TRAFFIC IN DEADLY DRUGS.

Mt Benger Mail, 2 November 1938, Page 1

TRAFFIC IN DEADLY DRUGS.

CHINESE PEASANTS PAY TERRIBLE PRICE FOR “HAPPINESS.” In remote villages in Java, in the Philippine Islands, Hong Kong and China, I have been face to face with the human wreckage left behind when the narcotic sellers have passed by, writes H. Hessell Tiltman in Tit-Bits. I have seen, in the new State of Manchukuo, boys of 10' and 12 going twice and thrice weekly to the opium dens just as British boys go'to the cinema. I have bought smuggled opium and heroin at Singapore, where the price is high because of the risk, and in China, where all drugs are so cheap that the poorest peasant can afford to commit suicide that way. I have walked through hospitals crowded with the yellow emaciated faces of the victims of this devilish habit. I have seen Chinese dope-sellers, caught on Chinese soil, executed in public in Peiping—with gaping crowds of tourists looking at the pretty sight. I have seen the bodies of drug-victims pulled out of Chinese rivers. And I have tracked down the headquarters of the vilest trade in the world. That headquarters is situated in a network of alleys, dark and forbidding, which lies jflst off one of the main streets of the Japanese Concession at Tientsin, in North China. In that one district, beyond control by the Chinese authorities, some 25,000 Japanese, Koreans and Chinese —and a handful of renegade British, Americans and French —are earning a fat living by poisoning Asia. From the 50 or moie narcotic factories, manufacturing opium, heroin, morphine, cocaine, and the famous “Red Pills” by the ton, the stuff is smuggled throughout China, down to the South Seas, and even, in some eases, to the United States. It is sold systematically in every part of North China, the dope-merchants' paradise. There are 1500 drug dens at Tientsin alone.

Some are camouflaged as beauty establishments, barbers’ shops, chemists, bars or sing-song houses. Most of them quite openly stock nothing but forbidden drugs. The average number of similar ‘ ‘ dope joints” in the provincial towns of North China is 40 per town. Almost all of them are run by Koreans or Japanese, who are immune from the new Chinese law decreeing the death penalty for dope-selling. I have just returned from an allnight “dope crawl” through the headquarters of the world opium and hcorin trade. My guide was a Chinese whose wife is at this moment dying of the effects of the heroin habit in Tientsin. She was, until the dope demon got her, a young, lovely Chinese girl, and her husband loved her. Bo he has declared single-handed war on the Asiatic merchants of death who have murdered his happiness—as they have murdered the happiness of millions of others. In that underworld I purchased, openly and without questions, supplies of half-a-dozen drugs, possession of any of which would land me in a police cell in London. I found that the retail price of the best quality heroin, which is smoked in cigarettes, works out at 2s for 10 smokes. The price of ‘‘Yellow Powder,” a stronger variety for those with a more advanced craving, is 3s 6d—about 87 cents—for the same quantity. Eight there, in the heart of the great commercial city of Tientsin and while the Japanese police regulate the traffic on the main road nearby, thousands every night ‘‘enjoy” a few hours of forgetfulness, only to' awake with a worse craving than before. If they wake up at all! They don’t always. For 1 saw something last night. I saw, in one foul alley in the heart of the drug quarter, 20 human vultures standing in a group. When I passed by again an hour later they were still there. They were members of the Tientsin Guild of Body-snatchers waiting for a call. When some poor wretch who has been living on drugs and no food dies inside one of those dope-dens, the proprietors summon one of these ‘‘undertakers” to spirit away the body without questions being asked. So many die in those dens that outsiders discovered the trade was profitable, and started muscling-in on it. The - original vultures who had started the profession formed a trade union and threatened to go on strike unless the dope merchants agreed to employ only union labour!

From Jehol to Java the methods of the dope-peddling gentry are the same. A pedlar appears in a village and offers the peasant “happiness” in the form of a free shot of morphine, or a free smoko of heroin. The next week the dope peddlar returns and repeats the dose—again without payment. The third time a small charge is made, and after that, as the craving takes hold of the victims, the price of “happiness” goes up and up until the peasants concerned sell household goods, tools, and all they possess to buy a few hours' escape from the hell into which they have walked.

When the victim reaches the stage of buying dope instead of food ho is finished! After that *fie end comes quickly. A Chinese official who has just completed a “dope map” of North China tells me ’ that 70 per cent, of all the wealthy Chinese in the five northern provinces, and nearly 40 per cent, of the peasants and coolies, are to-day drug-takers. This in a population of one hundred million people.

Travelling among the people of North China during recent weeks I have seen

tho sunken, cheeks, stooped shoulders, and bloodless faces of the drug-taker on every hand. Up here, where homes are of one room, constructed of pig' dung without glass in the windows, morphine (to name only one drug) is retailing through thousands of dopedens at a price of £224,000 a ton! For sheer, coldblooded inhumanity nothing like this vast and still expanding traffic in death-dealing drugs has happened in all history.