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How do drugs and hard narcotics get into the United States?
Where do they
come
from? Who is
affected?
How big is the
international drug traffic? Here are the astonishing answers
- a
behind-the-scenes look at dope smuggling!
by
W illiam F. Dankenbring
H
E POJNTED
his grandfather's shot–
gun at his heart and pulled the
trigger - ending a life which
had been made "hel l" by drugs. But
before Percy Patrick Pi lon, Jr., 18,
committed suicide he wrote an open Jet–
ter to fellow tcen-agcrs in which he
said:
I have used all types of drugs from
bash, pot and acid to bard stuff. h 's all
a bad scene. The people who push it
don't use it because they know it's
bad stuff. They can see what it does
to you. All you are doing is ruining
your life and letting people make
money through you....
Where are you going to go from pot
- hash - acid- beroin?
Drug Use Growing
What are the chances
J01fr
child will
be hooked on dope, bis or her Jife
ruined by heroin? Do you think this is
only a problcm of the ghettoes of the big
city?
If
so, then you have been grossly
mistaken.
The problem of drug traffic is wor–
sening. Drug abuse has spread from the
big city ghettoes into the affiuent sub–
urbs. Heroin traffic is being described as
commonplace in many schools.
In lynbrook, New York, parents
heard estimates that perhaps 50 percent
of the city's teen-agers were using mari–
juana or hard narcotics. Because of in–
creasiog drug usage, Donald H. Louria,
president of the New York State Council
on Drug Addiction, warned that "within
a couple of years every high school and
every college in the country will
be
inundated by heroin."
Unless the trend is reversed,
yo11r
community will
be
affected - tf it isn't
already.
Drug use has become part of modero
life. Thougb laws still make certain
drugs illegal, illicit drugs can be found
almost everywhere. People are looking
for thrills, kicks, excitement and escape,
and drugs are providing it.
Ambouodor
Col/e~
Pnolo
What can
be
done about this growing
plague of illicit drugs? Where does
dope come from? How can the drug
traffic
be
stopped?
The Opium Octopus
The major hard narcotic smuggled in
world trade is opium, from the opium
poppy plant - the source of morphine
and heroin. The story of opium is
almost as old as the story of mankind.
In ancient Sumerian clay tablets is
described the process of extraction of
opium from the poppy plant. The Sume–
rians of lower Mesopotamia called it
Gil,
which meant "rejoicing."
The knowledge of opium was spread
abroad by the ancient Babylonians to
Persia and Egypt. Arab traders intro–
duced the drug into China probably in
the ninth or tenth century.
OriginaUy, the drug was drunk or
eaten . Opium
smoking
is of com–
paratively recent origin.
Wrote Norman Taylor in his book
¡\ 'arcotics:
Nat11re's Dangerolfs
Gifts.
"lt
is difficult to exaggerate the tragedy
that opium has brought to humanity.
No other drug has caused so much cor–
ruption, or unseated so many of the
powerful; the tentacles of its trade have
strctched from the august board rooms