NOTORIOUS GOLDEN TRIANGLE LOSES SWAY IN THE OPIUM TRADE

BANNA SALA, Laos: Fields of brightly colored opium poppies, Corsican
gangsters and the CIA's secret war: The mystique of the Golden
Triangle clings to the jungle-covered mountains here like the morning mist.

But the prosaic reality is that after years of producing the lion's
share of the world's opium, the Golden Triangle is now only a bit
player in the business. Three decades ago, the northernmost reaches
of Laos, Thailand and Myanmar produced more than 70 percent of all
opium sold worldwide, most of it refined into heroin. Today the area
averages about 5 percent of the world total, according to the United
Nations Office on Drugs and Crime.

"The mystique may remain, and the geography will be celebrated in the
future by novelists," said Antonio Maria Costa, executive director of
the UN anti-drug agency, in an interview. "But from our vantage
point, we see a region that is rapidly moving towards an opium-free status."

The Golden Triangle has been eclipsed by the Golden Crescent - the
poppy-growing area in and around Afghanistan that is now the source
of an estimated 92 percent of the world's opium, according to the
United Nations, which bases its statistics on satellite imagery of
poppy fields.

The shift to Afghanistan has led to a near doubling of global opium
production in less than two decades because Afghanistan is a much
more efficient opium producer. Poppies are grown in fertile valleys
of southern Afghanistan where they yield on average of four times
more opium than in the less hospitable soil of upland Southeast Asia,
UN data shows.

Perhaps the most striking aspect of the decline of the Golden
Triangle is the role played by China in pressuring opium growing
regions to eradicate the crop. Three decades ago, the heroin produced
here landed on the streets of American cities, and U.S. authorities
took the most active role in curtailing the drug trade. Today China
is one of the biggest markets for Golden Triangle heroin, a trend
that has increased the number of HIV infections spread by sharing
dirty needles.

Thanks in part to Chinese pressure, the area of Myanmar along the
Chinese border that once produced about 30 percent of the country's
opium was last year declared opium-free by the United Nations. Local
authorities, who are from the Wa tribe and are autonomous from
Myanmar's central government, banned poppy cultivation and welcomed
Chinese investment in rubber, sugar cane and tea plantations, casinos
and other businesses.

"China has had an underestimated role," said Martin Jelsma, a Dutch
researcher who has written extensively on the illicit drug trade in
Asia. "Their main leverage is economic: These border areas of Burma
are by now economically much more connected to China than the rest of
Burma," he said, using the former name for Myanmar. "For local
authorities it's quite clear that, for any investments they want to
attract, cooperation with China is a necessity."

Data scheduled for release later this year will show an uptick in
Myanmar's 2007 opium cultivation by several percentage points, but
not enough to offset the dramatic 80 percent decline of the past
decade, said Costa of the United Nations.

Opium has long been used by insurgent groups to help finance civil
war in the Golden Triangle, whether by Myanmar hill tribes fighting
the central government or Hmong rebels allied with the Central
Intelligence Agency during the "secret war" in Laos against communist
forces in the 1960s and 1970s.

But one surprising development in recent years has been that some
insurgent groups that once tolerated or encouraged opium production
in the region are now campaigning to destroy the crop. At least one
faction of the Shan State Army, a group with longstanding ties to the
heroin business, is now leading eradication efforts.

Kon Jern, a military commander for the rebel group based along
Myanmar's border with northern Thailand, says he is cracking down on
opium because it profits government militias and corrupt officials.
"They sell the drugs, they buy weapons, and they use those weapons to
attack us," he said in an interview near his headquarters at Doi Kor
Wan, a village along the border.

The United Nations offers a different assessment, crediting Myanmar's
central government with leading eradication in Shan areas, where the
vast majority of the country's opium is cultivated.

Some analysts dispute the magnitude of the overall declines in
Myanmar, saying that by growing in the off-season farmers have
avoided eradication. But Terry Daru, director of the Narcotics
Affairs Section of the U.S. Embassy in Bangkok, said he had "no
reason to second-guess" the UN statistics.

In Laos, where the political situation is more stable, the government
began a crackdown in the 1990s partly out of a desire for increased
international credibility and partly because Laotian officials
realized that their own children were exposed to illegal drugs, says
Leik Boonwaat, the representative in Laos for the UN Office on Drugs and Crime.

"Something clicked when they began to see drugs harming communities
within urban areas, when their own families started to be affected,"
said Boonwaat, who has spent 13 years working on counternarcotic
efforts in the region.

The Laotian government, Boonwaat said, also began to see a link
between poverty and opium production: generations of opium farmers
remained dirt poor.

"Opium never really benefited the people who produced it," Boonwaat
said. "It's mostly the organized crime syndicates that made most of
the profits."

The total amount of land in Laos cultivated for opium has fallen 94
percent since 1998. Laos now produces so little opium that it may now
be a net importer of the drug, the United Nations says.

If the decade of declines is sustained, the banishment of opium from
the upland jungles of Southeast Asia would be a rare victory in the
fight against illegal drugs. Yet experts warn that reductions are not
definitive as long as opium farmers cannot find alternative means to
support their families.

"People are really suffering from the opium ban," said Pierre-Arnaud
Chouvy, an opium specialist at the National Center for Scientific
Research in Paris who travels frequently to the region. "It's been
imposed without any alternatives offered to them."

Chouvy says it took Thailand 30 years to wean opium farmers from the
illicit economy, a transition led by the Thai royal family, which
encouraged opium-growing hill tribes to use their cooler climate to
their advantage and produce crops - coffee, macadamia nuts and green
vegetables, among them - that would fail in the hot, low-lying areas
that cover most of the country.

"In Laos and Burma, we've had a very quick decrease," Chouvy said.
"But is it going to last?"

Four years ago farmers here in Banna Sala, an isolated hamlet of
several hundred ethnic Hmong, grew opium poppies with impunity.
Tongpoh Singya, 80, a wizened lifelong opium grower, tended to a
field of crimson poppies just steps away from his thatch-roofed house.

Then one day, Tongpoh recalled, the police arrived. "The government
came and destroyed my crops and said it was illegal," Tongpoh said.
"They came and said, 'Opium is bad for the country. If people smoke
it, it will make them miserable.' They said, 'If you continue to grow
this, we will arrest you.' "

Until 1996, opium for personal use was legal in Laos and as recently
as three years ago many poppy fields flourished alongside paved roads
easily accessible by government officials.

Tongpoh says he has no plans to resume opium farming. But his
daughter-in-law, Jeryeh Singya, 34, is more restless, and her
attitude illustrates how precarious the opium ban may be.

"They stopped me from growing opium, so I don't have money to send my
children to school," Jeryeh said bitterly. She has seven children.
Opium, which before the crackdown was sold in nearby vegetable
markets, was a cash crop that allowed her to barter for soap, salt
and clothing. "If they let me grow it I would," she said.

Kon, the rebel commander in Myanmar, says farmers are finding it
difficult to switch to other crops.

"I feel sorry for opium farmers," he said. "If they change and grow
other kinds of plants nobody comes to buy their products - the
transportation is not good."

Experts and officials at the United Nations sing like a Greek chorus
on this point: isolated, far-flung opium villages need many types of
assistance and investment - better roads, schools and medical clinics
- - if they are to remain opium-free.

But Myanmar, which was the world's leading opium producer in the
1970s and 1980s, poses a dilemma for Western countries. The United
States and European Union want to support the country's opium
eradication efforts but do not want to buttress the repressive
control of its military government.

The United States has a trade embargo with Myanmar and the European
Union has suspended trade privileges and defense cooperation and
restricts its aid to humanitarian assistance, measures designed to
encourage the return of a "legitimate civilian government," the
European Commission says.

"This policy of boycott and isolation has of course meant that only
very little development aid and humanitarian assistance is flowing
into the country," said Jelsma, the Dutch drug expert. "That makes
the chances of the sustainability of this decline very questionable."

Also in need of help are the casualties of decades of intensive poppy
cultivation. In Laos, there are an estimated 10,000 opium addicts,
many of whom no longer can afford the drug their withered bodies cry
out for. Opium and heroin prices in the Golden Triangle and China
have risen as supplies have dwindled.

One addict, Napaoli Jujaw, 70, rarely emerges from his darkened hut
perched on a hillside in Banna Sala. Napaoli is so desperate for a
fix he sits by a small fire - the village has no electricity - and
boils crumpled bits of paper once used to transport the opium. After
the opium residue on the paper is dissolved he drinks the concoction
to help ease his withdrawal symptoms.

"It hurts so much I want to die," Napaoli said, groaning.

Opium poppies have been used in traditional medicine for centuries in
the Golden Triangle, but commercial production did not really take
off until the 1950s and 1960s, after China's new Communist government
banned the crop and the business migrated south.

In Laos, opium production expanded with the help of Corsican gangs, a
legacy of French colonial rule in Indochina. U.S. soldiers fighting
in Vietnam became important consumers of heroin supplied by Hmong
fighters or ethnic Chinese gangs who brought chemists from Hong Kong
to process the opium. As opium production waned in Turkey, Mexico,
Iran, Pakistan and Afghanistan, the Golden Triangle became the most
important source of heroin on the streets of New York, Los Angeles and Sydney.

Now, with opium on the decline, erstwhile heroin traffickers have
branched out into other businesses, notably synthetic drugs that are
easier to conceal from authorities.

"Methamphetamine tablets are the threat, and continue to be produced
in Burma along the border with Thailand," said Daru, the U.S.
anti-narcotics official.