacuous mouth, and teeth discoloured, decayed, and, it seems, loose as castanets, you read the penalties of opium smoking. This is the proprietor of the house, whose preparation of the drug is so exceptionally skilful that Chinamen come from all parts of London to patronise him. Before you hastily form a judgement as to the wreck of vitality you think you see, learn that the old man is seventy-five years old, that he lives quite alone, and is his own housemaid, scullion, and cook; that he is diligent in his business, such as it is; rises daily at 5 a.m., and is celebrated throughout his dingy neighbourhood for the energetic particularity with which he scrubs and washes pots, pans, and house, and for the scrupulous care wherewith he purchases and prepares his food … Beside the bed, there are chairs, a table, cooking utensils, and a clothes-line stretching from one corner of the room to the other. On this hang the coats and waistcoats, collars, and cravats of three young fellows … They are evidently of a respectable class of Chinamen, they are clean in their persons, and both socks and shirts are of commendable purity … The young fellow with the particularly jolly smile … shows us how a pipe is charged, lighted, and smoked. One of the blanket pins is thrust into the syrup, and then twisted round and round in the flame until all the stringiness hardens down, and a pill-like globule can be inserted in the small hole in the thick barrel of the pipe. This is lit, and finished in a series of vigorous puffs, which are apparently continued for about a minute. The half-tumbler of black-brown syrup is opium duly prepared for smoking, and is worth twenty-five shilling, while the thimbles at its side each hold a shilling's worth … Each man helps himself, potters about the little place and lounges on the bed with perfect freedom … The club-night at, say, the ‘Three Jolly Pigeons', when the grocer, the baker, the parish clerk and the small farmer meet to chat over the gossip of the week, with pipe and glass, is a fair English illustration of the manners, demeanour, and general free-and-easiness of this batch of smokers.

A dreadful place it might have been yet malefic and vice-ridden it was not: the opium den was, as the writer put it, little more to the Chinese than the public house was to his English working-class contemporary.

Yet, as in America, attitudes began to change with the start of legislation, with the Pharmacy Act of 1868 and the establishment of the Society for the Suppression of the Opium Trade. Public opinion was swayed, equating opium with something evil.

This attitude was latched on to by a number of popular authors. In Charles Dickens's last novel,
The Mystery of Edwin Drood,
published in 1870, there is a powerful indictment of opium. The main character – one cannot call him the hero, for he becomes one of Dickens's most fascinatingly dislikeable characters – is John Jasper, the choirmaster of Cloisterham Cathedral and an opium addict. The novel was unfinished, but the way in which it was developing shows how Jasper's double life was catching up with him and highlights his despicable side. He courts the fiancée of his disappeared and presumed dead nephew, Edwin Drood, whom it is likely the novel would have proved Jasper had killed.

For Dickens, opium was a symbol of degeneracy, of a surrender of basic human values, a corruption of decency. A man of double standards – Dickens proclaimed a healthy Christian morality but maintained a secret mistress and a bastard child – it is not remarkable he wrote so powerfully and critically about an aspect of society of which, like infidelity, he had some insider's knowledge. In the last years of his life, when he was writing the story of Edwin Drood, he frequently took laudanum, and not just to relieve pain. On a reading tour of America in 1867, he dosed himself to calm his nerves after an emotive public reading of the death of Tiny Tim from
A Christmas Carol
and used it for some months as a cough mixture. Furthermore, Dickens researched the story by visiting the slums of London with the police where he saw an old crone smoking opium from a home-made pipe, a scene he used in the novel.

Dickens's novel introduced an intolerance of opium and opium dens but, in 1891, a new novel appeared in which an opium den was used as the setting for the dramatic, blasphemous revelation of man's inner evil. It was Oscar Wilde's famous tale,
The Picture of Dorian Gray.
Gray, the main character, lives two parallel lives. He is on one plane a witty, handsome and charming man yet he seduces young women and corrupts young men. The portrait of himself as a young man ages as time goes by whilst Gray himself does not. The mockery of the picture prompts him to murder its artist, by which act he sees himself as set apart from civilised society. In an attempt to escape the realisation of the killing, he goes to a London opium den ‘where one could buy oblivion'. In the den, however, Gray meets not oblivion but two of his former despoiled companions driven to addiction by his actions. One is intent on killing Gray but he does not: he cannot believe the man standing before him is forty years old. Gray is spared, saved by the picture which does his ageing for him, but he is reminded of his past and realises there is no escape from it. The opium, from which there was also no escape, is an image of entrapment: no amount of opium can alter the truth.