Smoking Poppy by Graham Joyce (the read aloud family .txt) 📕

listening to. Jack claimed that his uncle was Khun Sa, an infamous opium warlord of the seventies and eighties, and that he himself had trained under Khun Sa’s Muang Thai Army. Though the MTA had surrendered in 1996, Jack claimed that about seven thousand MTA were still active along the border area. I have no way of verifying any of this, and I didn’t think it wise to ask questions about what numbers of men were under Jack’s control.

He was determined, he told me, to give the local farmers good pay for their crops – a lesson in loyalty he’d learned from Khun Sa. Sixty dollars per kilo for the raw opium. He wanted to bring more in the way of power – electrification and the appurtenances of civilisation – to the villages but transport was a huge problem wedded to the fact that he had to move his poppy-growing location season by season.

It was when I asked him about the Calpol in the generator hut that I got an insight into who or what I was dealing with. The hill tribe with whom we were staying were particularly susceptible to opium. They had little medicine to speak of, and poor herb craft. Consequently their babies and children developed the opium habit from an early age. Jack had cut some deal which involved a large consignment of Calpol from Europe. It had been his plan to distribute it to the hill tribes. When he told me that, I realised he was a dreamer and a megalomaniac of the kind it was impossible to totally dislike.

Then he learned that he’d been palmed off with a recalled batch in which the ingredients of the Calpol were separating, resulting in dangerously unreliable doses for children. He was left with the consignment. This he shrugged off as one of the small setbacks associated with his business, and it didn’t matter, he said, because the man who had betrayed him wouldn’t do so again.

Here was a man who would go to extraordinary lengths to import infant medicine into the jungle but who wouldn’t think twice about killing a treacherous supplier.

What with his failure over the Calpol, his faulty generator and his lack of cable, I didn’t like to point out that his programme for civilising the jungle was so far modest at best. But I asked if I might take a bottle of Calpol for Mick. For some reason he thought this was hilarious, and invited me to take as much of the stuff as I wanted.

He also disclosed that he converted most of his opium to morphine before taking it away. ‘I must say,’ I offered in an unguarded moment, ‘it’s not how I imagined a drugs factory.’

‘Oh? How did you envisage us?’

I thought about it. ‘A laboratory. I thought you’d need a laboratory.’

‘You’re not educated, Danny. You know that? You think we’re slant-eye little savages – yes you do, don’t fucking argue with me – but you’re the one who is ignorant.’ He stood up, grabbed a pot and half filled it with water from a plastic container. Then he went inside his hut and came out with a mass of brown substance in his hands. I’d no idea what a quantity of opium like that would have weighed, or of its street value. He dumped it in the pan, and settled the pan on the fire without a word.

We talked some more. He treated me to his opinions about the hypocrisy of the West. He said that if he worked for the tobacco or the alcohol industry he’d be responsible for vastly more deaths than opium or heroin had ever caused, and he would be called an executive instead of a warlord.

The water in the opium pot came to the boil. He picked up a bulging paper sack, split it open and poured white powder into the pot. ‘Ordinary lime fertiliser,’ he said. He went on to talk a lot about the conspiracy of the tobacco industry’s vigorous efforts to addict people to a known carcinogenic drug, and the collusion of all governments.

Still talking, he drained the contents of the first pot on to a flannel cloth. The solution was a pile of grey mush, and he tossed this into a second pan, setting that back on the fire. And did I know the statistics for death or injury caused through alcohol? he asked me. From violence, illness, reckless motoring? The figures for social problems?

Next he took a plastic container, and poured a liquid into the pan. ‘Ordinary concentrated ammonia,’ he said. He pointed out that it had suited the economies of the West to export opium to the orient in the past, to fix the balance of payments. He asked me if I knew what was meant by karma.

After draining off this latest solution on to another flannel cloth, he showed me the results: a small quantity of chunky grey particles. ‘Morphine,’ he said. ‘Ninety per cent less in weight than the opium you saw me start with. Better for smuggling. Stronger high. You wanted to see my laboratory. That was it. That’s a jungle laboratory. Keep your eyes and ears open and your mouth shut and you might learn something around here.’

Demonstration over, he brought up again the idea of my wiring the village for light. Then he said, ‘I’m going away tomorrow. I’m leaving my man Khao in charge. Don’t fuck with him. Do what he says.’ I looked up and saw the glowing end of a cigarette from the hut. Khao hadn’t taken his eyes off me since he’d been sent inside.

We talked a little more, about being a father. I asked Jack if he knew about Charlie’s unwillingness to leave her hut.

‘You’ve got a big problem there.’

‘What can I do?’

He stood up and brushed the dust from the seat of his cut-off shorts. I guess he’d had enough conversation. ‘You know Khiem?’

‘The soil-taster?’

‘Yes, him. She’s got bad spirits in her head. Khiem is the only one who