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But the bad news about narcotics far overshadows such success. The "skag" seized at the Brooklyn Bridge last week was the second large shipment of Asian heroin to be intercepted in New York. The first seizure came last November when a Philippine diplomat and his Chinese partner were arrested at Manhattan's Lexington Hotel with 38 Ibs. of heroin in their luggage. The two busts tend to confirm the gloomy forecasts of U.S. narcotics experts that as some of the old drug trade routes from Europe become more dangerous, new ones will open up from Asia. The emergence of Asia, with its immense opium production, as a major exporter of narcotics, promises to make the drug trade a truly global problem.
New Routes. Through most of the postwar years, drugs had flowed from the poppy fields of Turkey and the labs of Marseille direct to the U.S. via the famed "French connection." In the past two or three years, more and more heroin has been routed through Latin America and the Caribbean, where law enforcement is spotty and protection cheap. But as the Latin connection begins to feel more and more heat, and if Turkey phases out remaining opium production under pressure from Washington, the drug trade is expected to swing increasingly to Asia, drawing on the vast surpluses of opium grown in the remote, misty hills of Burma, Thailand and Laos, source of 58% of the 1,200 tons of illicit opium the world produced last year. State Department narcotics experts already see several routes developing, including one to the U.S. via Hong Kong and Britain.
The present flow of narcotics to the West is capable of supporting a savage rise in consumption—and with it, savage rises in crime, in crippled lives and in deaths. Hard statistics are hard to come by, but the best Government estimates put the U.S. heroin-addict population at 560,000—ten times the level of 1960 and almost double what it was only two years ago. On the average, a U.S. addict spends $8,000 a year to support his habit; in New York City, with an addict population of more than 300,000, as much as 50% of all crime is related to addiction. The U.S. has become a heroin market worth $5 billion a year to the international drug trade.
As other countries are discovering to their horror, it is an expanding market. In Canada, recent estimates place the addict population at 14,000 and rising. Turkey now has a small heroin-addict population—a development that defies Moslem strictures against drugs and the powerful conviction among Turks that narcotics reduce sexual potency. Heroin is spreading among young South Vietnamese, who have picked up a taste for hard drugs from the departing American soldiers. All over Western Europe, which once idly dismissed hard drugs as "an American problem," officials now reckon that they have a growing addict population of about 100,000.