"Golden Triangle" is one of the four major drug producing areas in the world today. Opium trade has always been an open business in this "nobody cares" independent kingdom. Khun Sa is the opium king after Luo Xinghan and the master of the "Golden Triangle". His skill is not only manifested in drug trafficking, he pays equal attention to both kindness and prestige in running the army and shoots all subordinates who take drugs. Khun Sa said, I am the leader of Shan State, and drug trafficking is for my national liberation. He is famous as the opium king, but some foreign journalists say that he is just a propagandist and has great ability in social activities.
1, the crime of "Golden Triangle" The original "Golden Triangle" was only a piece of land at the junction of Thailand, Laos and Myanmar. The fast-flowing Mekong River is often mixed with a lot of sediment and flows backward to the Yesai River. Over time, a small delta was formed between the two rivers. This delta is fertile and rich in products; Every March and April, the crops are golden, hence the name "Golden Triangle". Today, people refer to the "Golden Triangle" area, which is much wider. It includes the two banks of salween in the east of Myanmar, the Shan Plateau, Chiang Rai in the northwest of Thailand, Songfu and Chiang Mai in Ye Feng, and Luang Prabang Province and Nanta River in the northwest of Laos. The total area of the "Golden Triangle" is between10.5 million and 200,000 square kilometers, but no one can calculate its actual area. Nowadays, the word "gold" in the "Golden Triangle" means that the drugs produced here have earned countless dollars for poisonous fruits. Most areas of the "Golden Triangle" are high mountains above 3000 meters above sea level, covered with dense forests. The hot climate, abundant rainfall and fertile soil are very suitable for poppy growth. However, the traffic in this area is extremely closed. Apart from a simple expressway from Chiang Rai, Chiang Rai, Thailand to Wanxinde Town, Thailand, the center of the "Golden Triangle", villages are mainly connected by narrow paths, and caravan is still the main mode of transportation here. If the mountain people grow cash crops other than poppies, they have to carry them on their shoulders after harvest and travel for two or three days to find buyers in flat areas, which is really "not worth the candle." Poppy cultivation, growers do not need to leave home, there are buyers coming to the door, and even buyers are resident in the village. The mountain people in the "Golden Triangle" grow rice as rations and opium as cash. Opium is equivalent to cash. With opium, you can have cash. With cash, you can buy gold and silver jewelry, guns, livestock, radios and see a doctor. In addition, the value of poppy is much higher than other cash crops.
The "Golden Triangle" is also a multi-ethnic area. Yao, Miao, Nong, Lahu, Wa, Lao, Shan (Dai), Wa, Aka (Hani), Kena and other ethnic groups thrive in hundreds of villages here. People of many ethnic groups have no idea about their own ethnic groups or what their borders are. As for the total population of the "Golden Triangle", it is generally believed that there are more than 3,000 villages in * *, with a population of 1 10,000, but the specific figures are naturally unknown. The "Golden Triangle" is the junction of Myanmar, Thailand and Laos, and it is also the border area of these three countries. "The mountain is high and the emperor is far away", and it is difficult for the three governments to go deep and beyond their reach. Therefore, it is a place that no one wants to take care of seriously. For a long time, there have been many anti-government forces and other drug armed forces here. Because it is rich in opium, it has become a paradise for "adventurers". Up to now, many indigenous peoples in the "Golden Triangle" mountainous area, such as Miao, Miao, Yao and Aka, still maintain the habit of slash and burn, and their villages migrate around the newly reclaimed land from time to time. This primitive production method is very suitable for poppy cultivation. Because poppy cultivation does not require complicated technology, when people cut down and burn dense jungles, only fertile humus layers can make opium harvest for several years in a row. When local power is exhausted, new cultivated land will be opened up. Anyway, there is endless land to use there. It's just that the forest has been seriously damaged, and if it goes on like this, it will naturally affect the balance of the ecological environment. Who planted the first poppy seed in the "Golden Triangle" and turned this "Xanadu", which has been isolated from the world for thousands of years and has no idea what opium is, into a world-famous drug den and evil den? The result of western scholars' observation and research is the westerners themselves. As early as 1825, shortly after the British occupation of Myanmar, a British company transported a large number of poppy seeds into Shan State. 1886 After the British occupied the whole territory of Myanmar, the Shan people were forced to grow poppies on a large scale, and the opium production was also considerable. British colonists once transported a large amount of opium produced here to China for sale and profiteering. Since then, poppies have blossomed in Shan State and spread to Kachin, Chin, Kai, Mandalay, Bagu, Sagaing, Magway and other states in Myanmar. So the British were the earliest poppy growers in the "Golden Triangle".
Seeing that the British made huge profits from the opium trade, the French who once occupied zhina, India, were also salivating, so they organized a wealthy businessman in zhina, India, to traffic opium from the "Golden Triangle" to Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos under their control on a large scale to extract huge tax revenue. In the future, simply send "experts" to Vietnam and northern Laos to teach the Miao, Yao, Lao and Thai indigenous people the technical knowledge of poppy cultivation, opium harvesting, refining and sales, so that opium production in these areas can develop rapidly. Like Britain, France plundered huge wealth from opium trafficking. According to statistics, from World War I to World War II, half of all the money plundered by the French from Indian zhina came from the opium trade. The chiefs of ethnic minorities in this area also benefited from the opium trade and lived the life of princes in the mountains. The French left the local minorities with poverty, ignorance and new evils. After World War II, the French returned to zhina. In order to deal with the * * * production party, France and local tribal chiefs once again United. An important condition for the cooperation between the two sides is that the French buy opium produced by the other side, while the leaders of ethnic minorities promise to "assist" the French in cracking down on the production party with a population of tens of millions. In this way, poppy cultivation and opium trade in the northwest of Laos, that is, that part of the "Golden Triangle" that belongs to Laos, still maintained a "prosperous situation".
By the early 1950s, Americans had filled the "vacuum" left by the French in zhina and helped the Saigon regime in South Vietnam to fight. The U.S. government did the same thing, sending CIA officials to help the anti-* * leaders of all ethnic groups (mainly Miao) in Shangzhai, Laos to train and organize armed forces, giving them excellent weapons and pulling them to fight the * * * production party. However, it was only after the United States promised to buy each other's opium that it won the support of the mountain people. Initially, the United States shipped the opium it bought back to China and refined it into narcotic drugs for use by medical departments. But it didn't take long for supply to exceed demand, and it was impossible to "digest". As a result, the United States simply tore off the veil of humanitarianism, cooperated with drug lords and sold it to Southeast Asian countries and other regions. In this way, many drug trafficking groups have emerged in Southeast Asia. During the opium harvest season, they gathered in the "Golden Triangle" and went on a shopping spree. In order to seek excitement, American soldiers fighting in Vietnam also took a lot of drugs. In addition to taking drugs themselves, they also use various conditions to bring drugs back to China. For a time, Saigon, Vietnam competed to become the largest drug distribution center in Southeast Asia. The opium trade in the "Golden Triangle" entered the "golden age" after 1960, and all kinds of drugs produced by it poured into western countries and other parts of the world silently, which strongly shocked the whole world. At present, there are three forces playing a major role in this mysterious "three no matter" zone: the first force is the local mountain people, that is, the "Golden Triangle", the main force of poppy cultivation. They are economically backward, live in poverty and have no education. They regard opium as a panacea for all diseases, which makes many people (including children aged seven or eight) addicted to it. This is also an important reason why the "Golden Triangle" banned opium. The second army is the remnant of the Kuomintang army. The third force is the armed drug trafficking group. Due to the "prosperity" of opium trade in the "Golden Triangle", many lawless people saw its rich oil and water, and set up smuggling armed forces one after another, which was larger than the drug trade and controlled drug purchase, refining and smuggling activities. According to the estimation of general experts, the poppy planting area in the "Golden Triangle" has reached 67,000 hectares, of which Myanmar is the largest, reaching about 60,000 hectares, and Thailand and Laos have 3,500 hectares. Generally, the annual output of opium is around 1200 tons, and in some years it is as high as 1000 tons. There are many opium plants in Myanmar, and the natural output is relatively large, with an annual output of about 900- 1200 tons, 200-300 tons in Laos, and only about 35 tons in Thailand. In the "Golden Triangle" area, opium trade is an open business. Anyone can buy opium in the market, just like other daily necessities. There are also various cigarette houses dedicated to the suffering gentlemen. For example, in some villages and towns in the eastern Shan State of Myanmar, such as Namkham, bhamo, Muse and Sister, there are such opium retail stores, cigarette houses and cigarette stalls. The price of cigarettes is generally about 1.200 kyats (a local unit of measurement with a ratio of about 1.5 kg). If calculated in RMB, 200 yuan is about 1 kg. In the "Golden Triangle" area, most of the raw opium consumed by local residents is unprocessed and refined. Because of proximity, many people smoke opium. According to the survey, about 16.5% of the male Akka people are addicted to cigarettes in the mountainous areas of northern Thailand. The proportion of other mountain people smoking opium is: Miao 12. 7%, Yao 10.2%, Yi 5. 1%, Karen 2.3%. The opium production in the "Golden Triangle" region (about 80% to 90% of the annual output) and its refined products, such as various grades of morphine and heroin, are mostly smuggled to the whole Southeast Asia and even many parts of the world, mainly to Japan, Malaysia and Australia through important ports in Southeast Asia. As for the re-export part, it is mainly smuggled to Europe and the United States from airports such as Bangkok, Colombo, Singapore, Hong Kong and New Delhi. Before the 1960s, most of the opium smuggled from the "Golden Triangle" was unrefined raw opium. Since then, the smuggled drugs are mainly heroin, because heroin and other drugs extracted from opium (about 10 ton of heroin can be extracted from opium) can be taken and injected, which is very popular in western countries; Moreover, it is expensive, light, easy to carry and suitable for smuggling. 50-60 tons of heroin produced in the "Golden Triangle" are smuggled to Southeast Asia, the United States and other places every year. In order to transport drugs out, drug dealers have come up with many ingenious ways, such as hiding drugs in bean sprout cleaning machines, stuffing them in porcelain statues, sealing them in tin-plated tin cans and labeling them, or sewing drugs into the stomachs of goldfish, or putting them in condoms, then swallowing them and flying to western countries. The drug trafficking center of the "Golden Triangle" is Banyan Town, Myanmar. Drug lords buy drugs here and transport them to Li Han, the border of Myanmar, by mule and horse through sparsely populated mountainous areas. It takes more than 20 days to walk from Banyan Town to Han Meng. There are many mountains, tigers and leopards and bandits along the way. In order to prevent wild animals from devouring, local strongmen intercepted and resisted the round-up by armed men at government checkpoints, and drug smugglers mostly organized themselves into cigarette gangs. Cigarette gangs are armed. The quantity and quality of weapons and equipment depend on the capital and organizational scale of the cigarette gang. Most guns are carbines, submachine guns, rifles, Type 38, Type 79, light and heavy machine guns and even small mortars. There are thousands of mules and horses in a powerful cigarette gang, with 200 to 300 people. The smallest cigarette gang also has more than 100 mules and horses, equipped with twenty or thirty guns. After opium arrived in Han Meng, it was wholesale or distributed to drug dealers from Thailand, Viet Nam, Laos, Cambodia and even Malaysia, and was transported or exported to other countries in Southeast Asia and other parts of the world.
In the "Golden Triangle" area, the price of opium sold by drug trafficking groups to local ethnic groups in mountainous areas is only 70-90 dollars per kilogram, and it is only 800- 100 dollars per kilogram after being refined into heroin. But on the black market in Bangkok, the value of heroin per kilogram is 65438+500 thousand to 20 thousand dollars; In Amsterdam, the Netherlands, the wholesale price of the black market rose to $654.38 +0.2 million; When heroin was in new york, the wholesale price on the black market rose to 200,000 to 220,000 dollars; However, if you retail in other cities in the United States, you can sell heroin for $2.3 million per kilogram. Why are there such high profits? There are two main reasons for this: first, drug trafficking is illegal. Most countries in the world have taken various measures to "encircle and suppress" the smuggling and trafficking of opium, heroin and other drugs. Therefore, these drugs eventually reach the hands of drug addicts, and they have to go through many "checkpoints", which makes their prices keep rising; Second, heroin used by addicts is not high-purity heroin, but other substances, such as quinine, sugar and headache powder. , are drug dealers through layers of addition, and finally become a drug with little heroin content, which is caused by the price increase (the highest purity can be reduced from the initial 80% to 3-5%). Let's take heroin sold in the American market as an example. The escaped drug dealer bought drugs with heroin content of 80% in Bangkok, Thailand. Shipped to China and sold to the first middleman at a price of $50,000 per kilogram; The second middleman adds sugar and quinine (heroin 1 kg sugar and quinine) to make powder with 40% heroin content, and sells it to the second middleman at $65,000 per kg; After the second middleman bought the powder with 40% heroin content, he added 600 grams of sugar to each kilogram and packed it in 250 grams of small bags, each of which sold for $6,543,800+5,000. Retail drug dealers buy this small package of powder, and then add sugar to make powder with heroin content of only 3-5%, and then package it into smaller packages and distribute it to small drug dealers on the street for sale. In this way, heroin, which once cost $800 to $65,438+$0,000 per kilogram in the "Golden Triangle", has now become an expensive drug worth more than $20,000.
Details of Khun Sa.
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