Opium Farms Grow Food for Tribes, Money & Fine Cuisine

BANGKOK, Thailand -- When the CIA, Thai police, Chinese guerrillas and others were linked to Southeast Asia's wealthy heroin dealers during the 20th century, no one imagined fruit and vegetables would provide delicious replacement crops to fight the official corruption and rescue impoverished tribes growing opium in northern Thailand.

"Our project is the only one in the world that has succeeded in replacing opium with other crops. No other country has done it," Prince Bhisadej Rajani, director of the Royal Project opium crop replacement program said in an interview.

The project claims to enable more than 100,000 indigenous Hmong, Yao, Akha, Karen and other ethnic tribal people to grow fruit, vegetables, herbs, flowers, mushrooms, tea and coffee instead of opium.

Initiated in 1969 by King Bhumibol Adulyadej, the project was helped by U.S. taxpayers but is now supported by Thai government subsidies, packaging and marketing.

The farms on land formerly used for opium fields also attract officials from Laos, Myanmar and Colombia who hope to replace their countries' drug crops or, in Bhutan, curb rural poverty.

But when Prince Bhisadej and a handful of experts flew to Kabul, Afghanistan, about 10 years ago to see if that war-ravaged nation could copy Thailand's anti-opium experiment, their U.S.-supported trip ended in failure.

U.S. security forces escorted them to a village which did not grow opium, but was next to another village which grew illegal poppies.

"We introduced some new crops for those particular non-opium people, so the opium people would try and copy," Prince Bhisadej said.

"But nobody wanted to do the organization" to transport the replacement food crops to markets and arrange for them to be sold.

"The Americans have their aircraft bringing food to the American soldiers, about three or four flights per day. The [crop replacement] produce could be sent back by the American planes, which go back empty" to Kabul and other cities where markets are available, he said.

But his suggestions were ignored and the program was shelved.

As a result, "the village I went to, where I was taken to, now are opium growers.”

Some of Thailand's so-called "hill tribes" continue to grow a relatively tiny amount of illicit opium, which is cooked and concentrated into stronger heroin powder for domestic consumption and international export.

But most of this country's narcotics zone has been pacified by the agricultural Royal Project.

In 1970, Thailand was producing more than 200 tons of illegal opium each year, "enough to supply the annual needs of every heroin addict in the United States two or three times over," according to a Royal Project report.

After studying robust peach stems grafted onto weaker peach trees, King Bhumibol decided to end opium growing by introducing peaches and other crops which could thrive in the north's cool weather and not compete with hotter lowland farms.

Tribes were given seeds and saplings, plus transportation and other support.

The new crops were sold at local markets, much cheaper than fruit and vegetables imported from America and elsewhere.

Prince Bhisadej said he met American Agricultural Research Service (ARS) officials in the early 1970s soon after the project began, who offered cash "to find crops to replace opium.”

ARS is the U.S. Agriculture Department's research wing and was interested "because the opium got into America. It was being smuggled in," after being converted into heroin, he said.

Eventually, Washington paid more than $6 million to fund 80 projects in the north, said the prince who is now 96 years old.

U.S., European and U.N. financing rapidly advanced the program before sloping off, and the Thai government's annual multi-million dollar subsidies now keep the Royal Project afloat.

"We don't make a profit. We sell the vegetables and the fruit. Our transportation expenses, and so on, are deducted from our income. The rest we give to the hill tribes," the prince said.

"About 98 percent" of Thailand's previous opium production was stopped thanks to crop replacements and police suppression, he said.

At a high-profile public relations dinner in Bangkok on March 4, Prince Bhisadej gave a speech describing how the Royal Project was hosting 50 foreign chefs from some of the world's finest restaurants and had taken them the project's farms.

The chefs met the tribes, witnessed their rustic cooking techniques, tasted their traditional meals and then returned to Bangkok to prepare an elaborate "50 Best Explores Thailand Gala Dinner" to show how the project's crops could also become exquisite cuisine.

"Opium production is highly labor intensive," said U.S.

anthropologist David Feingold, a former United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) official who also lived and worked with Thailand's northern tribes.

"For the Akha people that I studied, it took 387 man-hours to produce 1.6 kilos of opium. That was about 80 percent more than the labor input into upland rice," Mr. Feingold said in an interview.

"So opium was not a terrific crop for the growers" but does enjoy high value and low transportation costs.

"In an upland environment where transport is difficult and expensive, this was important. Also opium was an important medicine, it served as a currency...and was used to a certain extent recreationally," mostly among older Akha males.

Poverty was more devastating than addiction, he said.

"With the Akha, they smoked mainly raw opium, essentially opium as it comes out of the plant. In Southeast Asia, that opium has between 9 and 11 percent morphine content. Which means [smoking] down a pipe, you are getting about one percent morphine content.

"There were people who had problems with abusing opium, just as when you have lots of people who drink and you have people who have problems with alcohol," he said.

"The crop replacement programs had additional side benefits in that they brought certain services, like health services to hill tribe villages," Mr. Feingold said.

In the 1300s, when Thailand was known as Siam, King U Thong outlawed opium.

In the 1800s, opium consumption soared across much of Asia after British colonialists legally grew the poppies in India for massive sales to China, and enforced those lucrative capitalist ventures by fighting two Opium Wars.

The 1839-42 Opium War between London and Beijing defeated China's attempt to ban British India's opium after too many Chinese became junkies and the country hemorrhaged cash.

The 1856-60 Opium War stacked London and Paris against Beijing, forcing a ruined China to cede Hong Kong to Britain and open five coastal ports to foreign traders.

Bangkok reinforced opium's illegality in 1803 when King Rama I decreed punishments for its use.

King Rama III tightened those bans and involved Buddhist clergy in public "opium cremations.”

But later in the 1800s, "the government of King Rama III began importing opium from India and selling it by auction," according to Cornell University's former Southeast Asia Program Director Thak Chaloemtiarana.

"In the reign of Rama IV, opium use was restricted to the Chinese community. Thais were not permitted to deal in or use opium. From that time on, opium became associated with the rise of Chinese secret societies," Mr. Tak wrote.

During World War II, "U.S. Air Force aircraft flew large quantities of opium from India" to Burma to pay local tribal guerrillas fighting against Japan's occupation, British officer Ian Fellowes-Gordon said, according to historian Bertil Lintner.

"It was also necessary to enter the opium business," wrote U.S.

Office of Strategic Services Detachment 101's Commanding Officer in Burma, Gen. William R. Peers, and his lieutenant Dean Brelis in their book titled, "Behind the Burma Road: The Story of America's Most Successful Guerrilla Force.”

"Opium was available to [U.S.] agents who used it [for] obtaining information [or] buying their own escape.

"If opium could be useful in achieving victory, the pattern was clear. We would use opium," the American authors wrote.

Thailand's profitable, 100-year-old government-run Opium Monopoly meanwhile began having import problems.

So Bangkok legalized some poppy growing in the north in 1947 by allowing the Hmong, also known as Meo, to use their traditional opium skills to raise the pod-headed stalks.

In China, communist Chairman Mao Zedong banished opium after achieving victory in 1949.

But Southeast Asia's production rocketed because some of Chiang Kai-shek's anti-communist, U.S.-backed Chinese Kuomintang (KMT) guerrillas -- who lost their war against Mao -- fled into Burma, a country now known as Myanmar.

KMT rebels raised funds by growing opium which they continued after settling in northern Thailand.

In the 1950s, Thailand's U.S.-supported coup leader and military dictator Gen. Sarit Thanarat, and his CIA-supplied rival Police Gen.

Phao Siyonon, competed to control the KMT's illegal opium exports.

Anti-communist Gen. Phao "became the CIA's most important Thai client," wrote Alfred W. McCoy in his book titled, "The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia.”

"Phao protected KMT supply shipments [and] marketed their opium," Mr. McCoy wrote.

Gen. Sarit, who ruled from 1957 to 1963, soon ousted Gen. Phao and declared opium totally illegal in 1959, partly to please the U.S. and other foreign powers.

During America's wars against Laos and Vietnam in the 1960s and 70s, U.S.-backed corrupt officials in those Southeast Asian nations made huge fortunes from opium and heroin while the CIA and regional governments facilitated international smuggling with aircraft and other assistance or ignored the evidence, according to Mr. McCoy.

"Production of cheap, low-grade, number 3 heroin -- three to five percent pure -- had started in the late 1950s when the Thai government launched an intensive opium suppression campaign that forced most of her opium habitués to switch to heroin," Mr. McCoy said.

"By the early 1960s, large quantities of cheap number 3 heroin were being refined in Bangkok and northern Thailand," he said.

In South Vietnam under President Nguyen Van Thieu and Premier Nguyen Cao Ky, "the U.S. Embassy as part of its unqualified support of the Thieu-Ky regime, looked the other way when presented with evidence that members of the regime were involved in the [American soldiers'] G.I. heroin traffic," McCoy said.

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Richard S. Ehrlich is a Bangkok-based journalist from San Francisco, California, reporting news from Asia since 1978, and recipient of Columbia University's Foreign Correspondent's Award. He is a co-author of three non-fiction books about Thailand, including "Hello My Big Big Honey!" Love Letters to Bangkok Bar Girls and Their Revealing Interviews; 60 Stories of Royal Lineage; and Chronicle of Thailand: Headline News Since 1946. Mr. Ehrlich also contributed to the chapter about "Ceremonies and Regalia" in a book published in English and Thai titled, King Bhumibol Adulyadej, A Life's Work: Thailand's Monarchy in Perspective. Mr. Ehrlich's newest Virtual Reality novel titled, "Sheila Carfenders, Doctor Mask & President Akimbo" is a 3-dimensional experience with Oculus technology.

His websites are

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