Red China — Top Drug Producer
When U.S. Treasury agents spot a spate of counterfeit bills suddenly appearing at various stores, do they concentrate their efforts on catching the little guys who pass and receive the phony bills? Or do they follow the trail as fast as they can to the hideway where the counterfeiters have holed up with their money-making machine?
When our Treasury officials nab a street vendor of bootlegged booze, do they close their file on a job well done? Or do they pursue the clues until they confiscate the still?
The answers are obvious. It wouldn’t make sense if the Treasury agents ignored the source of illegal commodities and instead spent all their energies and funds on arresting the petty pushers and issuing leaflets to warn innocent citizens of the danger of “getting hooked” by counterfeit bills or illegal whiskey.
Why, then, do our law enforcement officials concentrate all their efforts on the street peddlers, middlemen, and victims of illegal drugs, but decline to follow the trail to its source? Yet, it is an official “no-no” of the Nixon Administration to mention the obvious fact that heroin comes from Red China.
Somehow, our war against drugs is run just like the Vietnam War. Every newspaper and TV proclaims U.S. bombing raids. But what do they add up to? Sending a giant multi-million dollar B-52 to knock out a truck driving down a country dirt road or a foot bridge across a tiny creek. All the while, the enemy’s tanks, trucks and munitions, concentrated in easy targets by the Haiphong docks, are left safe and secure to attack U.S. servicemen and our friends.
Just as the dredge and the docks at Haiphong have been a “privileged sanctuary” off-limits to U.S. bombers during eight years of war, so the poppy fields and heroin plants of Red China are a “privileged sanctuary” off-limits even to criticism by U.S. officials. Under President Nixon’s new policy of being nice to Red China, no Government official is permitted to criticize Red China’s manufacture of heroin to hook Americans. This problem was not on the agenda when President Nixon met with Mao and Chou.
Pretending that heroin doesn’t come from Red China is like pretending that Honda motorcycles don’t come from Japan or Volkswagens from Germany. Heroin is made from opium — which comes principally and characteristically from mainland China.
“Especially for American Soldiers”
On October 23, 1971, the Associated Press reported on a new book written by Mohammed Hassanein Heikal who is editor of Cairo’s semiofficial Al Ahram newspaper and was a confidant and close adviser of the late President Nasser of Egypt. Heikal told about a June 1965 conference at Alexandria, Egypt between Nasser and Premier Chou En-lai of Red China. Heikal, who personally attended the conference, quoted Chou discussing the demoralization of American soldiers in Vietnam and then telling Nasser: “Some of them are trying opium, and we are helping them. We are planting the best kinds of opium, especially for the American soldiers in Vietnam . . . The effect which this demoralization is going to have on the United States will be far greater than anyone realizes.”
The Administration has tried to discount the Heikal book but has produced no evidence to dispute it. He is a newspaper publisher who is considered reliable, and his facts were accepted and published as news by the London Sunday Telegraph and the Associated Press. Even the Washington Post said Heikal’s revelations have “the ring of truth.” The most important proof, however, is the factual record of the tremendous increase in drugs, drug addiction, and drug deaths in Vietnam.
The Senate Subcommittee on Alcoholism and Narcotics on June 22, 1971 released data on military drug abuse which proves that the Reds switched to a drug offensive in Vietnam shortly after the 1970 invasion of Cambodia destroyed some of their war materiel. Large quantities of high quality heroin began arriving in Vietnam in the summer and fall of 1970. Uniform packaging and refining indicated that this heroin came from a single source. It was 90-100 per cent pure.
The most remarkable part about this sudden influx, however, is that it sold for about $20 per ounce instead of the going price of $4,000 per ounce in the United States. According to columnist John Chamberlain’s analysis, it would seem that someone was willing to forego easy profits in return for widespread distribution and consequent addiction.
The evidence indicates that this drug offensive was very successful. A high Veterans Administration official told the publication Battle Line in April 1972 that the number of special hospitals authorized by the Defense Department to treat addicted GIs rose from 0 to 32 in the past two years, and that 12 more special hospitals are scheduled for fiscal 1973.
The U.S. command in Vietnam has released data showing that 35,000 to 45,000 servicemen in Vietnam were using hard drugs last year. There have been days in Vietnam when more American soldiers died from Chinese drugs than from combat.
Philadelphia’s assistant district attorney, John Steinberg, went to Vietnam to investigate the drug scene as a special consultant to the Senate Subcommittee investigating juvenile delinquency. He found that prior to 1970, deaths of American servicemen from drug overdoses averaged two per month. After the heavy heroin influx following the Cambodia invasion, there was a dramatic increase. In August 1970 there were 45 drug deaths, in October there were 60. In the period between the Cambodian invasion and the end of 1970, 164 U.S. servicemen died from drug overdoses. During the first quarter of 1971, more than 3,600 U.S. servicemen sought help to overcome heroin dependence.
Skeleton in the China Closet
Despite the euphoria about Red China generated by President Nixon’s precedent-shattering visit, Red China remains the world’s number-one producer of heroin. Dr. Stefan Possony, distinguished scholar of the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, says that 40 to 60 per cent of the international illegal 18,000-ton heroin market “can come only from mainland China.” There is, of course, no legal heroin market; it is banned from medical use by international treaty.
Estimates from many different sources about the volume of narcotics exported by Red China are mutually corroborative. From 1952 to 1957, the annual production and sale was roughly 2,000 tons. It increased to about 8,000 a year between 1958 and 1964. After 1965, the total shot up to an annual 10,000 tons.
Ralph de Toledano reported the remarkable statistic from the Hong Kong Narcotics Bureau that the drugs coming from Red China seized by the Hong Kong police were 1,000 per cent greater in 1971 than in 1970, although no greater efforts were made at intercepting the illegal traffic. In 1970, the Hong Kong police seized 1,400 pounds of narcotics coming from Red China; in 1971, seizures rose to more than 13,000 pounds. There is every reason to believe that the illegal drugs eluding the police likewise rose proportionately.
Father Raymond de Jaegher, a Belgian priest who has spent several decades in China and Southeast Asia, and has thousands of contacts there, recently gave a Congressional committee the locations of 30 heroin-producing refineries and 176 giant opium farms in China.
An Australian report issued November 11, 1971 by the Australian Citizens for Freedom, said: “At least 65 per cent of the world’s illicit narcotics come from the Communist-occupied Chinese mainland.”
Additional proof of Red China’s major involvement in the profitable heroin traffic is provided in a new book called Chinese Opium Narcotics by James Turnbull, published in London by the Foreign Affairs Publishing Company.
The Washington reporter, Paul Scott, disclosed a high-ranking defector from Hanoi who furnished eyewitness accounts of opium production in North Vietnam and Red China. Nguyen Ngoe Mai, who was a Communist Party journalist for the Hanoi newspaper, Tien Phong, revealed that North Vietnam is producing massive quantities of raw opium for export to Red China and the Soviet Union, where it is processed for distribution through the world. He told interrogators that the raw opium is transported to Hanoi, then flown to China to be processed into heroin.
The ‘Death Trade’
Now look at the financial side of Red China’s illegal drug traffic. In 1952, Red China’s opium production was $150 million. On September 21, 1964, Victor Riesel reported that it had climbed to $500 million. That same month, Pravda reported: “The Mao regime is the biggest producer of opium, morphine and heroin in the world. . . . About half a billion dollars every year come into the hands of the recent leaders of China from the sale of illicit drugs.” By 1970, Red China’s annual opium crop was estimated by numerous informed sources to be $800 million.
On June 10, 1971, Paul Scott reported that intelligence estimates circulated in Eastern Europe “put the worth of Communist China’s yearly opium production in the billions of dollars. This ‘death trade’, as it is known among U.S. narcotics officials, is believed to be Peking’s most profitable export. Earnings from these opium sales are now being used by Communist China to purchase Western goods, especially heavy machinery, aircraft, transportation equipment and food grains. Other millions in profits from the illegal dope sales go to finance Peking’s subversive activities throughout the free world.”
Columnist Scott went on to report that the opium production in mainland China is carried on at what are known as “special” and “ordinary” farms. The special opium farms are “state” enterprises managed by garrison troops or government organizations such as the agriculture department and scientific institutions. The ordinary farms are managed by local communes under the supervision of the agriculture department. In order to improve the quality of opium and increase its production, the Communist authorities have assigned various scientific institutes to conduct research and experiments.
The wealth of specific information that Mr. Scott provided is convincing. He said: “The Academy of Science, the Institute of Agricultural Science, Anhwei Agricultural College, Kweichow Agricultural College, Yunnan University, and several other colleges in Yunnan Province have all been assigned research work. More than 30 ‘special products refineries’ have been established in such cities as Peking, Tientsin, Dairen, Mukden , Cinchow, Kopekou, Yenchi, Shanghai, Chekiang, Hankou, Sikiang, Tiber, Sikan, Kunming, and Kwangtung. These refineries manufacture opium products, such as morphine and heroin.”
Continuing, Mr. Scott said: “To improve the refining process, Communist authorities have secretly sought out experienced opium technicians among the international gangsters, many of whom had worked for Japanese opium refineries during the Japanese occupation of China. The Chinese Communists have established what is known as ‘Special Domestic Product Trade Company’ to handle the export of its opium. The company’s headquarters is in downtown Peking and it has branches in 30 other Chinese cities. For all intent and purpose, the company is a smuggling organization under the supervision of the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and the Foreign Trade Commission.
“The commercial attachés in Peking’s embassies in foreign countries take charge of the sale and distribution of the opium. Peking uses various methods for smuggling the opium to the free world. For example, seamen and pilots are used as carriers and secret places on board ships are designed to hide the drugs. Small fishing boats are used for transportation -to Hong Kong and Macao for trans-shipment to other countries. Goods are unloaded at quiet coastal spots or left in the water with floats waiting to be picked up by divers. In recent months, Peking has begun using submarines to deliver goods to their destinations.”
A History of Heroin
Red China’s involvement in the heroin traffic has been known to informed persons and frankly admitted for many years.
Mr. Lawrence Sullivan, Coordinator of Information for the U.S. House of Representatives, said on December 13, 1961: “For the first time in human history, the systematic production and distribution of narcotic drugs has become an organized government monopoly in Red China. In ten years, Mao Tse-tung has built up a virtual monopoly in opium, heroin and morphine.”
The 1966 edition of the Encyclopedia Americana stated: “It is to be assumed that even if the production of opium is forbidden, that country [mainland China] is still by far the most important producer.”
One of the world’s most reliable and experienced authorities in the field of hard drugs is Mr. Harry Anslinger, the director of the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs from 1949 to 1962. For years he has pointed out the major involvement of Red China in the worldwide production and distribution of heroin. Back in 1955 he told the Senate Judiciary Committee that “Red China has singled out the United States as a primary target or its illicit traffic in opium and heroin. Spreading narcotic addiction and obtaining funds for political purposes through the sale of heroin and opium is not just the policy of one man in the Communist regime. It is the policy of the entire Communist regime in mainland China.” In his 1961 book called The Murderers, he warned that “large quantities of heroin have reached the United States from Communist China.”
Later in an address to the United Nations, Mr. Anslinger stated : “The Communist regime of mainland China is distributing drugs abroad and selling heroin and opium in large quantities to the free countries of the world.” He called Red China’s traffic in opium and heroin “a formidable and far-reaching plot to gain foreign exchange and at the same time to demoralize the people of the Free World. Millions of dollars obtained from the sale of opium and other narcotics are used by the Communist regime in mainland China to finance political causes and to finance agents operating in free countries.”
The publication Battle Line quotes Dr. Robert Baird, a New York drug expert with 24 years experience in the field of combating addiction, as saying that not only are the Chinese Reds responsible for the drug problem among U.S. servicemen in Asia, but the Chinese are now preparing to use hard drugs to demoralize the American populace, especially young people and for ideological purposes.
The Heroin Epidemic
The United States is “in the midst of an epidemic of hard-drug usage.” This is the conclusion of Mr. Myles Ambrose, head of the Justice Department’s Office for Drug Abuse Law Enforcement, as quoted in U.S. News & World Report on April 3, 1972. He gave these staggering figures proving a tenfold increase. In 1960, there were 55,000 heroin addicts in the United States. Today, the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs says there are 560,000 heroin addicts. If this rate of increase continues, we will soon have a nation with millions of heroin addicts.
The saddest part about these figures is that most of these addicts are only 18 to 25 years old.
Hard drugs are now one of the two top public health problems in the United States. During 1971 in New York City alone, 1,100 died from heroin – most of them between the ages of 15 to 22. A New York Times news story on March 8, 1970 reported five unrelated deaths from heroin in a single day — one was age 15, one was age 17, one was age 19, one was age 23, and one was age 28.
One reason for the spiraling of heroin addiction is that, as Mr. Ambrose so graphically described it, heroin is “the most contagious disease there is.” He said that people become heroin addicts because “heroin is available, and they know a heroin addict.” Art Linkletter confirmed this in the April 1972 issue of Columbia: “Everybody on drugs is a missionary for drugs. One of the terrible things about drugs is that it induces the people who use narcotics to want everybody to use them. They become the greatest salesmen in the world.”
In addition to its preeminence as a public health problem, many experts consider heroin also to be the number-one cause of crime because addicts have to steal to feed their expensive habit.
Hear No Evil, See No Evil
The Nixon Administration position, as given by State Department official Marshall Green in March 1972, is that “there is no hard evidence that the Chinese Communist government is involved in the covert drug traffic from the Asian mainland.” On June 30, 1971, another State Department official, William D. Blair, Jr., said: “As far as we are aware, opium is not legally grown in the People’s Republic of China and none is exported by the Chinese Communist authorities.”
The highly-respected scholar, Dr. Stefan T. Possony of the Hoover Institution, recently charged that “by alleging there is no evidence the Chinese Communists are involved in the international heroin traffic, the Administration is creating for itself a serious credibility gap.” Referring to statements by the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs that excuse Red China from any blame, Dr. Possony said: “This BNDD talk indicates momentous incompetence, or else it is intended to deceive.”.
On October 14, 1971, the Manchester Union Leader quoted an official of the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs as saying, “The word is out – no one is to offer one bit of criticism on China’s participation in the drug traffic — these are orders from the White House itself.” He said he would “lose my job in 24 hours” if his name were disclosed.
If the State Department had said that Red China supplies only 30 per cent of the world’s heroin instead of 60 per cent, and then produced some evidence to back up this claim, it might have made a credible press release. But to flatly deny that the Red Chinese government is even “involved,” and to claim that “opium is not legally grown” and that “none” is exported, can only contribute, as Dr. Possony said, to the widening credibility gap. It leads us to believe that truth is being sacrificed for the sake of saving Mao and Chou from embarrassment.
Other Administration spokesmen argue that “the Maoists are much too puritanical to go in for drugs,” and that Red China “has no drug problem of its own.” Those who understand Marxist and Maoist dialectics know that it is perfectly consistent for them to prohibit drugs (and pornography) for their own subjects, but promote them in the countries they are trying to subvert.
The implication by State Department spokesmen, such as Louis J. Link in a letter of October 27, 1971, that private “individuals” are peddling dope without the knowledge of the Red Chinese government is too ridiculous to be taken seriously. Anything which goes on in mainland China is under the rigid control and supervision and direction of the ruling Red regime.
In refutation of the claim of some Administration spokesmen that most heroin comes from Turkey rather than Red China, Dr. Robert W. Baird, president of HAVEN (Help Addicts Voluntarily End Narcotics), stated that this “is an out and out myth and is typical of many people who head drug programs who are totally oblivious to the real fact of drug addiction . . . . There is no doubt in my mind that the leading producer of heroin in the world is undoubtedly Red China.”
Dr. Jerome H. Jaffe, the head of the newly-created Federal Special Action Office for Drug Abuse Prevention, has been making snide remarks about the intelligence information supplied to this country by Taiwan. Presumably, according to Dr. Jaffe’s reasoning, Red China must be believed but Taiwan must be disbelieved. Such reasoning is unhappily reminiscent of the State Department blindness during the summer and fall of 1962 when it rejected the accurate intelligence supplied by Cuban refugees that the Soviets had put nuclear missiles in Cuba. Obviously, the Cuban refugees had contacts in Cuba who supplied accurate information, just as our friends on Taiwan have sources of information on the mainland today — and we disbelieve such first-hand intelligence at our own risk.
The closest that anyone in the Administration has come to implying even in a most guarded way that all the truth is not laid on the table was in the April 3, 1972 issue of U.S. News and World Report. The magazine editors asked Mr. Myles Ambrose of the Justice Department who are the “bigwigs behind all this importation of heroin?” In reply he said: “There are numerous conspiracies involved.” He then named the Mafia, “a considerable number of blacks and Cubans,” and “other groups.”
In order to avoid getting into the subject of Red China’s involvement, the Administration is concentrating its efforts on “street-level” enforcement against petty pushers and on educational work to warn addicts. Mr. Ambrose candidly states in U.S. News & World Report: “We are restructuring some of the activities of the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs to bring agents back into the so-called street-level operation, which they have not been concentrating on.” Mr. Ambrose says nothing about cutting off the major source from Red China.
What To Do
The United States has many weapons to deal with the Red China drug traffic — if we want to.
1) We should stop sweeping this problem under the rug in the vain hope it will go away if we pretend it doesn’t exist. We should stop pretending it is a domestic problem when it is really a foreign problem. As Dr. Stefan Possony said, “misinformation about Maoist heroin cannot possibly be in the American national interest.”
2) We should use our satellite reconnaissance to photograph pictures of the poppy fields and heroin refineries which will prove their existence even to the doubting Thomases.
3) Last August 5, the Nixon Administration lobbied through Congress a reversal in former U.S. policy in order to allow the Export-Import Bank to give loans to Red China from the American taxpayers money. China is salivating at the mere thought of U.S. trade financed with U.S. dollars. All the Administration would have to do is to say, “Not a penny of U.S. trade until all exports of opium and heroin cease.”
4) The United States made a tragic mistake in permitting Red China to come into the United Nations in October 1971. By bringing the issue of heroin traffic out onto the UN agenda, we might salvage some good out of this mistake.
Let your Senators and Congressmen know that you want them to act NOW to stop heroin from Red China from reaching Americans here and our servicemen in Vietnam. Let’s stop this foolish policy of trade and aid to the world’s number-one drug producer. What benefit can we get from Red China that could ever compensate for the ruination of the lives of the 560,000 Americans who are today living in the hell of heroin?
