The fearful legacy of China’s autonomy from Western influence.

China is the third-argest country in the world. It occupies one quarter of Asia and is a superpower that evolved from the expansionist and interventionist policies of Britain. Those policies had a serious backlash that Western society is still suffering today. The devastating effect of those policies is a drug called heroin.

Heroin is a derivative of raw opium. It is produced from poppy plant (papaver somniferum - the sleep-bearing poppy) which is euphemistically called the “moon flower” and grows three-to-four feet tall with egg-shaped pods that contain the opium resin. Ten days after the poppy blooms the resin is extracted by lancing the pods. The milky fluid is scraped off the pods and hardens into a brown gum that is raw opium. The amount of opium produced from a poppy crop will increase if the process is repeated but the potentency of the opium will be reduced with each lancing.

Australia’s current heroin problems contrast strongly with the historic tolerance towards opium smoking that is prevalent at the Asian source of the narcotic. Tolerance to opium smoking or "chasing the dragon" dates back to the eighth century, when Arab and Turkish merchants first introduced opium to China. The drug gained popularity in China where the huge demand resulted in domestic cultivation of opium poppies in Sichuan, Yunnan, Fujien, Zhejiang and Guangdong provinces.

In 1779 the British East India Company acquired a monopoly on the opium trade and flooded the Chinese market with large-scale importation until the trade was banned in 1839 by the Qing government. The destruction of 20,000 boxes of British-imported opium resulted in the Opium Wars, 1839-1842 and 1856-1860. The defeat of China during the Opium Wars divided the country into spheres of influence governed by the major Western powers and resulted in the Treaty of Tianjin (1858), which made it compulsory for China to accept opium imports.

It was not until The Boxer Rebellion (1899-1900) that China regained its autonomy and in 1949 further expansion of the opium trade occurred when members of The Chinese Nationalist Party were defeated by the Communist Party and fled to Indochina. Chinese from Yunnan province settled in the Shan State of Burma and began opium cultivation primarily for domestic consumption.

Asian-grown opium is a basic ingredient of the heroin export trade and the evolution from smoking recreational opium smoking to processing refined heroin was established by marketing entrepreneurs in Marseille and Hong Kong between 1950 and 1960.

The socio-economic consequence of that evolution has been a progressive worldwide increase of intravenous drug use, the spread of communicable diseases and spiralling costs caused by increased domestic crime rates.

Political implications have also emerged with the creation of military juntas and paramilitary insurgents that retain their power bases in Asia by siphoning off financial aid from the enormous narcodollar profits.

Clear definition of criminality remains nebulous - while intravenous drug users or minor heroin traffickers are targeted by law-enforcement agencies and the entrepreneurial kingpins remain untouched. The complexities of the Asian heroin export trade also make it difficult to eradicate heroin at its opium source and will require an empathetic reappraisal of Western attitudes towards Asian politics, culture, and economic assistance before any success can be accomplished.

The expansion of opium cultivation in Burma coincided with the political instability created by General Ne Win’s takeover in 1962. Opposition to Ne Win flared into open revolt by Shan, Kachin and other ethnic groups who formed revolutionary armies that taxed and controlled the opium convoys to finance paramilitary insurgents and micro-armies that fought Ne Win’s government. The conflict and frequent shifts in political alliance also allowed ex-revolutionaries to work as militia for the Burmese government that guarded the convoys to their destinations in Thailand.

In The Politics of Heroin in South-East Asia Dr Hal McCoy defined the main protagonists as Nationalist Chinese (KMT) paramilitary units under the command of General Ly Wen-huan. Rival opium warlords Lo Hsing Han and Chan Shee-fu or Khun Sa commanded their own militia but the most political of the rebel Shan micro-armies was the Shan State Army (SSA) who wanted to secede from the Union of Burma.

The KMT had established opium monopolies in North Burma since 1950 but were driven into Thailand by Burmese forces in 1961 and in 1967. When the Khun Sa’s militia challenged the KMT’s dominance of the narcotics trade he was defeated with major losses of opium, men and arms and in 1969 he was arrested and imprisoned by the Burmese army.

Following Khun Sa’s military defeat and imprisonment the rival opium warlord, Lo Hsing Han, became one of the region’s powerful military leaders. In 1973 he formed an alliance with the SSA to broker a deal with the US government for a pre-emptive purchase of 400 tonnes of opium for $20 million that would have ended the south-east Asian heroin export trade.

British film-maker Adrian Cowell acted as intermediary with the US government but the deal was never consummated because Lo Hsing Han was arrested and sentenced to death but received a pardon after serving eight years. The following year, Khun Sa was released from prison and regained control of the Golden Triangle heroin export trade.

Cowell described how Khun Sa also formed an alliance with the SSA and tried to end the south-east Asian heroin export trade by trying to broker a deal with the US for a pre-emptive purchase of Burma’s opium crop.

The offer received the backing of the Chairman of the US Commission on Drugs, Lester Wolfe, but US presidential advisor Dr Peter Bourne advised against the pre-emptive buy-back. Bourne recommended that the US government finance the Burmese army to use force to eradicate the heroin export trade. From 1974 to 1988 the US government poured $80 million into anti-narcotics efforts in Burma with the General Accounting Office of the US State Department adding another $5 million in 1988. All US Aid was finally suspended following the attack on pro-democracy demonstrators after General Ne Win’s one-party rule was replaced with the newly established State Law and Order Restoration Council (SLORC).

The political duplicity and implications of the Asian heroin export trade allows opium to remain the unofficial cash crop of impoverished rural areas in Asia. The world’s major illicit heroin-producing opium crops are cultivated in a zone stretching from central Turkey through Iran, Afganistan, Pakistan, India, Burma, Laos, Thailand and southern China and in some areas opium has replaced the traditional rice crops.

Asia’s capacity to produce and export significant quantities of heroin has had devastating impact upon every facet of Australian society. It is estimated that there are between 80 000 to 100 000 habitual heroin users in Australia which results in an estimated 70 per cent of all criminal activity being drug-related.

The National Drug and Alcohol Research Centre at the NSW University estimated the economic cost of heroin abuse in Australia was $1.7 billion a year. Contemporary strategies employed to combat the problem have become fragmented into philosophical arguments concerning the merits of drug rehabilitation programs, methadone substitution programs, and harm reduction strategies, as opposed to zero tolerance, detoxification, or legalised heroin trials.

Irrespective of the different strategies being employed to combat the heroin plague experienced by Australian society, it is a problem that has directly resulted from the expansionist and interventionist policies of Western powers during the 19th century. They were policies that moulded China into a singly autonomous superpower with a nationalistic pride in its own self-preservation. They were policies that also decimated Australian youth and have ultimately contributed to the death and destruction of young Australians lives.