MEXICO: V for Hop

The red and white opium poppies burst into bloom last week in the barren mountains of Northwest Mexico, setting the stage for melodrama. Troops rode through the hidden valleys, determined to stop the opium harvest. But the contraband harvesters, brown farmers and shepherds, bent on sharing the highest dope prices in history from over the border, eluded the soldiers.

Silently the opium gatherers moved among the flowers, sometimes hidden from sight among the rows of corn. With knives and razors they slashed a “V” in the egg-shaped fruit over the big poppy petals, tapped out drops of white slime into tin cans and paper sacks. If they could slip past the soldiers, they could sell the stiffened slime, crude opium gum, to gun-toting dealers. The rewards were great; and it was certainly easier than raising tomatoes, which spoiled on the burros’ backs on the long trails to market.

Suddenly the soldiers struck. Aided by U.S. Treasury Department detectives, they arrested ten growers and two officials on a Sinaloa hacienda. Then they flailed and rooted up the fields of illicit poppies.

Mexican authorities admitted that it would take many such raids to stop the bumper north-bound traffic. The facts:

¶ With few supplies from war-bound Asia and Europe, U.S. drug addicts now depend almost entirely on Mexico’s poppies for morphine and heroin.

¶ A pound of pure opium (“hop”), which used to cost $75 in the U.S. underworld, now brings as much as $700. The price of pure heroin (“aitch”) has gone up from $60 an ounce to $500.