Pushing
Brian Inglis
Triangle of Death Frank Robertson (Routledge £3.95) Until a couple of years ago the control which Britain had maintained over the heroin traffic was the envy of many other countries, the United States in particular. But then rumours began to circulate that there are many more addicts than the Home Office figures showed — an indication that a black market in the drug was developing; and a court case, which led to an attractive Rocdean-educated Chinese girl and her lover being sentenced to fourteen years for trafficking in the drug, has since revealed that there is a thriving English connection. Why?
Triangle of Death provides part of the answer. The 'Golden Triangle', as it is more commonly described, is the territory be tween Burma and Thailand where the poppy is most intensively cultivated; but the book in fact is less about the triangle than about the Triads, the Chinese secret societies, similar in some respects to the Mafia, which arrange for the collection of the raw opium, its shipment to places like Hong Kong where it can be refined into heroin, and the distribution of the drug to countries all over the world.
It is a fascinatingly macabre story; and where Frank Robertson is simply describing the characters involved in the enterprise and the methods they use, he tells it well. He has been investigating the subject as a reporter for years, having been lucky not to have ended up thoroughly bullet-ridden as a result; and his descriptions read very like those of the reporters of Prohibition in the Al Capone era, but with a more international flavour, including the French connection, and the events in Soho with which the story opens: the murder of the MaliJongh-playing Wong Kam in Gerrard Street eighteen months ago.
Yet it is an exasperating book. Indeed it is not, 'properly speaking, a book at all, so much as a string of investigative reports intertwined together, with loose ends left hanging all over the place, and no sense of order. Commonsense, for example, would suggest that the place to put the history of the opium traffic, if it is going to be included at all, is near the beginning: Robertson puts it at the end. He omits the crucial stage in the development of the heroin traffic — the decision to outlaw opium smoking, which made hundreds of thousands of people in the East switch to heroin because it was so much easier to smuggle.
Still, sorting out what Robertson provides, and fusing in what is known from other sources (including what has happened since his book went to the printers: my newspaper today carries two such stories, the arrest of a millionaire Hong Kong newspaper proprietor on a drugs conspiracy charge, and a fierce affray between Chinese in a London restaurant), it is possible to get a reasonably clear picture of what has been happening, and why.
The supreme irony is that the heroin traffickers have been created by the attempts to stop them — just as gangsterism, Chicagostyle, was created by Prohibition. In Britain, for example, so long as heroin was quite easily obtainable on prescription, it presented no real problem. In the 1960s a handful of doctors began to realise that legally supplying the few hundred addicts was not nearly as profitable as creating new ones on the black market.
But this was soon checked by clamping down on doctors' right to prescribe heroin, except at designated clinics. And because heroin remained relatively easily obtainable at the clinics, on the NHS, there was little incentive to push the drug here. It was worth far more to the smugglers if they could get it to the United States.
The Chinese here, however, continued to provide a small, steady demand; and as they spread out through the country in the great Chinese restaurant boom, a few of them found 'pushing' lucrative. The illicit demand rose, because the new herointakers were not registered at clinics; the prices also rose; and Britain has ceased to be just a staging post for the Triad-run traffic, becoming a market in her own right.
It would be unwise to panic at the prospect. Heroin is still much less of a problem in Britain than in most countries — there are probably a hundred addicts in the United States for each addict here. And tougher police and customs methods, on past experience, cannot be effective so long as heroin is literally worth its weight in gold; as Robertson shows, control is easily evaded by a combination of ingenious smuggling techniques, the bribing of officials, and the use of the diplomatic bags (with the cooperation, on occasion, of the dear old CIA; the Laotian ambassador to France, a member of the royal house they sustained, was careless enough to lose one of his suitcases at Orly; when it was opened it was found to contain 60 kilos of heroin).
Psychiatrists who have to deal with the end product of heroin addiction here will understandably shudder at the prospect; but the lesson of Triangle of Death, as of earlier works on the traffic, is that the only way to keep heroin consumption down is, paradoxically, to keep addicts supplied, in order to keep the price down. The reason is that heroin owes its sale not to its initial impact (anybody who perpetuates the canard that you have only to take it once to be in bondage forever ought to be prosecuted for being an accessory to the traffic), but to the difficulty of getting unhooked. It is consequently extremely difficult to cure people of addiction; but it is also by no means easy to induce people to become addicted.
Pushers, therefore, have a difficult, as well as an extremely dangerous, task to establish new sales outlets, as distinct from supplying regulars. If the regulars are supplied on the NHS, and the price on the black market kept low, there will still be a few new addicts each year; but not nearly as many as there would be if a higher price made it more profitable to push the drug.
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