Foreign News: Thirty Million New Addicts

An evil smoke rose from Peiping’s Forbidden City. By order of the National Government, a public bonfire was consuming 800,000 ounces of confiscated opium. China’s great drive against the drug traffic was under way again.

Chungking estimates that in the provinces occupied by Japan 30 million Chinese became opium, heroin, morphine or hashish addicts. Wherever the enemy advanced, he deliberately undid the patient, progressive work of Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek’s Opium Suppression Commission. This agency, aided by the indefatigable New Life Movement, had gone far toward stamping out the cultivation, sale and use of narcotics.

As they moved into North China and Inner Mongolia, the Japanese replanted the poppy fields that had once provided the war lords with revenue. They opened big narcotic factories; a report from Kalgan said that the local heroin plant produced enough each day (50 kilograms) to supply 15 times the world’s legitimate needs. In Peiping, Tientsin and other cities, the Japs opened hundreds of opium dens with signs proclaiming “Good Taste . . . High Quality . . . Comfortable Beds.” They peddled narcotic patent medicines for females, narcotic candy for children. Degradation reached a nadir in Mukden’s red-light alleys, where dying addicts were commonly dumped on rubbish heaps.

The immense and monstrous traffic not only sought to weaken Chinese resistance; it provided Japanese business with a big investment opportunity: in Tientsin alone, 35% of all Japanese capital was used to set up opium shops and dens. In large part it financed both the Japanese Army and Chinese puppet regimes. Every phase of the traffic was regulated and taxed. From the Chinese hub, it radiated to all corners of the “Co-Prosperity Sphere”: in Burma, Malaya and Indonesia, too, the number of addicts multiplied.

Since the Japanese surrender last August, Generalissimo Chiang’s Government has cracked down on opium dens in Peiping and Tientsin, ordered the destruction of poppy fields. All addicts must give up the habit in eight months or suffer severe punishment. A grower of poppies, a purveyor, or a pill-smoker caught in his third offense may be punished by death.