HIGH TIMES

This Fall, An Old Drug Reappeared On The Local Scene.

In October and November, police and customs discovered 12.5 kilos of opium
inside false-sided suitcases and another seven kilos inside pictures at the
Vancouver International Airport. At the Vancouver Port, another 18 kilos
were found hidden inside shipping pallets.

The seizures, said Corp. Scott Rintoul of the RCMP drug awareness unit,
were unusually large, but probably don't signal an increase in the
popularity of opium smoking.

"Heroin, obviously, is the preferred opiate, not opium," said Rintoul. "But
there's obviously a population of people who are consuming opium. Generally
those of Middle Eastern descent-the Persian community, as well as some
members of the Asian community."

Back when Edward "Nick" Carter was working for the RCMP drug squad in
Vancouver in the late 1940s and early '50s, however, opium and its
derivatives-morphine and heroin-were the drugs of choice. Street drugs like
ecstasy and crystal meth didn't exist. The grow-ops Vancouver would become
famous for were far in the future; the only marijuana in the city came from
south of the border, in the pockets of railway porters.

Opium, smuggled in from Asia and controlled in Canada by the Italian mob,
was smoked in dens in Chinatown. Those dens, sensationalized in the fiction
of the early 1920s, were still around in Carter's day.

Now 88, he remembers raiding the dimly lit cellars furnished with two or
three wooden bunks, each with a paillasse or straw mattress where addicts
would recline to smoke their drugs. Beside each bunk was a small table that
held a spirit lamp used to heat the bowl of the opium pipe. "Bunk
smoking"-in which one addict exhaled smoke into the nose and mouth of the
person lying next to him-was the poor man's way to get high.

"They get quite dreamy," said Carter. "They doze off. If you crash in about
that time it's dark and they're all running around... they don't know
what's happening. It was a riot. They didn't know where they were and
they'd run into each other."

Chinese addicts smoked the drug, while whites injected it, said Carter, who
joined the RCMP in 1937 and was a Mountie for 30 years, including eight
years on the drug squad after the war. The five-man squad was responsible
for all of B.C., although most of the work was done in Victoria and Vancouver.

"It made a mess, too; you could tell a guy who was shooting opium. His arm
seemed to be more scarred than a guy who was using morphine."

Opium eventually went out of favour-it came in a brown cake, which made it
cumbersome to transport, and had a distinctive, sweet odor when smoked that
was easy to detect.

But it dominated the first and one of the most colourful chapters in the
history of the young city's drug problem.

The brownish-yellow resin from the Papaver somniferum poppy, opium arrived
in British Columbia with the Chinese who joined the Fraser River gold rush
of 1858. Although opium was an ingredient in several patent medicines by
the 1870s, smoking it was a predominantly Chinese habit. European
immigrants had several other drugs to choose from-cocaine, ether, hashish,
chloroform and absinthe, not to mention alcohol. Europeans did ingest
opium, however, in the form of laudanum, an opium-alcohol mix sold as a
painkiller, and a handful of whites also smoked the drug. By 1887,
Vancouver's chief of police reported approximately 50 white opium users in
the city who were "beyond redemption." The number of Chinese users was not
recorded.

Importing, processing and smoking opium was legal in Canada for several
decades. In 1884, Victoria's Chinatown had 14 licensed opium factories that
processed raw opium from India, while Vancouver's Chinatown in the late
1880s had up to eight opium factories.

It wasn't until after the Vancouver race riots of 1907, when mobs smashed
shop windows of Chinese and Japanese merchants, that the Canadian
government took an interest in opium. W.L. Mackenzie King, then deputy
minister of labour, came west to investigate the riot. He was surprised to
find two opium manufacturing firms among the businesses submitting claims
for damages-he refused to compensate them-and was shocked to hear that
whites were smoking the drug in Chinatown opium dens.

"This evil," he commented in his 1908 report The Need for the Suppression
of the Opium Traffic in Canada, "does so much to destroy not only the lives
of individuals but the manhood of a nation."

King was spurred on by the Anti-Opium League, made up of Chinese-Canadians
opposed to the drug. Its members told him that, "Almost as much opium was
sold to white people as to Chinese and that the habit of opium smoking was
making headway, not only among white men and boys, but also among women and
girls."

The Opium Act, passed by Parliament in 1908, made it illegal to import,
sell or possess opium without a license from the Ministry of Public Health.
Licenses were granted only for those with legitimate "medical
purposes"-pharmaceutical companies, druggists, doctors, dentists and
veterinary surgeons. Smoking opium, possessing an opium pipe or being
"found in an opium joint" were cause for arrest.

The Vancouver Police Department's annual report for 1908 records two
arrests for breaches of the Opium Act. That same year, police made 1,202
arrests for drunkenness and for being drunk and disorderly.

In 1911, the Vancouver Police Department purchased its first patrol boat,
in part to help search for opium. The drug was smuggled into Vancouver by
ship and tossed overboard into the harbour, where it would be picked up
later by smugglers in small boats. One ingenious scheme involved attaching
the drug to a buoy and a block of rock salt. When the salt dissolved, the
buoy would rise to the surface, marking the spot where the drug had been
dropped.

Despite the new laws and police efforts, opium use continued to climb. The
Vancouver Police annual report for 1915 notes 36 arrests for "keeping an
opium joint," 303 for being found in an opium den, 70 for opium smoking, 48
for possession and nine for selling opium.

In 1921, the novel The Writing on the Wall painted a graphic picture of
Vancouver's Chinatown opium dens, describing "corpse-like [addicts], stark
naked" in dens whose floors were littered with "filth indescribable." It
was followed a year later by Black Candle, another anti-drug book, written
by Emily Murphy under the pen name Janey Canuck.

Shocked Vancouverites joined the anti-opium crusade. In February of 1922, a
host of Vancouver organizations-women's leagues, churches, men's
organizations, hospital auxiliaries and the Vancouver Board of Trade-fired
off letters to the federal government demanding longer prison sentences
instead of fines, increased use of the lash, and deportation of aliens
convicted of drug offenses.

The narcotics trade, wrote the Native Daughters of B.C., "brings in its
wake degeneracy, crime and mental and physical ruin." The Young Women's
Christian Association called the drug addicts "unfortunate victims of a
heartless and commercialized organization which traffics in human souls for
sordid gain," suggesting the city provide a hospital to treat them.

H.H. Stevens, MP for Vancouver Centre, wrote back to say that the existing
maximum sentence was seven years in jail and that the law did indeed
provide for the deportation of anyone involved in the drug trade who had
been in Canada less than five years.

The Opium Act had been amended in 1911 to include morphine, an opium
derivative, and cocaine. (Heroin wasn't added to the list until 1923.)
Among white drug users, morphine was becoming the drug of choice.

The 1922 annual report of the federal Opium and Narcotic Drug Branch
described how it was sold. "The smaller pedlar... does the drugs up in
small powders or 'decks' as they are generally known to the underworld,
consisting of from one to three or four grains. These 'decks' are sold
[for] anywhere from 50 cents to $3 a piece, depending altogether on the
scarcity of the article in the district concerned."

Police continued to focus on opium smoking. In 1922, the RCMP handled 315
drug prosecutions in B.C., all but 15 against "Chinamen." Risks aside, the
profits for illicit dealers were enormous.

In 1922, a pound of opium purchased by someone licensed to possess it-a
doctor, for example-sold for $3. The street price for a pound of illegal
opium ranged from $50 to $150.

By May of 1945, when the Women's Protection Committee of the Lower Mainland
United Way released its report on narcotics, an ounce of morphine-worth $10
in a retail drug store-had a street value of $8,700. Drug dealers sold it
for $20 a "grain"-one 480th of an ounce-to Vancouver's addicts, whose
numbers were estimated at 400 to 500.

Where before World War II, large amounts of opium had been smuggled in from
the "Orient" and sold in Chinatown, the report said, the war had disrupted
that trade, forcing dealers to fall back on manufactured drugs, mainly
morphine legitimately held by druggists and doctors. "Hardly a day passes
that a drug store is not broken into or held up and a doctor's small supply
rifled."

Street-level dealers put their morphine or heroin in a condom, tied it off
to keep out the rain, and hid it in a park or someone's garden. A typical
cache of heroin or morphine ranged from five grains to several dozen
capsules, and the dealer would take out a little at a time to sell.

The drug squad's cases, Carter says, would often begin with a tip from a
citizen. "They would phone in and say, 'There's something funny going on
here.' We'd go and search the area and find a cache of drugs."

Carter tells of one stakeout following a tip from a Kerrisdale homeowner
who found condom-wrapped drugs in her front garden. Carter and his
colleagues replaced the drugs with sugar and powdered milk and put the
condom back, then waited for the dealer to show up.

"The lady of the house was serving us coffee as we watched her front
garden," recalled Carter. "We knew the fellow whose cache it was. When he
came back he looked down at it and we said, 'Come on, pick it up so we can
grab you.' He went away and came back a couple of times, and when he
finally picked it up, we all yelled, 'Sucker!' and caught him."

Then, as now, police concentrated on those higher up in the drug trade.
"Our main job was not the drug addict, although we took them in," said
Carter. "A lot of them became our informants. If you got on the good side
of them, a lot of them would give you something. With them we were able to
develop conspiracy cases." The Mounties on the drug squad didn't always get
their man, however. Carter recalls one case from the late 1940s that
started when a longshoreman found nearly 400 kilos of opium in the
windlass-a hauling device-of a freighter originally bound for San Francisco
that had been rerouted to Vancouver due to a storm. During a year-long
investigation, Carter's squad traced the drugs back to Hong Kong, then India.

"By the time we finished our case, India had been partitioned, so the case
fell into the sink," said Carter. "We never were able to prosecute. We had
a perfect case too-we had all of the evidence we needed to convict the man
who was the kingpin of the opium [trade] in the U.S."

Some drug traffickers threatened to shoot it out with police to avoid
arrest. Carter was never shot at by dealers, but was stabbed in the abdomen
with a broken beer bottle. His training in jujitsu helped him to subdue and
arrest the dealer.

Carter also received a split lip and broken fingers during other scuffles
with crooks. He ended up having his nose straightened when he hit "civvie
street." "My nose looked like some of the hockey players' [noses] when I
left the force."

While abuse of opium-derived drugs was common in the pre-war years, the use
of cocaine was markedly diminishing, according to a 1938 Royal Commission
on Penitentiaries that focused on drug abuse. Cocaine had been in general
use since the 1880s, but its popularity waned in the 1930s after the
introduction of over-the-counter sales of amphetamines, which were legal
and produced a similar high. (Cocaine use later picked up after
amphetamines became more tightly controlled in the mid-1960s.) The Royal
Commission report did, however, warn against the use of Cannabis sativa, or
"marihuana," which it said was a particular menace to younger people
because the price for "cigarettes" was not as prohibitive as for other
drugs. With a hint of Reefer Madness-era hysteria, the report's authors
wrote, "Some authorities claim that the continued use of this drug produces
insanity." Marijuana had been added to the Opium and Narcotic Drug Act in
1923, but by 1938, there had been only four prosecutions for trafficking in
the drug in Canada. By the late 1960s, however, marijuana and hashish, its
derivative, had become hugely popular. In 1969, Vancouver Police made a
major drug bust at Vancouver airport, seizing 23 pounds of hashish with a
street value of $70,000. That year, arrests for possession and trafficking
in "soft drugs" were nearly twice those for heroin-549 arrests for the
former, compared to 330 for the latter.

Heroin use, however, continued to rise. By 1972, Vancouver Police Chief
J.R. Fisk called the drug problem an "epidemic." In the previous five
years, the number of heroin traffickers charged annually had ballooned from
16 to 222, while charges for trafficking in soft drugs rose sharply from 31
to 348.

Today, synthetic drugs have eclipsed those derived from the poppy or cocoa
leaf.

While marijuana is the number-one illicit drug globally, said RCMP Const.
Scott Rintoul, citing a United Nations study, "amphetamine-type stimulants"
like crystal meth, Ecstasy and MDA are a close second. Cocaine and heroin
rank third and fourth.

"We're seeing an increasing number of chemical labs, and I think that's a
trend that's going to get worse," said Rintoul. As an example of the boom
in synthetic drug manufacture, he points to Washington State. In 1994,
police in that state uncovered 54 methamphetimine labs. Last year, the
number had climbed to 1,400. In B.C., an average of 30 to 40
methamphetimine labs are uncovered each year.

"We have a real problem with the synthetic drugs," said Rintoul. "And it's
getting worse. Today raves are dying, but there's more Ecstasy and meth on
the street than ever before. Ecstasy is a social drug. It's now part of the
social scene-a house party drug."

Carter, who wound up commanding the RCMP drug squad, said he's glad he's
not a police officer working the drug beat today. "I wouldn't want to be in
it at all today. It's gotten right out of hand."

He added that, while drugs were typically used only by the "criminal
element" in his day, today the population at large is experimenting with them.

"Drug addicts in those days were criminals first and drug addicts next. Not
like today where everybody's sucked in by [drugs]."

The exhibit Opium: The Heavenly Demon is currently on display at Vancouver
Museum. It's co-curated by local author Barbara Hodgson, author of Opium: A
Portrait of the Heavenly Demon. The exhibit runs until March. The Vancouver
Historical Society is also sponsoring a talk Jan. 22 on the history of drug
use in Vancouver. The free talk by historian Catherine Carstairs starts at
7:30 p.m. at the Vancouver Museum, 1100 Chestnut St.