The Turkish
poppy flower produced not only the opium base for illicit
heroin but also the codeine base for medical preparations.
When a State Department official warned the Ad Hoc Committee
on Narcotics Control that the White House plan for eradicating
the world's poppies might have "dire unforeseen
consequences," a White House aide retorted cuttingly,
"If we can't foresee the consequences, why presume
they will be 'dire."' He then went on to ridicule
"bureaucratic overcautiousness" and demand
immediate action. Four years later, the United States
faced a massive coughing and painkilling crisis. The
inventories of codeine, which provide more than a half
billion doses of cough suppressant and analgesic medicine
each year, had fallen so precariously low that the government
was forced to release its strategic stockpiles of codeine
base. The licensed manufacturers of codeine medicines
warned that unless the shortage was soon alleviated,
they would have to cut production drastically. They
warned that by the end of 1974, they would have less
than one month's supply on hand, and the situation would
be critical.
The problem was that codeine
could be obtained only from the poppy plant, and the
Nixon administration, by eradicating the Turkish supply,
had inadvertently diminished the world's supply of this
crucial base medicine. (India, the only other licit
exporter of opium for codeine, doubled the price and
reduced exports in 1972.) The antiheroin crusaders in
the White House had expected a synthetic substitute
for codeine to be developed after ordering the surgeon
general and HEW to create such a drug. Despite some
frantic efforts, government and industry scientists
were unable to produce a synthetic equivalent on demand.
With no substitute for codeine even on the horizon,
the White House came under increased pressure from the
American Medical Association and from drug manufacturers
to increase the world's supply of opium. Finally, in
1974, as the coughing crisis loomed larger, the Office
of Management and Budget, which was now superintending
drug policy for the White House, decided to reverse
the policy of annihilating the world's poppy supplies
and seek new sources of opium for the drug industry.
At the same time, however, political interests dictated
that the prohibition on opium growing in Turkey, which
was in the conditioned popular imagination the single
greatest victory of the Nixon administration in its
war against heroin, be maintained.
To solve this dilemma, OMB
directed the State Department to encourage India to
increase by 50 percent its production of poppies. The
idea was that Indian opium did not have the connotations
in the press and with Congress that Turkish opium had,
and, because of the relative remoteness of India and
the fact that it consumed most of its own opium, an
illicit supply might never reach the American market.
India, however, was experiencing increased problems
with opium eating and drug addiction, and was reluctant
to plant more poppy acreage to please the United States.
At this point OMB more or less
designed its own poppy for American production-the Papaver
bracteatum. This strain of poppy was originally discovered
in northern Iran by scientists working for the Department
of Agriculture. It had the advantage of producing high-quality
thebaine, which can be converted to codeine but not,
without difficulty, to heroin. Thebaine, nevertheless,
was a white gummy substance similar to opium. Unfortunately,
thebaine yielded drugs known as the Bentley compounds,
which, although difficult to isolate, are ten thousand
times as powerful as heroin. Some government scientists,
fearing that the Bentley compounds would replace heroin,
suggested growing the bracteatum on Air Force bases,
surrounded by barbed wire and guarded by dogs. (One
White House aide suggested that the Bentley compounds
"would kill off half the heroin addicts, but then
we might have a real problem with those that survive.")
Finally, it was decided to grow the bracteatum experimentally
at a Department of Agriculture field station in Flagstaff,
Arizona (where poppies had already been planted as a
"signature" for satellites and U2s). Mallinckrodt
Chemical Works, a leading processor of opium, also announced
its interest in growing bracteatum in Arizona.
The attempt to induce India
to increase its opium production and the announced plans
to grow poppies in the United States fatally weakened
the American position in Turkey. William Handley, the
former ambassador to Turkey who had replaced Nelson
Gross as senior advisor to the secretary of state for
narcotics-related matters, argued that it would prove
impossible to maintain the ban in Turkey if "we
planted poppies ourselves and encouraged every country
but Turkey to go into the opium business." He held
that the policy of banning opium in a single country,
Turkey, was ultimately untenable. He was unable, however,
to garner support from the narcotics agencies for his
position. The Drug Enforcement Administration, which
succeeded the BNDD in 1973, took the position that Turkish
opium would eventually be replaced by other drugs, and
that the best way to undermine the profitability of
opium would be for America to produce its own poppies.
The Special Action Office for Drug Abuse Prevention,
which managed the federal methadone and treatment programs,
argued that the drug problem could be solved only by
reducing demand through treatment, and that therefore
the Turkish opium question was irrelevant. Handley took
his case to the cabinet committee, presided over by
Melvin Laird, and lost. He promptly resigned. Less than
six months later, on July 1, 1974, Turkey announced
that it was resuming opium production to relieve the
world shortage. Angry Congressmen immediately threatened
to cut off military aid to Turkey (which grants the
United States twenty-five common defense" bases,
mainly monitoring Soviet missiles), and suddenly the
eastern flank of the NATO alliance was being thrown
into jeopardy by the politics of the poppy.
Eventually, administration
officials were able to brief congressional leaders on
the fact that Turkey produced only 7 percent of the
world's opium, and they claimed now that they had never
really believed that the suppression of opium in Turkey
would end the supply of heroin to addicts in the United
States. As Walter Minnick, the former staff coordinator
of the Cabinet Committee on International Narcotics
Control, testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee
on March 4, 1975:
The dilemma we now face is
that the demand for medicinal opiates around the world
continues to skyrocket, inducing ever larger quantities
of gum opium to be cultivated, primarily in India. The
more opium produced, the larger the stock available
for diversion into illicit criminal channels.... This
will be true whether the opium gum is produced in India,
Turkey, the Golden Triangle, or anywhere else.
The Nixon administration's
"poppy war" had thus not only contributed
to the codeine crisis but had stimulated production
in other areas of the world. As Daniel Patrick Moynihan
pointed out in a telegram to the State Department in
1973, when he was ambassador to India and the White
House was attempting to change the hoary system of Indian
poppy cultivation to alleviate the codeine shortage,
it was not always possible for the White House to dictate
morality with favorable results.
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