Our Junkies in Vietnam

...It is off limits to American military personnel, and Murphy and Steele reported that military police attempting to enter the area "have been assaulted, robbed, stripped of their clothing and weapons, and otherwise mistreated...

...Representative Steele, who spread the word that he might be interested in purchasing some scag, was accosted nine times in the course of a twenty-minute walk...

...Therefore, raids must be coordinated with the South Vietnamese police...

...ERWIN KNOLL is Washington Editor of The Progressive...

...Some is mailed to the United States by U.S...

...The National Institute of Mental Health recently doubled its estimate of the number of American heroin addicts, from 125,000 to 250,000, but NIMH experts admit their figure is, at best, an educated guess and probably on the conservative side...

...In January of this year there were seventeen drug-related deaths, and in February there were nineteen...

...The Congressmen discreetly noted that they could not substantiate reports that South Vietnamese Vice President Nguyen Cao Ky "is implicated in the current heroin traffic...

...It is ironic indeed," an American serving in Vietnam told the Congressmen, "that in the last two years of the war our biggest casualty figures will come from heroin addiction, not from combat...

...Administrative discharges for "character-ologic ineffectiveness"—often a euphemism for drug use—rose from 12,726 in fiscal 1969 to 27,837 in fiscal 1970...

...Army Provost Marshal that ten to fifteen per cent of all American soldiers now in South Vietnam—30,000 to 40,000 men—"are addicted to heroin in one form or another," and that in some units the addiction rate may be as high as twenty-five per cent...

...The economics of heroin addiction quickly reach astronomic proportions...

...One of the social costs is death, and in Vietnam, because of the potency of the available heroin, the death rate is high and rising...

...Heroin comes high in the New York area, and he has had his boots stolen off his feet by someone who needed to raise some quick cash for a quick fix...

...Military sources say the rate is now approaching one a day...

...If the serviceman who has become addicted using ninety-four to ninety-seven per cent pure heroin in South Vietnam enters the drug scene in the United States, where the heroin available is four to six per cent pure, the ominous implications are obvious, both for himself, his family, and for American society...

...Most, however, is smuggled into South Vietnam through both Laos and Thailand...

...But the "major conduit" for heroin is Thailand, the Congressmen concluded, and "from the American viewpoint, Thailand is as important to the control of the international traffic in narcotics as Turkey...

...Most is purchased but a large amount is obtained by military personnel who barter cigarettes and other post exchange items for the drugs...

...Heroin is processed in laboratories located in Laos, and what is not smuggled through Thailand is smuggled through Laos, primarily by air in Laotian Air Force planes...

...The planes of Air America, the CIA airline, have also carried heroin, though the Congressmen said they found "no evidence that Americans connected with that airline were involved...

...Representatives Murphy and Steele, who have no basic quarrel with America's "mission" in Indochina, say that if the flow of heroin into Vietnam cannot be stopped, "the only solution is to withdraw all American servicemen from Southeast Asia...

...A pair of GI boots in good condition brings up to $3.50 on the established market...

...perhaps a fourth...

...Heroin is readily available to American servicemen in South Vietnam, particularly in Saigon," the Congressmen wrote...

...I figure," a Vietnam veteran recently told me, "that there are only two outfits in the world big enough to carry it off—the Mafia and the CIA...

...There is also a widespread belief among many American servicemen in Vietnam that this heroin is actually cocaine, a non-addictive drug...

...Reliable sources report that at least two high-ranking Laotian officials, including the chief of the Laotian general staff, military and governmental, are deeply involved in the heroin business...

...Because of the quality of heroin available in South Vietnam, it is possible to become addicted through smoking or sniffing...

...Eventually America's junkie Army will have to come home, to be assimilated back into a junkie nation...

...The traditional channel for heroin reaching the United States extends from the poppy fields of Turkey to Syria and Lebanon, where opium is processed into morphine base, then to Marseilles, where clandestine laboratories refine the morphine into heroin, and finally to American ports by way of Western Europe and Latin America...

...One quarter gram sells for as little as $2.50 and as much as $10, while one eighth of a gram will sell for as little as $1.50 and as much as $5...

...But it is difficult to arrest street peddlers, let alone financiers and backers...

...The "Kuomintang irregulars" to whom Murphy and Steele referred are remnants of Chinese Nationalist forces who have been in the area for at least twenty years and who have long been the beneficiaries of U.S...

...Their report, which named few names, identified one of these as William Henry Jackson, who operates the Five Star Bar in Bangkok, and who is wanted for prosecution in the United States...

...Central Intelligence Agency assistance and supplies...

...The Army's preferred approach is still to kick them out...

...This article was prepared from a draft of the Congressmen's report which was still subject to final revision, and at this point a paragraph had been heavily deleted in india ink...

...There is a far greater irony than this, however, and it is illuminated in the Congressional Study Mission's report: Americans in Vietnam—and a growing number of Americans here at home—are getting high and getting hooked and getting killed with a little help, a lot of help, from America's great good friends in Southeast Asia...

...At Fort Bragg, North Carolina, for example, ,you will be told—with something approaching Chamber-of-Commerce pride—that the home of the Eighty-second Airborne now rivals Harlem as a center of the heroin traffic...

...The major flow of traffic from the producing areas of Burma, Laos, and Thailand is directed through the Mekong River Valley in the latter two countries...

...Historians tell us that the techniques developed by empires for the subjugation of alien peoples are eventually applied against their own citizens at home...

...In the last five months of 1970, Murphy and Steele reported, ninety Americans died in South Vietnam of causes "suspected to have been drug related," and autopsies confirmed that forty-nine of these had been due to an overdose of heroin...

...An addict told a New York Times reporter, "I figure the Commies have put that stuff around...

...They depend for their livelihood upon opium production...

...We were told that there is information available that high-ranking Vietnamese officials, including military, are mixed up in drug operations...

...Law enforcement authorities contend that an addict must steal goods worth four to five times the cost of his habit in order to meet his needs...

...He is one himself, and has track marks on his arms to prove it...

...In nearby Fayetteville you will be told—with something approaching despair—that the pushers who moved in to serve the Fort Bragg trade have branched out and now do a thriving business among local high school students...

...The intelligence gathering capabilities of the inhabitants of Soul Alley is excellent, and they are usually 'tipped off when a raid is being planned...

...In Laos, government armed forces are major wholesalers of opium and heroin and have been directly involved in large-scale smuggling activities...

...Some of it is processed into heroin which is smuggled to the United States by couriers on commercial or military aircraft...

...But Far Eastern growers and refiners are the sole source in Vietnam, and they are rapidly cutting into the American market, now accounting for at least ten per cent...

...Heroin reaches South Vietnam by means of private and commercial aircraft, and on Thai, Laotian, and South Vietnamese Air Force planes...

...Inadvertently, however, the same paragraph appeared on a duplicate page...

...The true number may be 500,000 or more...

...The street peddler," he and Murphy wrote, "is the low man on the totem pole...

...This, again, is not true...

...The Shan tribesmen are, in the Congressmen's own words, "some of the most effective resistance fighters against the North Vietnamese and the Pathet Lao...

...Since last fall military commanders have been authorized to extend "amnesty" to addicts who turn themselves in for treatment...

...military personnel using both commercial and military postal services...

...Generals tell reporters that narcotics are a bigger threat than Communists...

...The heroin traffic in Indochina could not exist, they concluded, were it not for the active—and profitable—involvement of America's freedom-loving clients in the region...

...Official reports say the use of heroin in the military has reached "epidemic proportions...

...It has long been common gossip in Saigon that Ky, a former Air Force pilot, had once been heavily engaged in flying opium from Laos to South Vietnam...

...The 'high' does not develop as quickly as when injected, but smoking or sniffing does develop a physical need for heroin...

...The men admitted to the hospital, he says, rarely experience withdrawal symptoms, which may mean that they are just experimenting and are not yet hooked...

...To grasp the scope of the problem, you need not rely on shaky statistics...

...Whoever now extends protection to the heroin trade, his influence is great...

...Some experts calculate that the actual social costs of addiction —the costs of crime and punishment and attempted rehabilitation—already surpass $25 billion a year...

...The response of many officers has been lukewarm—the Marine Corps completely rejects the "amnesty" approach—and the result in those programs that have been established are less than overwhelming...

...While all of the opium produced in Southeast Asia is not grown in Thailand, most of it is smuggled through that country...

...The stuff they buy here just doesn't match in strength and purity the scag to which they grew accustomed back in "the Nam...

...At Fort Ord, California, you will hear of Vietnam returnees who go into withdrawal even though they are spending $30 or more a day to maintain their heroin habit...

...The Congressmen—Democrat Morgan F. Murphy of Illinois and Republican Robert H. Steele of Connecticut —reported that during this year's invasion of Laos, some South Vietnamese soldiers as well as American support troops had to be treated for withdrawal pains because they were moved on such short notice that it was not possible to obtain enough heroin to meet their needs...

...It may not be the best reason for making peace, but it could prove more persuasive than any of the other arguments that have been advanced...

...It may also mean, he adds, that drugs are reaching them even in the hospital—or that seasoned addicts have learned to be more careful with their needles...

...There is little or no indigenous requirement for white heroin in Southeast Asia—purple heroin is smoked there...

...They were compiled by two members of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs who visited South Vietnam and half a dozen other countries in April as a Special Study Mission on the World Heroin Problem...

...It read: "No arrests can be made in South Vietnam unless a South Vietnamese policeman is present...

...It may be that Vietnam provides a corollary: that problems encountered at the periphery of empire also return to haunt the mother country...

...At Fort Meade, Maryland, an Army doctor will tell you that he has no idea of the extent of drug use on the post, but that he sees an astonishing number of cases of serum hepatitis—the result of using contaminated needles...

...Major cities in these two countries, such as Luang Prabang, Vientiane, and Bangkok, serve as final markets, heroin processing centers, and transshipment points, principally to South Vietnam and Hong Kong...

...In the absence of the heroin available in South Vietnam, the only alternative for one who has become addicted through sniffing and snorting will be to inject...

...There are some new statistics on heroin addiction among American forces in Vietnam, and while these, too, must be regarded as guesses or, at best, approximations, they are startling nonetheless...

...At Fort Dix, New Jersey, a soldier in the Personnel Control Facility—the holding detachment for returned AWOLs—maintains that at least one in three of his buddies is an addict...

...Two different types of heroin are produced from the poppies grown in this area—white and purple...

...Often these wholesalers are prominent local businessmen...

...Accomplices in the Police Department undoubtedly pass the information to Soul Alley and when the raid is conducted everybody has disappeared...

...Here are some highlights from the Congressional Study Mission's report: "Burma, Laos, and Thailand produce an estimated 1,000 tons of raw opium, or more than one-half of the world illicit output...

...American citizens, most of them ex-servicemen, have recently begun settling in Thailand to engage in the heroin trade, the Congressmen found...

...The production of white heroin in quantity is a comparatively recent development...

...In Saigon, they were told by the U.S...

...The Pentagon now concedes that heroin addiction among soldiers in Vietnam is "a problem of considerable magnitude...

...GIs complain that "amnes-ty>' or no, they are still subject to harassment and discrimination once they are identified as having a narcotics problem...

...If 250,000 addicts in the United States —the official NIMH estimate—maintain a habit costing $30 a day—a minimum figure—they must spend $7.5 million daily, or more than $2.7 billion a year, for heroin...

...Perhaps a fifth of them are members of the armed services...

...The latter arrange for conversion to heroin and for the domestic and export distribution of both opium and heroin...

...And I figure they're in it together...

...From the evidence available," the report noted, "there is no doubt that the Laotian military are deeply involved in the international traffic in heroin...

...If three-fourths of all addicts resort to theft, therefore, goods worth more than $8 billion must be stolen each year to keep them supplied with heroin...

...Nothing could be further from the truth...

...You can go to your friendly neighborhood military base and ask a few random questions of the first few men you meet...

...The economics of heroin addiction quickly reach astronomic proportions...

...We have the hideous picture before us," says Senator Harold Hughes of Iowa, "of men inured to violence and addicted to drugs returning to civilian society from the war area compelled to use the skills of violence they have learned as soldiers in criminal acts here at home in order to support their habit...

...A center of Saigon drug traffic is "Soul Alley...

...Now the problem is so big, so visible, that the silence has given way to statements of concern, alarm, even panic...

...Statistics on the extent of addiction in the armed services—as in the civilian population—are scarce and unreliable, but a trend can be discerned...

...According to Frank A. Bartimo, assistant general counsel of the Defense Department, the use of hard drugs in the military has been doubling every year since 1967, but he's guessing too...

...Unfortunately, most of those who smoke or sniff are under the dangerous illusion that heroin taken in this manner is not addictive...

...Nobody knows...

...There are no reliable statistics to indicate what proportion of opium production is processed into heroin, but it must be concluded that production is increasing in direct proportion to the growing demand among Americans in South Vietnam...

...The first major collections of the raw opium in Burma are made by Kuomintang irregulars and guerrilla armies of the Shan tribal insurgents who themselves convey the product southward for delivery to wholesale operators in the cities...

...But Congressmen Murphy and Steele (who found "no evidence available to suggest that the Chinese Communists are actively engaged in the illegal international traffic in opium or its derivatives") pointed persuasively to another source...

...They did report that heroin smuggling activity "reaches high levels of command, to include politicians, both in Laos and in South Vietnam...

...For a long time there was silence—the silence of pretending it was not happening, of wishing it would go away, of hoping nobody would notice...

...Among GIs there are many theories about the source of heroin supplies...

...American narcotics agents in Thailand told Murphy and Steele that "Jackson is probably paying a Thai legislator for protection...

...If the financiers and backers who finance the narcotics business can be uncovered and prosecuted, severe damage could be inflicted on the entire operation...

...And it is cheap...

...Once it reaches South Vietnam, heroin is readily available in the streets of Saigon, though trafficking in drugs is theoretically against the law...

...The Nam" is where it's at (and where more and more of it is coming from...