Let Them Shoot Smack

By Lloyd Garrison

Heroin, once mostly an export, is now a scourge at home

It is well after the noon hour in the sprawling urban slum where 22-year-old Mali lives. Clothes hang on a nearby line, and small children play in the dusty path. Squatting on a doorstep, Mali (a pseudonym) lifts her scarred right arm and feels for a usable vein. No one seems to notice as she grips one end of a yellow plastic cord in her teeth and winds the other end tightly around her arm, readying it for the needle. It could be the South Bronx, East Los Angeles, Amsterdam or London--the traditional dumping grounds for Asia's deadly commodity, heroin. But this is mid-afternoon in Bangkok, capital of Thailand, where heroin has long been perceived as an illegal export sold only abroad to residents of the U.S. and other weak-willed Western cultures.

The wheel has turned. Caught in a squeeze between overproduction of heroin and eroding markets overseas, Asians are now selling to Asians, with devastating effect. Though official statistics do not exist, the worst estimates suggest that Thailand alone may have more addicts than the U.S. Nowhere has the scourge spread more swiftly than in Pakistan, where the number of heroin users has exploded from virtually none before 1980 to an estimated 200,000 by the end of last year. Malaysian police report that as much as 70% of all crime in the nation is now related to drugs. More than 4,500 addicts are in prison, and last year 1,000 soldiers were dismissed from the Malaysian army for drug involvement. In neighboring Thailand, long permissive in matters of vice, some leading authorities now favor stringent antidrug laws and compulsory rehabilitation. In India, new users range from drivers of Delhi's scooter taxis to affluent businessmen who view a quick fix as the fashionable thing to do.

The most alarming usage among the young can be found in Pakistan, where a survey last summer of 500 engineering and medical students at the University of Karachi revealed that 12% are addicts. Heroin is so prevalent that enterprising pushers use women and children for home delivery of the drug, hidden in vegetable baskets. After Pakistani mothers took to the streets to demand tighter drug laws, President Mohammed Zia ul-Haq decreed a life sentence and 30 lashes for heroin merchants.

The problem began in the mid-1970s, when many American users began to realize just how lethal "smack" could be and when a rival drug, cocaine, rose to new prominence. With heroin falling out of fashion, the number of hardcore American users has dropped from a peak of 700,000 a decade ago to 500,000 today. The slippage in this key market coincided with a 1979 drought in the Golden Triangle, the mountainous region where Burma, Thailand and Laos meet. The area has long produced much of the world's supply of poppies, from which opium and heroin are derived. The resulting rise in prices only accelerated the switch to cocaine in the U.S.

Meanwhile, poppy growers in the Golden Crescent, which cuts across Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan, rushed to exploit the high prices. But when the rains returned to the Golden Triangle in 1980, bumper crops followed, and suddenly growers from Iran to Thailand were saddled with a burgeoning surplus. Prices for high-grade heroin are still falling, as Asian dealers try to undercut one another in a multimillion-dollar scramble for new users. Hong Kong's 45,000 addicts can now shoot up for about the price of a movie ticket, $3. In Malaysia, a fix costs less than $2, no more than a beer.

Not all Asian nations have been afflicted with heroin. Japan, South Korea and Taiwan are largely free of hard drugs, thanks to firm law enforcement and strongly held traditional values. China, Indonesia and the Philippines serve primarily as transit points for shipment to the U.S. and Europe. Singapore, with its draconian antidrug laws, honest and efficient police force and intensive rehabilitation programs, reports a decline in heroin addiction.

In Pakistan, however, President Zia's measures have hardly disturbed the more than 400 drug dens still operating all along the highway from Peshawar to Karachi. An addict there can order a fix almost as easily as a meal in a restaurant. The nation's heroin trade is further bolstered by Afghan refugees, who peddle the drug to help pay for the rebellion against the Soviet-backed government in Kabul. Western intelligence sources say that the Kabul regime, with Soviet connivance, is also injecting Pakistan with heroin in a deliberate attempt to destabilize Pakistani society. Officials in Karachi have found no way to stop this traffic. A government report calls vast areas of the Afghan frontier virtually "unpoliceable."

Ironically, effective law enforcement sometimes seems to make matters worse. Thai narcotics agents ran down several top dealers in Bangkok last year, but the arrests merely prompted the owners of refineries in the Golden Triangle, which were already overloaded with stock, to market their wares independently. To attract new buyers they lowered prices and peddled their product aggressively in the south, where more than 70% of all Thai heroin users reside. The country's authorities report that they are now catching more traffickers. Nevertheless, as usual in the heroin business, more arrests also mean that pushers have to cut prices and redouble their efforts to find buyers, which in turn increases the number of Asian drug addicts. --By Lloyd Garrison. Reported by Dean Brelis/New Delhi and James Willwerth/ Bangkok

With reporting by Dean Brelis, James Willwerth