Asia: Let Them Shoot Smack

Heroin, once mostly an export, is now a scourge at home

It is well after the noon hour in the sprawling urban slum where 22-year-old Mali lives. Clothes hang on a nearby line, and small children play in the dusty path. Squatting on a doorstep, Mali (a pseudonym) lifts her scarred right arm and feels for a usable vein. No one seems to notice as she grips one end of a yellow plastic cord in her teeth and winds the other end tightly around her arm, readying it for the needle. It could be the South Bronx, East Los Angeles, Amsterdam or London—the traditional dumping grounds for Asia's deadly commodity, heroin. But this is mid-afternoon in Bangkok, capital of Thailand, where heroin has long been perceived as an illegal export sold only abroad to residents of the U.S. and other weak-willed Western cultures.

The wheel has turned. Caught in a squeeze between overproduction of heroin and eroding markets overseas, Asians are now selling to Asians, with devastating effect. Though official statistics do not exist, the worst estimates suggest that Thailand alone may have more addicts than the U.S. Nowhere has the scourge spread more swiftly than in Pakistan, where the number of heroin users has exploded from virtually none before 1980 to an estimated 200,000 by the end of last year. Malaysian police report that as much as 70% of all crime in the nation is now related to drugs. More than 4,500 addicts are in prison, and last year 1,000 soldiers were dismissed from the Malaysian army for drug involvement. In neighboring Thailand, long permissive in matters of vice, some leading authorities now favor stringent antidrug laws and compulsory rehabilitation. In India, new users range from drivers of Delhi's scooter taxis to affluent businessmen who view a quick fix as the fashionable thing to do.

The most alarming usage among the young can be found in Pakistan, where a survey last summer of 500 engineering and medical students at the University of Karachi revealed that 12% are addicts. Heroin is so prevalent that enterprising pushers use women and children for home delivery of the drug, hidden in vegetable baskets. After Pakistani mothers took to the streets to demand tighter drug laws, President Mohammed Zia ul-Haq decreed a life sentence and 30 lashes for heroin merchants.

The problem began in the mid-1970s, when many American users began to realize just how lethal "smack" could be and when a rival drug, cocaine, rose to new prominence. With heroin falling out of fashion, the number of hardcore American users has dropped from a peak of 700,000 a decade ago to 500,000 today. The slippage in this key market coincided with a 1979 drought in the Golden Triangle, the mountainous region where Burma, Thailand and Laos meet. The area has long produced much of the world's supply of poppies, from which opium and heroin are derived. The resulting rise in prices only accelerated the switch to cocaine in the U.S.