Chinese Peoples government opened a drug counter offensive against Japan. Assisted by N. Korean communists who had returned to Korea after fighting the Japanese in Manchuria, the Chinese began to flood Japan with narcotics routed through N. Korea. In the aftermath of the War, drug-taking in Japan rose rapidly. By 1949, heroin addiction in the country had reached alarming proportions. Reports from the G.H.Q. of the Supreme Commander of Allied Powers in Tokyo based on arrests and seizures in the intervening period till 1951, revealed that large amounts of Chinese opium and heroin were reaching Japan from N. Korea and Hong Kong through the ports of Yokohama, Kobe, Kure and Sasebo. In 1960 considerable amounts of Chinese heroin of Hopei origin were seized in Japan. A Japanese National Committee to combat the narcotics traffic was set up under the chairmanship of Mr. Tsusai Sugahara. Reports of this Committee were quoted by the Pravda correspondent in Tokyo to the effect that Peking was netting annually from Japan some 170 m. U.S. dollars for drugs. About 25% of this sum was estimated as going to the support of the Japanese Communist Party. The total narcotics traffic in Japan was currently valued at about 500 million dollars, 2/3 of which represented transhipments to the United States through the port of San Francisco. The estimated wholesale price of Chinese heroin in Japan was some 4,000 per pound in 1960. In the absence of official figures only crude estimates of the total opium output of China are available. Soviet sources based on Japanese reports have indicated that some 8,000 tons of opium were produced in China in 1958. This staggering figure represents about ten times the total world requirement for legitimate use. Poppy cultivation and harvesting in China is controlled by the Ministries of Agriculture and Rural Cultivation. The main type of production unit is the collective opium farm of 500 mu (33 hectares) or somewhat larger.
These are supervised by the Peoples Government and production quotas are set by the authorities. In addition special experimental opium farms have been set up as state enterprises managed by Government ministries of Agriculture, Health and Science. Estimates of the total acreage under poppy cultivation in China vary somewhat according to sources (Table 6). A reasonably consistent estimate is of the order of 500,000 hectares in total for 1970. The yield of opium harvested per hectare varies widely depending on climate, botanical variations and farming techniques. The use of fertilizers and improved extraction procedures has been shown to increase yields from 3 kg to more than 10 kg per hectare. In comparison Turkish figures indicate a yield of about 7 kg hectare. Chinese Communist farming skills are considerable, but fertilizer is extremely short in mainland China. If one assumes a low yield of 5 kg per hectare, the postulated acreage would produce a harvest of some 2.5 million kilos of opium (2,500 tons). The International Narcotics Control Board estimates of world legal annual production of opium were of the order of 1400 tons (1969). The estimated world annual requirement for medical and scientific purposes is no more than 1,000 tons, excluding mainland China and other non-cooperating states. A generous estimate of legitimate production and storage requirements for China, based on these figures should not exceed 500 tons. The difference, amounting to 2,000 tons, represents a conservative estimate of opium illicitly exported annually from Red China to world markets.
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