(9 of 10)
International traffickers have been moving through Anatolia's medieval villages for months, buying and salting away quantities of opium. Says a Turkish narcotics official: "We will still be finding it four or five years from now."
Turkey has been a sobering experience for U.S. opium warriors. "There was at first too much enthusiasm, too much optimism," says Assistant Secretary of State Nelson G. Gross, boss of narcotics affairs at Foggy Bottom. Some Washington officials still talk of achieving a "drastic" reduction in the drug flow within two or three years, but others are skeptical. Veteran agents, among them New York's Daniel P. Casey, doubt that detective work can ever stop any more than 50% of the total drug flow. As a U.S. agent based in Latin America puts it: "We need 16,000, not just 1,600 guys, to stop this traffic. As fast as we close one route, they come up with two others."
What is the solution? Nixon has argued that the "only really effective way" to end the drug traffic is to end poppy cultivation. The U.S. already has satellites in orbit that can locate poppy fields on the earth's surface. In The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia, a new study that attempts, with only partial success, to blame U.S. policy for the vigor of the world drug trade, Author Alfred W. McCoy, a Yale graduate student, suggests that Washington might consider paying the hill peoples of the Golden Triangle area not to grow their poppies. If they were paid the going price in the area of $50 a kilo, by McCoy's reckoning, the cost to the U.S. would be $50 million.
Tough Strategy. But that is hardly realistic; the dollar has not always served the U.S. well in Indochina, and there is little reason its luck would be any better in the hills of Burma, where the poppy is deeply embedded in the local culture. What are the alternatives then? India, which dominates the world trade in legal opium used in medicine, is widely regarded as having one of the best control programs in the world. That is somewhat mythical, however. In New Delhi, there are 800 registered addicts, served by two government opium shops—but another 30,000 or so unregistered addicts can get opium under the counter at tea stalls or from cigarette vendors in the city.
The U.S. would hardly accept drastic measures like those of China, where opium dealers were shot on sight in the 1950s and 1960s, or Iran, which has a chronic addiction problem. In 1955, when that country was plagued with 2,000,000 addicts in a population of 25 million, the Shah ordered Iran's opium fields burned and addicts bused off to camps for a forced withdrawal program. Addiction dropped way down, but it was only a temporary reprieve. The addict population is back up to 400,000 and still climbing, even though Iranian troops regularly fight gun battles with Turkish and Afghan opium smugglers along the borders.
The U.S.'s war on heroin is only getting under way, and it is not without its critics, who variously contend that it is too little