Even readers willing at this point to concede that heroin really is an addicting drug may still favor vigorous enforcement of our antinarcotics laws. After all, addicts go without heroin while in prison.* Why not make narcotics unavailable throughout the country? Why not, in short, enforce the narcotics laws?

* This statement is only partially true; heroin is readily smuggled into some prisons.

The answer lies firmly imbedded in the structure of the American heroin black market. Let us examine this industry as we might examine any other commercial enterprise.

The opium poppy can be cultivated almost anywhere, with adequate yields of opium per acre in many soils and climates. While it is often alleged that poppy growing requires special soil and climate, the successful commercial cultivation of opium poppies in Vermont, New Hampshire, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Tennessee, South Carolina, Georgia, Arizona, and California demonstrates that the concentration of poppy cultivation in China, Greece, India, Iran, Laos, Thailand, Turkey, and Yugoslavia, with lesser amounts grown in Bulgaria, Mexico, North Africa, Pakistan, and the Soviet Union, is a legal and economic phenomenon rather than a botanical necessity. It takes hundreds of hours of labor during a short ten-day season to harvest the opium from one acre of poppies; thus commercial production flourishes primarily in countries where surplus labor can be hired for short periods at low hourly rates.

Most of the heroin that reaches the United States black market has come (at least until recently) from Turkey. Farmers there have for years been required by law to sell their entire opium crop to the Turkish government, which resells it to legitimate pharmaceutical manufacturers. Until 1970 or 1971, the official price paid was $7.25 per kilogram (2.2 pounds). By offering more than that, black-market operators have, despite the law, been able to secure all the Turkish opium they want; whatever portion of the crop they don't buy goes to the government and then to the legitimate pharmaceutical manufacturers.1

In 1970, American government representatives stationed in Turkey offered a solution to this problem. They persuaded the Turkish government to raise the official price from $7.25 to $10 or $15 per kilogram. The black-market operators thereupon raised their price to $25 per kilogram, and continued to secure all the heroin they wanted .2

The increase in price did not seriously affect black-market profitability. With opium at $25 per kilogram, the raw-materials cost of the heroin in a $5 New York City bag is only about a quarter of a cent. An increase in the farm price of opium to $100 per kilogram would still take only a penny of the $5-per-bag retail price.

In June 1971, President Nixon announced that the United States government had successfully persuaded Turkey to pass a law banning production of opium altogether after 197-2even legal opium for conversion to medicinal morphine.:' Such a law, when and if enforced, will certainly have an effect on the legitimate pharmaceutical companies who supply the world's legal morphine. They will have to go elsewhere for their opium. The net effect of this prohibition, when and if it occurs, will be to give the black-market suppliers a monopoly position as the only buyers to whom Turkish farmers can sell their opium.

But while the new law will, when and if enforced, drive the legitimate pharmaceutical companies out of the Turkish opium market, it is unlikely to curtail the availability of black-market opium. The proposed new measure will be only one more law for the Turkish farmers to break when they sell to the black-market entrepreneurs. Alternatively, if efforts are in fact made to enforce the new law, poppy culture may have to move higher into the Turkish hills. Finally, in the unlikely event that the ban on Turkish poppy growing becomes completely effective, the black-market suppliers will no doubt simply follow the legitimate pharmaceutical firms to Asia, Africa, or Latin America for their supplies. Indeed, there is growing evidence of a recent substantial shift in black-market operations from cheap Turkish opium to even cheaper Southeast Asian opium.*

*' In June 1971, for example, a "Special Study Mission" of the United States House of Representatives reported that opium grown in Southeast Asia "is smuggled to the United States by couriers on commercial or military aircraft. Some is mailed to the United States using both commercial and military postal services." One group centered in Bangkok, Thailand, was alleged to utilize "active duty military personnel to ship heroin to the United States thro6gh the Army and Air Force Postal System." In confirmation, the Special Study Mission cited United States Bureau of Customs data: from the beginning of March through April 24, 1971, the bureau made 248 seizures of narcotics passing through army and air force post offices. How many shipments passed through unseized was, of course, not known. One package from Bangkok, Thailand , containing 17 pounds of heroin-about 800,000 "fixes"-was seized at Fort Monmouth on April 5, 1971. Southeast Asian heroin is also said to reach the United States through Okinawa, Hong Kong, and other Asian ports.' The suppression of this traffic is likely to prove even more difficult than the suppression of the traffic from Turkey through Italy or France to New York.

 Even if the cultivation of poppies throughout the world should be completely blocked, moreover, the effect would be minimal. There are numerous synthetic opiates today which do not require opium as a raw material.

The formulas of these synthetics are known, and their synthesis is not beyond the skills of black-market chemists. Indeed, heroin itself can be synthesized in the chemical laboratory without using opium. An effective worldwide policing of all sources of raw opium would no doubt result in a conversion of the natural-heroin black market into a black market for synthetic heroin or for a synthetic heroin substitute. Why have black market entrepreneurs not already shifted to synthetics? The answer is simple. Even at inflated 1971 prices, the black marketeers (like the legitimate pharmaceutical companies) secure natural opium so cheaply that synthetics cannot compete.

After the poppies are grown and the opium harvested, the morphine must be extracted from the opium and converted to heroin. This processing can be quite readily accomplished with simple, inexpensive,* relatively mobile equipment-much less equipment than is needed for the distillation of alcohol on a comparable scale. When one heroin "factory" is closed down, another is set tip. The United States was unable to prevent the illegal distillation of alcoholic beverages from 1920 to 1933 (or even today); f preventing the conversion of opium to morphine and then to heroin is a much more difficult undertaking. The bulk of the morphine is converted to heroin in the south of France, because that is where the trade began. It continues to be centered there, presumably because the converters like to live in the south of France. If law enforcement there becomes too troublesome, they can readily take their skills and modest equipment elsewhere.

* Equipment for a factory capable of converting morphine into heroin in kilogram batches costs about $700.5

* For every 14 gallons of legal distilled spirits consumed in the United States in 1969, it is estimated that one gallon of bootleg "moonshine" was produced.6

Faced with these discouraging facts, United States law-enforcement officials have devoted much of their efforts through the years to preventing the importation of heroin into the United States. The problems they face at this level can be suggested by a few figures.

There are an estimated 250,000 to 315,000 addicts in the United States, each paying an estimated $20 a day for an estimated 40 milligrams of heroin.7

To supply 250,000 addicts with 40 milligrams apiece per day takes less than 25 pounds of heroin per day-four or five tons a year.

Total United States imports of all goods exceed 100,000,000 tons a year. The task of the Bureau of Customs, accordingly, is to find four or five tons of heroin amid 100,000,000 tons of other imports.

The number of persons entering the United States through Customs each year totals more than 200,000,000-4,000,000 per week. One or two travelers can carry concealed on their persons a day's supply of heroin for 250,000 addicts; two or three can carry a week's national supply in their luggage. To spot that handful of smugglers among 4,000,000 border crossers each week is a problem not easily solvable. It has certainly not been solved during the decades since 1914. What antismuggling controls really accomplish is to discourage an increase in the supply and thus to help maintain high prices.

Few smugglers are caught by means of random border checks, of course. Arrests generally occur when border officials are tipped off to their coming by national and international surveillance networks. Many seizures are in fact made, and widely publicized. But here three other factors tend to limit police effectiveness.

First, the national and international surveillance networks with their paid informers and voluntary informants are an ideal method of spotting new entrants into the narcotics industry. An established smuggler or importer faced with fresh competition especially competition from a supplier who cuts prices-need only pass the word through informers or informants to the surveillance networks and thus to the United States Bureau of Customs. The law-enforcement agents may be completely honest; * even so, the net effect of their efforts is largely to keep out new competitors and thus to buttress the existing heroin distribution system and its price-fixing effectiveness.

* Honesty remains a problem, however. Agents making $10,000 to $12,000 a year must resist bribes totaling many times that sum. In narcotics work, says the chief of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs, John E. Ingersoll, are "the most fantastic temptations that I have found in some 18 or 19 years of law enforcement."8 During a twelve-month period ending in November 1969, 49 Federal Bureau of Narcotics agents (39 of them in New York) resigned under fire following investigation. The agents' misconduct took three forms: actual sale of narcotics, participation in a conspiracy to sell, and illegal possession of drugs. In one case, more than $1 million changed 9

Second, increasing the Bureau of Customs heroin seizures has only a trivial effect on the cost of the heroin in a bag. An estimated 6,600 pounds of heroin was smuggled into the United States in the fiscal year ending June 30, 1970. During that year, the Bureau of Customs seized 311 pounds, or less than 5 percent; this was a better-than-average year for the bureau. 10 It meant that foreign suppliers had to ship 6,911 pounds of heroin in order to land 6,600 pounds safely in the United States. Suppose that by herculean efforts and a vast expansion of its staff, the Bureau of Customs manages to quadruple its seizures next year. The net effect will be that European suppliers will have to ship 7,844 pounds instead of 6,911 pounds in order to land 6,600 pounds safely. The additional 933 pounds of heroin intercepted will represent a loss to heroin importers of about $3,500,000. This will add less than two cents to the materials cost of a $5 bag. (The selling price of the bag may go up by more than two cents, of course; but if so, the rest of the increase will represent added profits to the traffickers.)

Third, the smuggler actually caught is rarely the owner of the heroin seized; he is instead a very well-paid courier (sometimes a sailor, sometimes a minor diplomat, sometimes a college student, sometimes just a traveler). Even if he is caught and imprisoned for life, there are others eager to take his place for a sufficient fee.

On rare occasions, it is true, the seizure of a very large shipment of heroin does cause a temporary shortage of black-market supplies within the United States. This, however, is hardly an objectionable event for the American distributors; on the contrary, it enables them to raise their prices even higher.' Indeed, the profitability of the entire narcotics black market depends on untiring efforts of the law-enforcement agencies to hold the available supply down to the level of effective demand. Only during World War 11, when international channels of trade were disrupted on a mammoth scale, was the shortage of smuggled heroin sufficiently acute to curtail significantly the number of addicts receiving their opiates.* 13

* Law enforcement produced a temporary shortage of heroin in New York City, for example, in November 1961. Preble and Casey said (1969): "The panic lasted only a few weeks. During this time the demand for the meager supplies of heroin was so great that those who had supplies were able to double and triple their prices and further adulterate the quality, thus realizing sometimes as much as ten times their usual profit. By the time heroin became available again in good supply, the dealers had learned that inferior heroin at inflated prices could find a ready market. Since that time the cost of heroin on the street has continued to climb.... A few minor panics about two a year-help bolster the market. Today an average heroin habit costs the user about $20 a day, as compared to $2 twenty years ago. This fact is responsible for a major social disorder in [New York City] today." 11

A minor panic developed in New York City late in November 1971, with heroin hard to get; it was generally attributed to the two-month dock strike, which cut off au ocean freight, rather than to law enforcement. The panic ended when the strike was settled.

* During this shortage of imported heroin, opium poppies were again planted in the UnitedStates.12 Congress responded by passing the Opium Poppy Control Act of 1942. The shortage also led to an expansion of opium production in Mexico.

 If the price of tomatoes goes up, many housewives will shift to other vegetables. But, as a 1967 Arthur D. Little, Inc., report points out, the demand for opiates is remarkably inelastic. 11 Even at the inflated blackmarket prices charged in the 1960s, consumers went right on buying heroin. (Alcohol and cigarettes are two other products that display very little demand elasticity.) Vigorous law enforcement, while it can be enormously effective in inflating heroin prices, has relatively little effect on heroin consumption.

The efficiency of American law-enforcement agencies in keeping the price of heroin high in the United States has proved to be a boon primarily to Great Britain, France, Germany, the Scandinavian countries, and other nonopium-producing countries throughout the world. Why bother to smuggle heroin into London or Stockholm when you can sell it at far higher prices in the United States? *

* Detective Sergeant Arthur Howard, senior sergeant of the Scotland Yard Drugs Office, reported at a meeting of the British Medico-Legal Society on February 11, 1965, that the black-market price of heroin of medicinal strength and purity in London was then twenty shillings (about $2.80) per grain." Heroin of medicinal strength and purity was not available on the New York retail black market at any price at that time; adulterated heroin of equivalent opiate activity was retailing at about $30. The London black market was very small and unable to raise its prices because an overcharged addict could get his heroin without charge through the National Health Service.

Britain's relative freedom from smuggled opiates through the decades has often been attributed to the policy that permitted British physicians to prescribe morphine and heroin for addicts legally. This, as we , shall show in Chapter 13, has been one important factor; but American law enforcement efforts, by stimulating increased prices and thus attracting the world's smugglers, also deserves much credit for Britain's freedom from smuggled heroin.

It is the economics of smuggling, incidentally, that explains why American addicts converted from opium or morphine to heroin after 1914. The difference to the addict is slight for heroin is promptly reconverted into morphine after it enters the human body. Addicts now take heroin because that's what the smugglers smuggle. One pound of pure morphine can be easily and cheaply converted into a little more than one pound of pure heroin (diacetylmorphine) by heating it in the presence of acetic acid, some of which it absorbs. The heroin that emerges is more potent, per ounce or per cubic inch, than the morphine that goes into the process; it is therefore worth more.*  

* "It is widely believed amongst addicts," says Dr. J. H. Willis, consultant psychiatrist in drug addiction to Guy's, King's College, and Bexley Hospitals in London, "that heroin possesses some special euphoriant effect; a collective belief which may be shared by many doctors but in fact it is not the case. Studies carried out on nonaddicts and post-addicts have clearly demonstrated that the subjects completely failed to distinguish between the effects of heroin and morphine. What seems likely is that a 'special effect' of heroin as a euphoriant is a myth propagated by narcotics pedlars in the United States. Thus the myth may have an economic basis, since an illicit dealer can sell more doses. Its 'special' effect is then directly linked to its greater potency weight for weight than morphine rather than to a qualitative difference.

"In the same way the drug has acquired a bad reputation as an addictive substance and a special reputation as an analgesic. Whilst it is an excellent analgesic there is little firm evidence that it is more effective than morphine although it is traditionally favoured in terminal illness. This is not to say that it is a drug which should be removed from the Pharmacopoeia but merely to highlight the fact that it is a drug that has acquired a reputation for good or ill probably for no really valid reason." 16

* The ability of one milligram of heroin to accomplish as much in medicinal use as two or three milligrams of morphine is believed to result from the greater ease with which a heroin molecule passes through the barrier separating the bloodstream from the brain. Thus more heroin molecules reach the brain and fewer are wastefully excreted. For the addict, however, the difference is slight; lie readily develops tolerance to both morphine and heroin, so that neither produces much effect. 

One final point concerning smuggling is made in the 1967 Arthur D. Little report. If United States law-enforcement policies become so efficient as to prevent altogether the smuggling of heroin, the black market can readily convert to narcotic concentrates that are a thousand or even ten thousand times more potent, milligram for milligram.17 A month's supply of such a concentrate for one addict can be hidden under a postage stamp. A few pounds of these concentrates might supply the entire United States addict market for a year. The formulas for these concentrates are known, the raw materials are available, and only small quantities are needed. The skills required are not beyond those possessed by the clandestine chemists who now extract morphine from opium and convert the morphine to heroin, or of better chemists who might be recruited. If the Bureau of Customs should some day develop methods for seizing so much heroin that smuggling became unprofitable, the foreign suppliers could and no doubt would convert to the uninterceptable concentrates-or the concentrates might be manufactured here in the United States, much as black-market amphetamines and LSD are now clandestinely manufactured here (see Parts V and VII).

After importation, the heroin is adulterated or "cut" with other materials. The morphine that physicians legally prescribe for the treatment of pain is also "cut" with a fluid vehicle; pure morphine and pure heroin are too concentrated to be safely injectable into the human body. The objection to the "cutting" of street heroin is not that it occurs, but that it is not properly done, and that unsafe diluents are used. The adulterated heroin that reaches the street has, on the average, about as much opiate activity (10 percent) as the natural product, opium. The net effect of the whole opium-morphine-heroin-adulterated heroin cycle is thus to put the active opiate into its most concentrated form for the smuggling leg of its trip to market.

The 1967 Arthur D. Little report distinguishes three levels of middlemen between the importer and the addict on the street-and estimates buying and selling prices per kilogram (2.2 pounds) of pure heroin at each level as follows.18

A more detailed analysis of the New York City heroin market was published in the International Journal of the Addictions for March 1969 by Professor Edward A. Preble and John J. Casey, Jr. The Preble-Casey analysis follows in part. 

Heroin contracted for in Europe at $5,000 per kilo @2.2 pounds) will be sold in $5 bags on the street for about one million dollars, after having passed through at least six levels of distribution. . . . The following account does not include all the many variations, but can be taken as a paradigm.

Opium produced in Turkey, India, and Iran is processed into heroin in Lebanon, France, and Italy and prepared for shipment to the East Coast of the United States. A United States importer, through a courier, can buy a kilogram of 80% heroin in Europe for $5,000.... The importer, who usually never sees the heroin, sells down the line to a highly trusted customer through intermediaries. If it is a syndicate operation, he would only sell to high level, coded men, known as captains. These men are major distributors, referred to as kilo connections and, generally, as the people.

The kilo connection pays $20,000 for the original kilogram (kilo, kee), and gives it a one and one cut (known as hitting it), that is, he makes two kilos out of one by adding the common adulterants of milk sugar, mannite (a product from the ash tree used as a mild laxative) and quinine. . . . After the cut, the kilo connection sells down the line in kilos, half kilos and quarter kilos, depending upon the resources of his customers. He will get approximately $10,000 per half kilo for the now adulterated heroin.

The customer of the kilo connection is known as the connection in its original sense, meaning that he knows the people, even though he is not one of them. He may also be called an ounce man. He is a highly trusted customer. . . . Assuming that the connection buys directly from a kilo connection, he will probably give the heroin a one and one cut (make two units of each one), divide the total aggregate into ounces, and sell down the line at $700 per ounce. In addition to the adulteration, the aggregate weight of the product is reduced. Known as a short count, this procedure occurs at every succeeding level of distribution. At this stage, however, it is called a good ounce, despite the adulteration and reduced weight.

The next man is known as a dealer in weight, and is probably--' important figure in the line of distribution. He stands midway between the top and the bottom, and is the first one coming down the line who takes substantial risk of being apprehended by law enforcement officers. He is also the first one who may be a heroin user himself, but usually be is not. He is commonly referred to as one who is into something and is respected as a big dealer who has put himself in jeopardy, by, as the sayings go, carrying a felony with him and doing the time; that is, if he gets caught he can expect a long jail sentence. It is said of him that "he let his name go," or "his name gets kicked around," meaning that his identity is known to people in the street. This man usually specializes in cut ounces. He may give a two and one cut (make three units of each one) to the good ounce from the connection and sell the resulting quantity for $500 per ounce. The aggregate weight is again reduced, and now the unit is called a piece instead of an ounce. Sometimes it is called a street ounce or a vig ounce (vig, is an abbreviation for vigorish, which is the term used to designate the high interest on loans charged by loan sharks). In previous years 25 to 30 level teaspoons were supposed to constitute an ounce; today it is 16 to 20.

The next customer is known as a street dealer. He buys the piece for $500, gives it a one and one cut and makes bundles, which consist of 25 $5 bags each. He can usually get seven bundles from each piece, and he sells each bundle for $80. He may also package the heroin in half-bundles (ten $5 bags each), which sell for $40, or he may package in half-loads (fifteen $3 bags), which sell for $30 each. This man may or may not be a heroin user.

The next distributor is known as a juggler [in popular parlance, pusher], who is the seller from whom the average street addict buys. He is always a user. He buys bundles for $80 each and sells the 25 bags at about $5 each, making just enough profit to support his own habit, day by day. He may or may not make a small cut, known as tapping the bags. He is referred to as someone who is always high and always short , that is, he always has enough heroin for his own use and is always looking for a few dollars to get enough capital to cop again.... The juggler leads a precarious life, both financially and in the risks he takes of getting robbed by fellow addicts or arrested. Most arrests for heroin sales are of the juggler. Financially he is always struggling to stay in the black. If business is a little slow he may start to get sick or impatient and use some of the heroin he needs to sell in order to re-cop. If be does this he is in the red and temporarily out of business. A juggler is considered to be doing well if he has enough money left over after a transaction for cab fare to where he buys the heroin. One informant defined a juggler as a "non-hustling dope fiend who is always messing the money up." 19

Figure 1, taken from the Preble and Casey report, summarizes the major features of the distribution transactions.

The purpose of this complex, multilayered distribution system is clear: it makes it possible for each participant in the system to deal with only a few others whom he knows and trusts, and thus to minimize his risk of arrest. The 1967 Arthur D. Little report estimates, for example, that the average importer supplies only eight wholesalers, each wholesaler only six retailers, each retailer only six pushers, and each pusher only fifteen addicts. Yet the supplies from the original importer reach 4,320 addicts .20 The middlemen (wholesalers and retailers) are liable to arrest-but arresting a middleman is not likely to close down a channel of distribution. One retired middleman told a New York Times reporter in September 1969 that he had been making $4,000 a week before his retirement by distributing a relatively small amount of heroin weekly." At a White House press conference in October 1969, the head of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs, John E. Ingersoll, similarly reported: "The money is terrific. I have seen traffickers who can make $150,000 to $200,000 a year. These are not the big-time fellows. These are the middle level ." 22 When a job like that falls vacant through arrest, retirement, or other cause, there are many applicants eager to fill it. No college degree is required, nor much technical skill or experience. Since the black market keeps few records, the need to pay income tax on the $4,000 a week is less than for most other sources of income; this acts as a multiplier of incentive. Even $1,000 a week is generous pay if no tax is paid on it. If a middleman is prudent, he can retire quite young. Lack of middlemen, in short-like lack of poppy growers, processors, or importers-is not likely to prove the Achilles' heel in the black-market distribution system.

The middlemen lowest on the ladder, the pushers or "jugglers," are often arrested. Indeed, the 1967 Arthur D. Little report estimates that of every seven pushers, one goes to prison each year. Following such an event, there is keen competition among the arrested man's friends, neighbors, and other customers to determine which one of them will be fortunate enough to inherit his "connection"-for "juggling" is a way of life much preferable to stealing or other alternatives open to street addicts. Thus doubling or trebling the number of jugglers or pushers arrested each year has little effect on the distribution system; it simply opens the door of opportunity for additional replacements.

From time to time, enforcement officials find a weak spot in one of the conduits through which drugs flow from the poppy growers overseas to addicts in the United States. When this occurs, the supply is simply rerouted around the weak spot. Failure to close down the opiate black markets during the past fifty-six years of intensive effort suggests that not too much hope should be pinned on the success of future efforts.

The structure of the black market, incidentally, helps to explain why the black-market retailing of narcotics has tended since World War II to center in black inner-city ghettos. The first black markets after 1914 were largely in brothels and red-light districts-neighborhoods where the risk was minimized that passersby, if they happened upon drug transactions, would summon the police. After 1920, the markets tended to shift to speakeasies in the nation's Boweries and skid rows-also areas where residents and the police were inclined to be alienated from one another. The shift after World War 11 to the alienated black inner-city ghettos was a natural further development.

Narcotics agents followed the traffickers into the black ghettos. Thus, arrest figures and Federal Bureau of Narcotics figures since 1946 have shown a heavy overrepresentation of black inner-city addicts. The true ratios, past and present, of black to white addicts, of impoverished to middle-class addicts, and of inner-city to suburban addicts are unknown.

The evidence is clear, however, that heroin addiction among white, middle-class young people outside the inner cities increased notably in 1970 and 1971 (see Chapter 20). This was the first major extension of the heroin market since the early 1950s-and it is ironic indeed that it coincided with the Nixon administration's vigorous law-enforcement campaign against illicit drugs.