SOUTHEAST ASIA: The Puritan Crusade

Fields of poppies have bloomed for centuries in the remote, jungle-clad valleys of northern Laos where five nations—Laos. Red China, Burma. Thailand and Communist North Viet Nam—meet in a tangle of ill-defined boundaries. The local Meos and kindred tribesmen delicately pierce the flowering buds, extract the sticky raw opium. Some of it they use themselves: when a Meo child complains of an ache, his mother may blow opium smoke into his mouth to ease the pain; for Meo adults, opium smoking provides a goofing-off pleasure that is their substitute for the combined attractions of alcohol, tobacco, literature and other forms of escapism.

Stinging Taunts. Early in March each year, Meo tribesmen journey to the small Laotian town of Xiengkhouang, sell their surplus crop at about $30 a kilo to middlemen, hardheaded types who belong to something known as the Corsican brotherhood. From here the business gets into illicit channels and high prices. By pony caravan, or by light planes that take off from jungle airfields built by the French during their five-year war with Communist Viet Minh, the raw opium is transported to Bangkok and Hong Kong, bought by Chinese dealers at up to $1,000 a kilo and refined into morphine and heroin, as well as smokable opium. Smugglers then take possession, hoping for the vast profits to be gained from selling the narcotics in the big cities of Asia, Europe and the U.S.

This flourishing trade has survived war, anti-imperialist revolutions and natural disasters. But last week it was facing a new threat: the wave of civic morality that is sweeping the nations of Southeast Asia with an evangelistic fervor. Imposed from the top, largely by military leaders who have taken over from fumbling and corrupt bureaucrats (TIME, Feb. 9), this Puritan outlook is also rooted in national pride. Evidences of the new morality:

In Laos last week 600 schoolchildren wearing white shirts and black berets marched through the puddled streets of Vientiane in the first “antivice” drive in Laotian history. They carried “good” banners, hailing the three Rs of “Revolution, Roads and Rice,” and “bad” banners condemning equally Communism, opium, prostitution, gambling and liquor. General Ouane Rattinkoun, 34, the Laotian chief of staff, watched approvingly as the bad banners were heaped in a pile, doused with gasoline and set afire. General Ouane. who has a Buddhist horror of going to extremes, says, “There is no question of making physical war on the opium growers.” Instead, the government will employ the moral suasion of the Comite de Defense des Interets Nationaux, led by ascetic young army officers, government workers and officials of the royal household. The villages are to be purified by the means of mo lam, or blind wandering minstrels who are traditional Laotian entertainers and have added to their repertory special anti-vice and anti-Communist songs and recitals.

Thailand also had a bonfire last week when police raided 854 opium dens throughout the nation, sealed up unsold stocks and piled almost 9,000 opium pipes, many of ivory and rare mandarin wood, in front of Bangkok’s Grand Palace. Drenched with gasoline and set afire, the blaze was watched by thousands until dawn. Boasted Thailand’s boss. Field Marshal Sarit Thanarat, who has also closed down nightclubs, “massage parlors” and brothels: “From this day we can proudly claim that we are a civilized people. Gone will be those trying days when we were pilloried by the foreign press, which printed squalid pictures of opium addicts.”

In the month-old autonomous state of Singapore, Lee Kuan Yew’s puritanical new administration, after banning pinball games and jukebox parlors, last week set out to end polygyny (except among Moslems) and to abolish the widespread local Chinese practice of concubinage.

In Burma, brothels have been shut down in the capital city of Rangoon and only survive in dingy hideouts in the suburbs. There is a public outcry from conservative Burmese (echoed by the opportunistic pro-Communist press) against such Western innovations as rock ‘n’ roll (“dance of mad persons with chronic diarrhea”). Western ballroom dancing ( “couple-rubbing exhibitions” ) and beauty contests (“degradation of Burmese womanhood”). Last month the government destroyed opium crops in a northern district, warned that other opium growers in the Kachin and Shan states would be the next to suffer.

South Viet Nam, under President Ngo Dinh Diem, an ascetic Roman Catholic, four years ago closed down its opium dens, which had been legal throughout the years of French rule, and shut up some of the fanciest whorehouses in the Far East. So successful has the government been that there is only a small clandestine traffic in opium across its borders.

Indonesia has recently prohibited a contest to choose a Miss Indonesia for the Miss Universe contest in Long Beach, Calif., after a leftist newspaper complained that she would be “manhandled and ogled at.” In Bandung, Western movies are banned because they tend to show “racial discrimination” and provoke “adventurous sentiments.” Hula-Hoops, about to catch on belatedly, were banned as sexually provocative.

In all of these censorious activities the West tends to get blamed for what it introduced and what it did not. How long the reforming move will last in Southeast Asia, no one knows. But if Hula-Hoops and B-girls are easily legislated against, wiping out opium will come harder, for hundreds of thousands of addicts remain whose cure will take time and money.