Laos: Flower Power Struggle

The wild country where the borders of Burma, Laos and Thailand meet is infested with virulent snakes. Rogue elephants roam its valleys, tigers and pan thers patrol its hillsides. It hardly seems a fit place for man. Yet that inhospitable area has attracted as motley an assortment of tribesmen, fugitives, thieves, freebooters and smugglers as exists anywhere on earth. They come and they stay on for only one reason: be cause of certain distinctions of climate and soil, Papaver somniferum, the opium poppy, finds the place unusually congenial. Each spring the hillsides blossom into white and purple waves...

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