DAILY TELEGRAPH
cutting dated
13.0 JUL 1515
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U.S. BLAMES BRITONS FOR
DRUG FLOW
By FRANK ROBERTSON Diplomatic Staff THE Foreign Office last!
night withheld com- ment on an American re- port that “lack of CO- operation by British officials in Hongkong was partly responsible for the flow of hard drugs to America.
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The report, prepared by Mr Lester Wolff, a Democratic mem- ber of Congress from New York, said: Hongkong is in many ways the centre of the Far East narcotics traffic.
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Drugs are readily shipped in and out and processed in at least dozen clandestine factories there. It is also a major financial centre for the trade."
It said that the British in Hongkong had reservations about agents of the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs interfering in local law enforce- ment matters.
It urged the American consul- general in the colony to press for more British co-operation.
£8m haul
Hongkong was the principal centre for drugs from Thailand, Laos and Vietnam being smuggled to the United States.
One shipment of opium and morphone base, seized from a fishing boat between Pangkok and Hongkong in April, was worth £8,300,000 at New York wholesale prices.
Most of the drugs are dropped into the sea outside Hongkong's three-mile limit by deep-sea trawlers. The packages are then picked up by small in- shore fishing sampans, inds- ting ishable from at least 1,000 - others operating from the colony.
The Hongkong authorities have offered informers up to 25 per cent of the value of con- fiscated cargoes. But this has not seriously impeded the flow, for about one-third of the heroin reaching America still comes through the colony.
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