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University Daily Kansan Wednesday, May 22, 1963
Narcotics-Newest Weapon In Communist China's Arsenal
By United Press International
Red China's newest strategy in the cold war is to try to flood the world with narcotics.
Before things become too melodramatic it should be explained there are no Red Chinese agents lurking in the White House bushes trying to slip opium tablets into President Kennedy's breakfast coffee.
What the Chinese Reds are after is foreign exchange — money from other countries which can be used to buy such things as tractors and bulldozers. They have vast farms on which the poppy is cultivated, and from the poppy comes opium. From opium, in turn, comes morphine and heroin and from them stem most of the trouble the United States is having today with drug addiction.
It works like this; Not long ago an agent of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics tipped off government officials in Thailand that if they would go to a certain place at a certain time they would find something interesting. What they found was two tons of opium which they seized.
"The source of this," says Henry L. Giordano, U.S. Commissioner of Narcotics, "is primarily from the Yunnan province of Communist China. Some of it comes from Burma — the Shan states of Burma — but most of it is moving out of Yunnan province through Thailand, through Laos, Viet-Nam into Hong Kong, Singapore, Japan and some of it eventually reaching the United States in the form of heroin."
America is the top-priority market for drug smugglers. No opium is produced in this country and there are a sizeable number of addicts with money to spend to ease their craving and pain. Agents of the Narcotics Bureau and the customs men are wise and vigilant in catching smugglers, but they are like persons trying to push back the ocean tides with their bare hands.
To dry up narcotics smuggling, the clothing of every person and every piece of baggage that goes through the nation's ports and airports would have to be searched. Everybody — airline pilots, stewardesses, tourists, sailors from all ships and even foreign diplomats — would
have to be considered guilty until proved innocent. Every piece of mail from abroad would have to be opened. It is small wonder that the Treasury Department estimates only five per cent of the drugs smuggled in this country are seized at the ports of entry.
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However, the number of new addicts in the United States has been on a down curve since 1953, according to the Bureau of Narcotics. One reason probably is that tight enforcement is making it more difficult to obtain drugs.
The Federal Narcotics Bureau has an annual budget of about $5 million, and that practically makes them paupers in a city where an agency dealing in millions instead of billions automatically becomes a second class citizen. It can deploy only 287 agents in this country and abroad, although it works closely with state agencies, local police and the customs agents.
The fantastic profit to be made out of narcotics in this country enlist the best brains of the underworld. Recently the bureau broke up a ring that had been smuggling drugs into the United States since 1949, and there was evidence to show that the total over the years
was 2,200 pounds of pure heroin.
Charles Sirauga, deputy narcotics commissioner, computed the retail value of it at $360 million.
Next to a Central Intelligence agent operating behind the iron curtain, a Narcotics Bureau man is in more peril than any employee of the federal investigative bureaus. Sometimes he is dealing with men half crazy by drugs. His assignment is not only to investigate, but bring in the evidence and that means he has to infiltrate the underworld and stay there until he can get a peddler to sell him some narcotics. Some agents stay underground for as long as 18 months.
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