Drug Traffic in the Middle East

...Once a man took to hashish he found it difficult to let go, so long as it was available...

...Then a Turkish official told me of a new development...

...In the magical mountain scenery of Lebanon, western Svria and southern Turkey, it was all too easy to forget those distant customers in the slums of Egypt and consider hemp just another crop—even something of a joke, as it was to most Lebanese...

...but because they found it so boring, they discontinued and went back to whiskey...

...But with more than 20 million tourists visiting Spain annually, the authorities can only skim the surface of the dope traffic...

...Sir Thomas "Pasha" Russell, a dedicated British police officer who retired in 1946, spent the 1930s and early '40s fighting the hashish and heroin traffic then ravaging Egypt...

...Our two balconies adjoined...

...Yet the trade never recovered its prewar importance, in part because the reemerg-ence of Israel cut the overland smuggling route to Egypt...

...Excluding from the discussion the poet or painter who may experiment with drugs in the hope of enriching his art, the Near Eastern experience suggests several major factors for narcotics abuse...

...It's brainwashing," a militant international anarchist told me one day...

...So here I am, looking at that out-of-date map, trying to remember something significant, and wondering how it is that the colored lines now mainly point westward...

...While a British officer at the end of World War II, I devoted some time getting to know the Syrian-Turkish frontier and, later, southern Syria and Lebanon...

...The reply was always an indignant "No...

...Inexpensive drugs might also help eradicate much mindless juvenile delinquency, itself a form of escapism...

...They feel impelled to pass on their disease...

...It is perhaps significant that the jargon of British hopheads comes exclusively, and pathetically, from across the Atlantic: fix, trip, turn on, pot, reefer, horse . . . even marijuana (though most of the hashish smuggled into Britain comes from North Africa and the Near East, not Mexico...

...In the States right now," he replied sadly, "drugs are about as exotic as a drunken Irishman on Saint Patrick's Day...

...Are any of them also investing promotional funds in an effort to hasten the day...

...group ethics tolerant of "extreme" forms of escapism (these might embrace religion and alcohol as well as narcotics...

...In their view, the narcotics traffickers are tied up with such industries as pop music and mod fashion, and the mythic "drug culture" that has bedazzled thousands of American adolescents is more than merely clever pr work...

...The incident took place about a year and a half ago, at a university the gutter press had pilloried for alleged moral laxity...

...They're becoming an epidemic...

...You ought to publish something about it in America...

...They were always trying to be friendly and encouraging the children to get together...

...I had added a few details myself, but most were already there when the document was given to me many years ago...

...But today in England, France and Spain drugs are a problem, though as yet a minor one by American standards...

...The situation was complicated last year by an international hippie migration to the Spanish Mediterranean islands of Ibiza and Formen-tera—for a few weeks there actually were more hippies than Spaniards on Formentera...

...I'll land in jail if I take that home...

...It is admittedly arguable that without hashish they would become dependent on something anyway, be it alcohol, amphetamines, astrology, quack psychiatry, religious or political fanaticism...

...Proud though they might be of the quality of their crop, they would nevertheless assure me that hashish was for the subnormal and wretched—"Egyptians, underdogs...

...In the Near East, the usual effects of hashish I observed were the inducement of apathy, passivity, indifference to social evils, neglect of physical well-being, and erosion of the moral block that prevents normal adults from fooling with harder drugs like heroin...

...I asked some growers and smugglers if they ever smoked hashish...

...Some of them were bringing back drugs and selling them in Turkey in order to help finance their travels...

...To be sure, the original "Assassins" (hashishin), a Shiite Moslem sect, were stupefied with hashish by their Grand Master so that he might exploit their credulity...

...But who...

...Of all drug-users, the heroin addict is the most desperate for a cure and the hardest to help...

...For example, I have known well-fed, well-balanced Europeans to smoke, as an experiment, a quantity of hashish that would probably send an Egyptian peasant over the roof...

...Obviously, supplies are the key to the problem...

...Indeed, I had been told by an influential British official that "antidrug fanatics like Russell Pasha" had done Britain more harm than good...

...In Egypt, Sir Russell's strategy was to cut supply routes...

...But the middle-class and petit-bourgeois youngsters who are now the pushers' best prospects have far less to worry about materially, and live in a far simpler moral universe, than their equivalents 30-40 years ago...

...and lived in Egypt...

...A pusher had appeared in a students' residence, and while some of the young men kept him talking, an executive of the student union called the police and had the outsider arrested...

...youths for the spread of the dope craze...

...Persuading young workers and students to dope themselves is the easiest way of getting it...

...market must be super-psychedelic...

...The growers and first-stage smugglers I met were on the whole conventional Godfearing men—the growers mainly Christians or Syrian Alawites, the smugglers Moslems of a variety of sects...

...Mao's China...

...It has been said that but for Russell and his colleagues, Egypt would soon have ceased to count as a nation—reason enough for some British Mideast specialists to criticize him...

...The speed with which the jargon circulates, and the fact that lobbies in distant cities and countries call for the legalization of "soft" drugs in more or less identical terms, have made many Europeans suspect that someone is masterminding the narcotics explosion...

...Clearly, neither England nor France seemed in any great danger from narcotics...

...Morphine, extracted from the poppy itself, is produced in Turkey—legally for medicRay Alan is a British correspondent who has reported on Europe, Africa and the Middle East for many years...

...Near East...

...a disruption of supplies would usually release him...

...After being dried and flailed, the crop was steamed and compressed into khaki-green kilo bricks, which camels and trucks took down to the plain for shipment from Lebanese and Syrian ports, or via Aqaba in Jordan...

...An Englishwoman then told this story: "Last summer on the Costa Brava, an American family had the next apartamento to ours...

...Employing polyglot police officers and captured smugglers, he built up a crack anti-narcotics intelligence service, and concentrated repressive action against suppliers and distributors...

...But cut off supplies and jail distributors, and the situation becomes manageable...

...What's the cause of the drug mania...

...In the summer, on Lebanese mountain tracks, one might come across many donkey-loads of the hemp plant being brought in from the fields...

...Cannabis sativa, grown in Lebanon, Syria and Turkey, is familiar in many parts of southern Asia, North Africa and America as Indian hemp, bhang, ganja, grifa, and marijuana, and is the primary ingredient in such preparations as hashish, kif and charras...

...Drug-users were not usually imprisoned unless they were also pushers—or had asked to be jailed, as many did in the hope of finding release from their habit...

...In Britain, where Americans are not so conspicuous, the allegation is less assertive but still made, since most teen-age fads there— whether motorcyclist exhibitionism or campus Maoism—are imitation American...

...not real men...

...As the news spread, other addicts flocked for the treatment...

...But I doubt if one need blame anything more occult than the profit motive for the present narcotics explosion...

...In one Egyptian town, a heroin addict found that his craving for the drug had left him after he had been bitten by a mad dog and undergone the usual course of anti-rabies injections...

...Opium, morphine and hashish...

...How have countries like Egypt dealt with it...

...He tapped the map...

...I have heard, too, that some cigarette manufacturers and pharmaceutical firms are even experimenting with hashish-tobacco blends and "safe" synthetic mind-shrinkers, in readiness for the day when "soft" drugs are legalized...

...Capitalism must have a docile labor force," they argue...

...We snubbed them time after time...

...keeping my Egyptian contact informed...

...Cypriots, I discovered, were uninterested in narcotics—they preferred brandy— and the restaurateur told me the only person to do a little harvesting when the hedges flowered was the Moslem sheikh who read the Koran every morning over Sharq el-Adna, the British Foreign Office's Communist-infiltrated Arabic radio station...

...But drugs were not our business—it was just that we thought it might prove useful one day to know something about smuggling routes and the men who used them—and I had orders not to take any initiatives...

...All seemed to enjoy the face-saving game of hide-and-seek they played with the local gendarmes and customs men...

...Their contempt for their ultimate clients was unbounded...

...France has about 6,000 addicts, Britain 4,000, and Spain, the most exposed of the three, has fewer than 3,000...

...Roughly 20-25 per cent of the hashish users developed a desire for stronger action, and most of these went on to heroin if it was available...

...A dope slogan or catch phrase coined in New York will be parroted in London within a week or so...

...It seemed that American and Western European youngsters, mainly middle-class students, had suddenly taken to visiting India and Nepal...

...What's the answer to it...

...In 1930, nearly 10 per cent of male Egyptians were taking dope, and 5-6 per cent were already addicts...

...But, asked the official, why hadn't the parents kept their dismal offspring out of trouble in the first place...

...By Western standards, too, the Egyptian society that produced so many hashish and heroin users was not in the least complex...

...A few days later, I was looking through my collection of old maps with an American friend who had asked me for "something exotic" to make a lampshade...

...Police and educational authorities in France and Spain blame U.S...

...And in our own century, cases have been reported in Egypt and the Far East of employers giving their workers a ration of hashish, opium or heroin...

...If before the War fortunes could be made by supplying drugs to Egyptian slum-dwellers, the profits that are being squeezed out of the affluent U.S...

...The price of heroin is said to appreciate 500 per cent between Marseille and New York, and 6,000 per cent between the New York "importer" and consumer...

...Great quantities of hashish pass through Spain on their way northward from Morocco, and heroin is coming in from France...

...This is a moral problem, however, and should be discussed as such by responsible public opinion...

...boredom...

...Imprisonment in order to effect a cure can be a nightmarish experience for addict and jailers alike, but it was the only treatment available in Egypt and in some cases it worked...

...Hell's bells...

...The regimentation of the young and gullible by the barons of the consumer society...

...Back in Western Europe, I was surprised to hear talk of hashish one day in an English university town...

...We came to one marked "Secret...

...they must have thought we were savages...

...green, red and blue dotted lines traced the drug-runners' known routes...

...They seemed educated and looked nice—the man was a minister of one of the more respectable American churches— but I had such a fear of their kids taking ours into some quiet corner and persuading them to take dope...

...Certainly it should neither be resolved by the lobbying of commercial interests, nor neglected until society is faced with a fait accompli...

...my friend exclaimed...

...The man who gave me the map had another like it...

...Some authorities even argue that it is cruel to try to help him, and kindest to let addiction run its course...

...It appeared in subsequent discussion that the majority of students in the residence approved of the action...

...In due course, I went on to other work and lost sight of the dope trade...

...All too often they are immature and insecure, and some are incipient neurotics or psychotics...

...Americans seem to like the theory that drug-taking is a reaction against the increasing material and moral complexity of modern life...

...Maybe we can learn something from them...

...What sympathy would be shown a Turk who was found to be pushing dope in the West...

...Now the government is tightening its drug and vagrancy laws, and the police are giving hippies compulsory baths and haircuts, in the hope of discouraging another invasion...

...The Mafia...

...The hashish-smoker, on the other hand, is much less likely to become hooked if he is in good physical and mental health...

...It was an old French Army map on which hashish-producing regions had been shaded in green, opium poppy areas in red, and morphine laboratories in blue...

...You've no idea how badly we need help...

...The key producers had bribed key officials, even small growers had a political string to pull, and the first-stage smugglers had taken care, in their jargon, to "buy themselves a route...

...Protests were flowing in from fond parents, while Western newspapers and politicians expressed anger that "decent" white Christian kids should be locked up in harsh Oriental prisons...

...It's their way of getting even with society for playing such a dirty trick on them...

...When doctors refused to cooperate, a local barber rigged up a dog's skull that gave a realistic spring-operated bite for a few piastres...

...It can be argued that narcotics of some kind should be made available on humanitarian grounds to people who work at humdrum jobs, have no creative or sporting talent, live in squalid cities, and are unable to get away on weekends to coast or countryside...

...The trouble, of course, is that the people most likely to use hashish are not in the best of mental health...

...You've seen the Middle East drug traffic...

...It is not surprising, then, that the field attracts many eager businessmen— slick young graduates as well as old-fashioned Mafiosi...

...Drug Traffic in the Middle East BY RAY ALAN Madrid Another group of young Americans had just been arrested for peddling narcotics here, and we were discussing the incident...

...Still, my immediate reaction was to smile when I realized one day in Cyprus that the little hedges surrounding an open-air restaurant and separating its tables were Indian hemp plants...

...What happened to the stuff once they were paid for it did not interest them in the least...

...That earned Britain the enmity of some of the Levant states' most influential families...

...A few months later in France, I read the results of an opinion poll in which 84 per cent of the youths questioned declared themselves firmly "against drugs...

...They include a relatively servile status...

...inal purposes, illegally for conversion (chiefly in France and Italy) into the more potent, and profitable, heroin...

...and above all, an efficient supply network employing shrewd distributors and active pushers...

...Dope addicts are like syphilitics," a Spanish doctor commented...

...It was only a face-saving game because graft was a way of life in Lebanon and Syria...

...a monotonous, wearying and/or debasing mode of life...

...A newspaperman added: '"And America, a diseased society, feels impelled to infect other societies...

...Note the complacent, discreetly approving, attitude of leading big-business organs...

...I was a rather earnest youth, however, and I took the dope traffic seriously, having read a file of Russell's reports and seen a few addicts in Egypt...

...By the time I arrived in the Near East, the hashish trade was reviving...

...I made an effort now and then to check some of the dotted lines and add a new one...

...You wanted something exotic," I said...

...Most of the Near East's opium poppy crop is grown in Turkey, Persia and occasionally Egypt...

...By 1940 he had broken the back of the problem, and wartime controls strengthened his hand: The British Army moved into Lebanon and Syria the following year, and at Russell's request occupied a bit of its leisure during the next four summers burning hemp crops and chasing smugglers...

...Thus Iran has been able to reduce addiction merely by executing a dozen or so smugglers...

...Some European Left-wingers (the genuine ones, not the teenyboppers of the New Left or the Maoist Tontons Macoutes) blame "big business...

...As morphine producers, the Turks did not want a drug problem in their own back yard, so they were passing stiff sentences on these foreign delinquents...

...If narcotics are easily obtainable and efficiently pushed, the social workers and educators worrying about drugs might just as well take up golf, for all the good they can do...

...a sense of personal inadequacy and purposelessness...

...Britain supplies more or less hopeless cases with a heroin ration under the National Health Service so as to keep them out of crime, but stern police measures have been found necessary to combat the pushers who attempt to propagate addiction...