Heroin Diplomacy

DRUGS Heroin Diplomacy Though heroin is smuggled into the U.S. by a bewildering variety of secret and devious means, its route before reaching American ports is remarkably well known. Of the 5,500 pounds of the powdery white drug believed to have entered the U.S. last year, fully 80% was grown in poppy fields in central Turkey, processed into morphine base there, and then refined into the final product in France, especially around the southern port city of Marseille.

U.S. drug authorities have tried for years to get France and Turkey to tighten restrictions on "H," but without much success. Last week the White House announced that President Nixon, concerned by estimates that 180,000 Americans are now addicted to heroin, has made the problem a matter of high-level diplomacy. International heroin control, as one Administration official put it, "is now a foreign policy objective of the United States."

Gradual Ban. Partly out of indifference, partly because of some real difficulties, Ankara and Paris have been slow to attack the heroin problem. Under the 1961 United Nations convention on narcotic drugs, Turkey is one of eight countries permitted to export opium poppies for medical purposes. Some 70,000 farmers, most of them supporters of the ruling Justice Party, count on the opium produce for at least some of their earnings. The government pays $5 a pound, though many growers sell part or all of their crops on the black market for as much as five times the official price. (Pure heroin sells for at least $8,000 a pound in the underworld.) In 1968, the U.S. gave Turkey $3,000,000 to curtail opium production, half of which was used for additional enforcement and the rest to develop substitute crops. By the end of this year opium growing will be legal in only seven of the 21 provinces (out of a total of 67 in Turkey) that once produced poppies. The Nixon Administration may well arrange another sizable grant to encourage the elimination of all production by the mid-1970s.

The Frenchmen whose livelihood depends on heroin are not the sort to accept substitutes. They are members of a well-organized Corsican underworld headquartered in bawdy, vice-filled Marseille. Turkish sailors smuggle the morphine base ashore and sell it to the mob's hirelings. They in turn deliver it for the final refining process to secret laboratories, which have been discovered in everything from peaceful-looking stone farmhouses to tenement kitchens. The finished heroin is sold on order to the U.S. underworld.

Lack of manpower has prevented the

French federal narcotics squad from keeping the heat on heroin dealers for long. Last summer, however, two things happened that should make drug enforcement a good deal more severe in the future. One was a visit to Paris by Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the President's top domestic adviser and the architect of his heroin diplomacy, who dwelt on the subject with law-enforcement authorities and diplomatic officials, including Foreign Minister Maurice Schumann. The other event had an impact imaginable only in a nation that has never had a serious drug problem. In August, two middle-class French youths, a 21-year-old boy and a 17-year-old girl, died of heroin overdoses in towns along the Riviera. The publicity from that case and the awareness that addiction was becoming a problem in France jolted officialdom into action.

Social Costs. The French narcotics bureau has since been increased from 47 to 350 agents. By midyear, predicts Commissioner Marcel Carrere, there will be 40 operatives in the Marseille bureau alone, a fourfold increase. Two drug cops will receive permanent liaison assignments to the U.S., and others will take special training in American cities. In an effort to save itself the high social costs--and the inestimable human ones--that are now taking their toll in the U.S., the government of President Georges Pompidou has taken one other step. It has introduced a bill increasing the maximum sentence for drug peddling from five to 20 years.

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