More valuable than wine, as widely consumed as tobacco and offering combined profits that exceed the total value of all wine or wheat exports, heroin has become a global commodity in every sense. Distributed from a small production base concentrated in Central and Southeast Asia, it’s sold in virtually every corner of the globe, from Manchester to Manchuria, New York to Nairobi, Tehran to Toronto. Its use is endemic in countries such as Iran, China, Pakistan, the Central Asian republics and Russia, and is rising sharply in Africa.

According to the UN’s latest World Drug Report, the heroin industry appears to be under control. Last year, the total area under illegal opium poppy cultivation – 151,500 hectares – declined by 23 per cent from the previous year and illegal opium production stabilised at 4,620 tonnes after more than 25 years of increase.

But dig a little deeper and another picture emerges. While production may be stable, the global trade has spread and diversified; last year, heroin use increased in more countries than it decreased. While worldwide cocaine use has declined since the late 1990s, consumption of heroin has increased, and more people now use opiates than either cocaine or ecstacy.
Heroin is derived from the opium poppy, and its production involves harvesting and refining the raw opium, which is then converted to morphine and, finally, heroin. Today, the majority is converted into heroin: around 70 per cent of opium produced last year was used to make heroin (a total of 460 tonnes), while the remainder was consumed as opium.

The value of the opiate industry is staggering. At both producer and wholesale level, opiates are worth more than their cocaine equivalents, with traders clearing profits of an estimated US$21billion (£11.4billion). At retail level, the total value is estimated at US$65billion – ten per cent of all global agricultural exports.

Since the 1950s, opium cultivation and production has been concentrated largely in two highland regions known as the Golden Crescent and the Golden Triangle. The former covers an area of Southwest Asia from Pakistan, through Afghanistan to Iran; the latter spans the borders of Myanmar, Laos and Thailand.

During the 1970s and ’80s, Burma dominated the world’s opium supply, its yields eventually peaking at almost 1,800 tonnes in 1993. But since 1991, Afghanistan has been the world’s primary source: its farmers produced 1,980 tonnes in that year, more than half the world’s opium. Its share of global production has subsequently increased, and last year, a 4,100-tonne yield represented 89 per cent of the total. In contrast, Myanmar’s production has declined overall since 1993, and dropped consistently since 2001; last year its yield was only 312 tonnes, or seven per cent of the total.

There are other producers based in Colombia and Mexico, but their contribution is less significant and has declined in recent years, from 160 tonnes in 2003 to 97 in 2005.

Unsurprisingly, the opiates industry can play a significant role in the economies of producer countries. Farmers in Afghanistan, for example, can earn up to ten times as much from opium as from growing wheat. Nevertheless, with producers only receiving US$560million in Afghanistan last year and US$800million worldwide, it’s the processors, traffickers and dealers who enjoy the lion’s share of the wealth: traffickers last year received profits of more than US$20billion in Western Europe, US$8billion in Russia,  and US$2.1billion in Afghanistan. Retailers in Western Europe cleared around US$10billion.

From this select group of production areas, there are distinct patterns of distribution. About a quarter of the opiates produced in the Golden Crescent travel to Europe, 20 per cent goes north to Central Asia and Russia, 20 per cent stays in the region and ten per cent goes to South Asia. The remainder supplies markets in other parts of Asia, Africa, the Caribbean, North America and Oceania.

More than three quarters of Southeast Asia’s production supplies local and regional markets, including those in India and China. The remainder goes to Oceania, with smaller proportions supplying Europe and North America. Producers in Colombia and Mexico supply all of the Americas, although the majority goes to the north.

From triangle to crescent

The growth of Afghanistan as the world’s primary producer of opiates is rooted in the Cold War politics of the late 20th century.
At the turn of the 20th century, farmers were growing opium poppies throughout Asia, from Turkey to China, in the mountains of Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, Burma, Laos, Thailand, Vietnam and China, as well as in Russia and the Central Asian republics. But after the Second World War, production became concentrated in Turkey, the Golden Crescent and the Golden Triangle, when both the Communist Chinese and Russians and the European colonial authorities imposed rigorous prohibition.  

The Golden Triangle subsequently emerged as the centre of the global opium industry during the late 1970s, after crackdowns in Iran and Turkey. Production had grown during the protracted civil wars in Laos and Burma, where warlords used the proceeds to fund their struggles. The CIA’s covert operations in these conflicts also played an important part in supporting the Golden Triangle’s opium industry. 

At the peak of production during the early 1990s, farmers in Myanmar, Laos, Thailand and Vietnam were planting around 200,000 hectares with opium poppies and producing almost 2,000 tonnes of opium each year. But crackdowns on cultivation eradicated the crop from Thailand and Vietnam by 2001 and reduced production in Laos from 202 tonnes in 1990 to 14 tonnes last year. Declines of similar magnitude in Myanmar mean the yield for the entire the Golden Triangle was less than 400 tonnes last year. At the same time, Afghanistan’s industry has gone from strength to strength, so that today it not only accounts for the vast majority of the global total, but its production has replaced that which was lost from the Golden Triangle.

The Golden Crescent’s association with the opium trade dates back to the first century AD. Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan all have a history of opium use that stretches back at least to Medieval times, when it’s likely that opium was one of the commodities traded along the Silk Route. However, it was the politics of the late 1970s and ’80s that prompted cultivation and production to increase significantly in Afghanistan.

The first trigger was the Soviet invasion of 1979, says Labrousse. “This wasn’t so the Mujahideen could fund their war: the USA was already sending them weapons.” Farmers turned to growing opium poppies because they were left with little alternative. “The Communists were bombing the farmers’ fields, forcing many to flee to Pakistan as refugees. They would return to their fields two or three times a year to plant and harvest crops and, considering the risk, it made more sense for them to grow something of high value.”

There was a ready market for their opium in Iran, where more than one million addicts had suddenly found themselves without a supply following the revolution in 1979. “Iran was traditionally a very important producer and consumer of opium for both economic and social reasons,” says Pierre-Arnaud Chouvy. “But Ayatollah Khomeni instigated a huge crackdown on production, so Afghan opium was at a premium.”

At the same time, the Pakistani military secret service began trading in opium to support the destabilisation of India. “They were delivering American arms to the Mujahedin,” says Labrousse. “After dropping off the weapons, they would load up with opium, which they would transform into heroin and then sell. They used the proceeds to support the Sikhs in Punjab and Muslim rebellions in Kashmir.”

A drought in the Golden Triangle in 1983 further increased the demand for Afghan opium. It was the withdrawal of the Soviets in 1989, however, that led to the biggest rise in production levels in Afghanistan. “When the Soviets retreated,” says Chouvy, “the warlords that had made up the Mujahedin began fighting among themselves.” No longer supported by the USA, they used sales of opium as a means of funding their wars. “In fact, it got to the point where some of the warlords continued to fight so they could keep profiting from the opium economy.”

Within five years, the area under cultivation more than doubled from 34,000 hectares to 71,000 in 1994, During the same period, production tripled from 1,120 tonnes to 3,400 tonnes.

After the Taliban emerged in 1994, it effectively legitimised the trade by taxing producers, processors and traffickers. Production soared to 4,600 tonnes from 91,000 hectares in 1999, before dropping sharply in 2001, after the group’s leader, Mullah Omah, issued a ban on opium-poppy cultivation in an effort to appease the UN. Following the US invasion of 2001, however, production resumed, with the area under cultivation reaching a new high of 131,000 hectares in 2004. The latest survey of the opium industry in Afghanistan shows that, last year, cultivation declined by 21 per cent to 104,000 hectares. However, a rich harvest produced 4,100 tonnes of raw opium.

Despite the declines from the peaks of 1999 and 2004, the overall trend continues to rise, and the UN predicts that this year will see an increase in both the area under cultivation and the volume of opium produced in Afghanistan. Moreover, the Taliban is now instructing farmers in the areas that it controls to plant opium to illustrate their defiance of the Karzai government and Western troops.

If Afghanistan’s opium and heroin industry helped to fund wars and feed poor farmers’ families between 1979 and 2001, it continues to play a vital part in the country’s economy today. “Opium sustained Afghanistan through 25 years of war and may well help the country to move to a peace economy,” says Chouvy. “Without opium, I don’t know what the people would have done.” Last year, the total value of opiate exports was US$2.7billion, which is equivalent to 52 per cent of the country’s GDP. Of this, US$2.14billion went to traffickers and US$560million to farmers.

In relative terms, however, it’s the latter group who benefit most from opium trade. Last year, more than 300,000 families grew opium poppies, accounting for a total of two million people or 11 per cent of the rural population. They can earn almost ten times as much from planting opium as they can wheat, and last year, the average annual gross income from opium among these families was US$1,800.

For this reason, reducing opium cultivation and heroin production will be extremely difficult, says Chouvy. “In Myanmar and Laos, the failure to provide economic alternatives to opium-poppy production is having a devastating effect on the impoverished rural people who depend on the illicit opium economy for their livelihood. Sudden reductions of the main cash crop in areas where rice shortages are severe can have dire consequences for the local populations, who have no other way of coping with such shortages than the opium economy.”

Even without considering the effects on producers, it’s clear that efforts to eradicate opium production have failed. “The USA’s ‘war on drugs’, which was started by Richard Nixon in 1971, has been a complete failure,” says Chouvy. “In fact, it’s actually been counterproductive. In most cases, it simply shifts production to other areas and helps to keep the price high, which is exactly what the producers and traffickers want.” The ban imposed by the Taliban in 2000 had just that effect, with the price of opium at the farm gate rising by almost 1,000 per cent from US$28 to US$301 per kilogram.

Many promote the idea of alternative development – substituting other crops for opium – but according to  Chouvy, this hasn’t worked either. “You can’t get rid of the opium industry by focusing on opium production and replacing it with another form of agricultural production. The profits from opium are often too high and the overall economic environment is rarely conducive to viable legal agricultural production.

 In Afghanistan, the problem isn’t opium, it’s the underdevelopment of the whole country.”
Labrousse agrees. So far, he says, reconstruction and development projects have failed to address the needs of the country’s rural population. “There was around US$5billion made available for development between 2001 and 2005, but this money went to the cities. There’s no administration to manage the money in the countryside yet, so the farmers have seen no change in their economy. They still need the poppy just to survive.”

Diversification of trade

As the centre of opium production has moved from the Golden Triangle to Afghanistan, so the trade in, and consumption of, heroin has changed. Until the 1970s, most of the world’s heroin was made from opium produced in Turkey, with the Golden Triangle and Golden Crescent supplying smoking opium to regional consumers. The Turkish opium was sent to laboratories in Marseilles, France, to be processed into heroin and distributed to Europe and North America by the Corsican mafia. But following pressure from the USA, Turkey instigated a national prohibition on opium production and the Golden Triangle began to supply the international market.

Today, the Golden Triangle, particularly Myanmar, continues to supply most of the markets in East and Southeast Asia. Colombia and Mexico also feed North and South America, although, as production has declined (to around 100 tonnes of opium a year), so have their significance in the market place.

Afghanistan is now the big player, supplying some 90 per cent of the world’s heroin market. In fact, not only have Afghan producers captured the markets previously supplied by Turkey and the Golden Triangle, it has also taken advantage of political changes to diversify the global trade.

Traditionally, opiates exported from the Golden Crescent followed a path through Turkey to Europe. Today, although this so-called Southern Route has been extended eastwards, essentially it hasn’t changed, explains Labrousse. “During the 1960s, the main producer in the region was Turkey, and in the 1970s, it was Iran,” he says. “Since Afghanistan has increased production, there has been no need to change the route: from Afghanistan through Iran to Turkey, and from there on to Europe, either westwards via the Balkans or northwards through Bulgaria or Romania.”

But since the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, a new, northern route from Afghanistan has emerged, via Central Asia to Russia. “When the ex-Soviet Republics acceeded to independence, all the borders north of Afghanistan that had been closed for 50 or 60 years opened, and with them a huge potential market for heroin,” says Labrousse.

Where the majority of Southwest Asian opium used to be converted to heroin in Turkey, during the past two or three years, processing has become increasingly concentrated in Afghanistan. “From our seizure data, we estimate that about 70 per cent of Afghan opium is now processed into heroin before it leaves the country,” says Thomas Pietschmann of the UN Office on Drugs and Crime. “The other 30 per cent leaves the country as opium, mostly for consumption in Iran and Pakistan.”

This shift makes sense for several reasons, Pietschmann believes. “Dealers can make more money by selling heroin rather than opium,” he says. “And the conversion makes trafficking easier, because heroin is less bulky [around ten per cent the volume of its opium equivalent] and doesn’t have the strong smell of opium. There are also fewer risks involved in producing heroin in Afghanistan than in Turkey, where the police have been cracking down on laboratories.”

In the past, customs officials and police would frequently find morphine on its way to Turkey, but as heroin processing has moved to Afghanistan, this trend has declined. Nevertheless, there remains a small trade in morphine. “Because of the various stages involved in converting opium into heroin,” says Pietschmann, “what is sold as poor quality heroin might, in fact, be closer to morphine.”

Last year, around 80 per cent of Afghanistan’s heroin left on the southern road, via Iran and/or Pakistan. The remainder travelled north to Central Asia and Russia. Although there are important staging points along both of these routes, the exact path taken by a consignment will vary according to traffickers’ capabilities and preferences. Much of the European trade is controlled by Turkish groups, for example. So heroin being smuggled from Afghanistan to the UK might find its way to Turkey via Iran and sometimes Pakistan and then take one of a number of routes to the Netherlands. There, Turkish syndicates would arrange its passage to the UK, usually by ferry to such busy ports as Dover, Harwich or Felixtowe, or via the Channel Tunnel.

It’s rare for a consignment to travel the entire distance from Afghanistan to Europe in a single unbroken journey. “Normally, they are bought and sold by different groups along the route, the mode of transport is changed and loads are split up and merged as they move westward,” explains a report on organised crime by the UK National Criminal Intelligence Service. These “different groups” might work independently, the report goes on to explain, or under the control of others. “For example, Albanians, Bulgarians, Macedonians, Kosovars, Romanians, Bosnians and Serbs are all known to be involved in the movement of Turkish-controlled heroin through the Balkan corridor.”

In many countries, the informal nature of the economies facilitates the illegal passage of heroin. “The black market is well developed in Central Asia,” says Labrousse. “All sorts of items, both legal and illegal, are traded here, and traffickers can use established networks to smuggle whatever goods they want, whether it’s heroin, people, archaeological pieces, electronic devices, cars, mineral oils or cigarettes.”

Often the distinction between an informal and an illegal economy is ill-defined. “Many of these Central Asian countries face endemic economic crises,” says Chouvy, “where the majority of the population live on the threshold of poverty. In many market towns, goods are sold informally, and people practise bartering to obtain supplies cheaply. Towns on trading routes act as regional distribution points for all kinds of goods, and there is little law enforcement or legislation governing these practices.” Even when there is, endemic corruption, often perpetuated by drug traffickers, means that it’s easy to get a policeman or customs official to turn a blind eye.

Along the two principal routes out of Afghanistan – towards Europe and Russia – there are countless diversions, some of them extremely convoluted. ‘Southern’ heroin, for example, often travels to Iran via Pakistan. From there, some is smuggled into India, where it’s either sold on the streets or shipped to East Africa, where West African syndicates control the trade. From such ports as Mombassa in Kenya and Dar es Salaam and Zanzibar in Tanzania, these groups fly the heroin on to West Africa, and from there to Europe and eventually to the USA.

Traffickers prefer to take a more convoluted route if it ensures safety, says Pietschmann. “They like to move their consignments through those areas where they are least likely to be detected, either where traffic is busy or where there is less security.” Another advantage of taking heroin from Afghanistan to Europe via Africa, he adds, is that customs officials will be less likely to expect drugs to arrive from non-producer countries.

Unlike the Turkish trade, which tends to move relatively large consignments of several hundred kilograms  the West African groups prefer to use ‘mules’ to move small amounts – typically less than one kilo – more frequently. The diversification of routes out of Afghanistan hasn’t just increased the supply to established markets. It has also helped to create new markets. The availability of cheap heroin in sub-Saharan Africa, for example, has led to sharp increases in consumption in such countries as Ghana, Kenya, Tanzania, South Africa, Nigeria, Senegal and Zambia.

The key to the rise of heroin use in these areas is the price. According to the latest UN report, the retail value of ‘no.3 heroin’ – that which is used for injecting – is US$96 per gram in the UK and US$95 in the USA. But in Central Asia, it can be as low as US$1.90 in Tajikistan, US$4.50 in Kyrgyzstan and US$17 in Uzbekistan. In Afghanistan, itself, it is US$1.40, in Pakistan US$2 and in Iran US$7.40.

“The range in price reflects the distance from Afghanistan,” says Pietschmann. “Each time it crosses a border, somebody wants to make money.” Even so, prices in some parts of Africa remain low: US$13 in Kenya and Uganda, US$18 in Tanzania, US$19 in Ghana and US$15 in Nigeria. “The risk factor has the biggest effect on the price, and here there is a low risk of detection because there is little enforcement.” There are also market forces at play here. “The price needs to be competitive in the local market. At European prices, no African could buy the drugs.”

Legal opium and morphine

The Senlis Council, a European-based security and development policy think tank, is promoting an initiative that aims to tackle illegal opium production in Afghanistan by licensing farmers to grow the crop legally for the production of morphine, codeine and other medicines for the pharmaceutical industry. In doing so, it hopes to solve another global problem – the chronic lack of potent analgesics available in the developing world.

The council hopes to model this proposal on a similar system used in Turkey during the 1970s. “The Turkish government at the time realised that forced crop eradication wasn’t a realistic option,” says Emmanuel Reinert, the council’s executive director. “They worked together with the USA to implement a licensing system and negotiated preferential trade agreements between the two countries.”

Today, about 100,000 Turkish farmers hold licenses to grow poppies and about 600,000 people make a living out of the legal opium. The USA still buys opium for medicine from Turkey. “Turkey stands as an example of how a country can go from being an illegal to a licensed producer of opium,” says Reinert. “We think that Afghanistan can do the same. It must use its two strengths – its strictly binding local control systems and the expertise of its poppy farmers – to move forward and pave the way for a new Afghanistan.”

Heroin production

The illicit production of heroin involves various stages of refining and processing. The first stage is to harvest raw opium from the opium poppy (Papaver somniferum) by scoring the seed pod with a sharp blade. Exuded from these cuts is a milky latex that dries to form a sticky brown resin – raw opium – that us scraped from the pod.

The raw opium is then refined by dissolving it in water and simmering the solution over a low heat, before filtering out vegetable oils and reducing the liquid back to a sticky resin. In this form, it can either be smoked or processed further to make heroin. In the heroin labs, morphine is extracted by dissolving the opium in water and adding first slaked lime then ammonia, which causes the morphine to become a solid. Also known as heroin no.1, morphine will weigh about ten per cent the weight of the original opium.

The morphine is then combined with acetic anhydricide – a chemical also used in the manufacture of aspirin – and cooked for several hours at 85˚C. When this mixture cools, the morphine and acid bond to form heroin ‘base’, or heroin no.2. This is subsequently dissolved in water and hydrochloric acid, before being mixed with sodium carbonate. At this point, the heroin is heated with alcohol and activated charcoal until the alcohol evaporates.

The result is a brown crystalline substance commonly referred to as no.3 heroin or ‘brown sugar’, thanks to its resemblance to unrefined sugar. This is used for smoking, and isn’t suitable for injecting. Further processing with a mixture of ether and hydrochloric acid results in a purer product, no.4 heroin, which is used for injecting.

Kenya’s growing problem

The UNODC reports that heroin consumption in East Africa has increased significantly during the past five to ten years. However, its presence there dates back to the early 1980s, says Maggie Telfer, who has spent more than 20 years working with users there. “East Africa was a transit point for heroin for many years,” she says. “It was the Italian community, which has a long history of settling on the coast of Kenya around Mombasa, that first created a local demand for heroin.”

From there, consumption subsequently spread out into the indigenous communities, particularly in Nairobi and the coastal areas where tourism was booming. “During the 1980s and ’90s, people were switching from traditional livelihoods, such as fishing, to jobs in the tourism sector. They were earning more money than most people had ever seen before, so they had a lot of disposable income.”

For more than 15 years, Telfer says, the heroin consumed in Kenya – which came from Pakistan – was the brown variety. But in 1999, this was replaced almost exclusively by white heroin. As a result, says Telfer, Kenyan users were faced with the choice of either going back to sniffing it or smoking it in a joint with cannabis, or injecting it. “A whole generation of people switched to injecting, which had an absolutely catastrophic impact in terms of HIV/AIDS.”

Although heroin use has remained stable in Kenya’s coastal areas and larger cities during the past ten years or so, it has begun to spread out to other parts of the country. “It has moved out from Nairobi and the tourist resorts into the more rural areas,” says Telfer. “And recent research has found that its use is now endemic in all ethnic groups, rather than just Muslim and Swahili peoples, as we originally thought.”

One reason for this could be that heroin is now cheaper. “For almost ten years now, heroin has cost KSh100 per kikete, which is about one tenth of a gram – the equivalent to a wrap in the UK. But the Kenyan shilling has been doing quite well recently, so the price has come down.” Today, KSh100 is worth about 87 pence, around the same price as a bottle of beer.