LAOS: The Boys at the Snow Leopard

What makes Phong Savan different from innumerable other thatch-roofed Laotian villages is the comfortable Inn of the Snow Leopard, built in the form of a hunting lodge. Last month the boys were gathering at the Snow Leopard to sip their pastis, discuss business conditions, and wait for the tribesmen on their way down from the hills with their annual offering of confiture (jam), the local nickname for opium. Most of the boys have a Mediterranean origin: Couscous, a wiry North African; Carlo the Corsican; a Eurasian called Moitie Gnakouey; and a clutch of characters of vaguely French antecedents—Petit Pere, La Seche Noire (the Black Cigarette), Le Gorille Gris (the Grey Gorilla).

As the Meo tribesmen, clad in red-and-blue turbans, black pants and tunics, and weighted down with massive silver ankle-rings and foot-and-a-half-long hairpins, arrived with the jam, the boys at the Snow Leopard sent their Chinese agents to bid for the crop. Even though this has been a bad year for poppies—there was a two-month drought in the hills—the Meo are getting only the equivalent of $20 a kilo (2.2 lbs.). The same kilo, when it reaches the Laotian capital of Vientiane, will be worth $60; at Saigon in South Viet Nam it will bring $1,000, and when it is safely put ashore in San Francisco, the value may leap to $2,000 or more.

Though the 40-odd tribes of Northern Laos are permitted to raise poppies and extract opium from their pods—it is the only cash crop available to them—the export of the drug is illegal. The boys at the Snow Leopard get around the ban by maintaining a fleet of half a dozen Single-engine Beavers and Pipers outfitted with auxiliary gas tanks. They fly into South Viet Nam and parachute the jam to agents in isolated valleys, who carry it to Saigon.

From there it is often smuggled by ship to Hong Kong, e.g., concealed in a crate of oranges or hidden inside the cable drum of a deck winch. Hong Kong's more than 150,000 dope addicts require an estimated 40 tons of opium a year, and though British narcotic agents search all arriving planes and boats, they seldom recover as much as 1½ tons of opium annually.

Last week the British at Hong Kong seized 340 lbs. of opium on a plane that had just flown in from Laos. But the boys at the Snow Leopard were not disconcerted. Said Couscous contemptuously: "That was the work of pure amateurs. A few days before the shipment they were drunk in a Vientiane bar, and boasting about the killing they were going to make.

I knew they'd be pinched quicker than that." He added complacently: "It's still business as usual among the pros."