PB,
Hope there was a stiff upper lip to go with your honest mea culpas: <<drug pushers (The British Empire)>> Kudos! for the admission.
Here's how Pynchon, again in *Gravity's Rainbow,* put it without going quite as far as you in naming names:
<< This classic hustle is still famous, even today, for the cold purity of its execution: bring opium from India, introduce it into China -- howdy Fong, this here's opium, opium, this is Fong -- ah, so, me eatee! -- no-ho-ho, Fong, you smokee, smokee, see? pretty soon Fong's coming back for more and more, so you create an inelastic demand for the shit, get China to make it illegal, then sucker China into a couple-three disastrous wars over th right of your merchants to sell opium, which by now you are describing as sacred. You win, China loses. Fantastic. >>
I know for a fact, and don't need historians or journalists of any stripe to tell me, that in one form or another this same *hustle* was perpetrated on American soldiers with opium refined into heroin. You see, four years after I left Vietnam my younger brother went there as a USAF medic treating hundreds of heroin addicted troops. Curiously, these men became addicted by smoking, not injecting the drug. I wonder who taught them that?
All discussion re the identity of perpetrators of this hustle aside, one thing is certain, it's not likely they'll ever be held accountable.
Jerry in Omaha |
