Christopher R. Cox

Excerpt:

“The hilltribe women back slowly through the sloping fields. Bulbs the size of bird’s eggs sway atop vein-thin, chest-high stalks, dancing in the soft highland breeze like tentacles of a poisonous sea anemone. In the late-morning glare, the women work carefully, mindful of their harvest’s value. The earth is soft and warm beneath their feet, which rustle the dead ruby- and amethyst-colored petals blanketing the mountainside.

Wielding curved, tri-bladed knives as sharp as an eagle’s talons, they gently pinch the poppy pods between thumbs and forefingers and make quick, vertical incisions. In the heat of a brass-brilliant winter sun, tears of chalk-white sap soon well in the shallow cuts. Opium. The latex will ooze during the day; the droplets will coagulate and darken overnight. The next morning, while it is still cool, the women will return to painstakingly scrape the henna-colored gum from the pods with semi-circular blades, then deposit the treasure into metal cans hanging from their necks like amulets.

This year, the spirits have smiled upon their mountain village. The earth the menfolk ate the previous spring to test its quality had been sweet with alkaline. A good place to burn the forest for the mineral-rich ash. The summer monsoon watered the cover crop of maize; autumn, dry and cool, was perfect for the poppy seedlings. The women descend through the fields. Gradually, their metal cans grow heavy with the weight of the blackened beads that bring both dreams and despair. Beneath their burden, the women smile. There will be opium enough to barter for salt, sugar, tobacco, and cloth. They know not where the opium goes, only that it brings merchants to their distant huts, that the fruit of their fields is coveted by the powerful men whose soldiers walk the dragon-toothed mountains. They know their hard, simple life will endure another year. Their ancestors knew the same rituals, endured the same risks, kowtowed to the same unseen, omnipotent warlords. It has always been thus in a land as wild as the waves of a raging typhoon.’’


From Publishers Weekly:

Perhaps 60% of the heroin in the U.S. originates in the Golden Triangle, where Laos, Thailand and Burma (Myanmar) meet. But when Boston Herald reporter Cox went to Southeast Asia in 1994, his aim was to enter Shan State in eastern Burma, a section run by warlord Khun Sa, depicted by the DEA as the evil demon of the heroin trade. Cox was accompanied by his friend Jay Sullivan, a veteran obsessed with finding American POWs and MIAs in the region and aided by an American wheeler-dealer whom Khun Sa trusted. Cox portrays Burma, a brutal police state, as eager to share in drug profits. Thailand has converted itself into a vast bordello, where the number of HIV and AIDS patients may soon reach two million. Khun Sa, according to Cox, sought to make Shan State an independent nation and to phase out heroin production, but the world would not help. Edgy and told with dark humor, Cox's report is richly informative. Illustrations not seen by PW.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.