TNAG-0414-FCO40-460-Review-of-narcotics-problem-in-Hong-Kong-1973 — Page 94

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The Period 1945-1972

12.

For practical purposes the two principal drugs of abuse in Hong Kong are opium and heroin. Since the end of the Second World War the consumption of opiate drugs as a vice has been an offence against the laws of the Colony, likewise the maintenance ⚫f divans or other premises pandering to the illicit trade. All trafficking in dangerous drugs and the manufacture of them for the illicit market are also prohibited under penal sanctions.

13.

There were many opium divans in existonce throughout Hong Kong in the early years after the Japanese occupation. The se attracted Police attention in increasing measure as the strength of the Force grew and thus its ability to tackle the problem improved. Paradoxically it was the Police success in mastering the opium divan, with all the cumbersome paraphernalia required to operate it in the form of bedboards, large pipes, lamps, scrapers and so forth, which led to the emergence of heroin in the early 1950's as a more convenient drug of abuse since it requires very little in the way of equipment to inhale or inject it and it is more easily concealed and capable of being smuggled successfully than opium. The arrival in Hong Kong of numbers of chemists and others from North China, consequent upon the change of Government on the China mainland, who were conversant with the drug trade and the process of refining opium and morphine into heroin provided an impetus for the illicit manufacture of heroin and led to an upsurge in the trafficking and consumption of that drug during the 1950's. By the middle of the decade it had taken over from opium as the principal drug of abuse and addiction in Hong Kong and so it remains today. The pernicious effects of heroin with their deleterious consequences to the human body and personality are too well known to require any explanation here.

14.

Notwithstanding the increasing pressure applied by the Police and the Preventive Service on the ground during the early 1950's to detect and prosecute offenders against the Dengerous Drugs Ordinance, nevertheless it became apparent that this type of law enforcement at the lowest level was having no effect in curbing illicit trafficking and drug abuse. Indeed all the evidence tended to show that the drug problem in the Colony was getting worse, not better, and was becoming more vicious en account of the steady drift away from opium in favour of heroin. The sanctuary afforded by the Kowloon Walled City, a haven for vice of all descriptions at that time, with the immunity from prosecution for narcotics offences which those operating there enjoyed, undoubtedly provided an encouragement and stimulus to the drug tra le as a whole in Hong Kong, an unfortunate an unhappy situation which was to continue until the beginning of the next decade.

15.

Hong Kong grows no opium producing poppies and therefore it follows that all the illicit opium and heroin consumed here must be imported. It became apparent to the Police during the early 1950's that the clandestine importation of dangerous drugs into the Colony was a highly organised business of very consider- able dimensions, operated on a strictly professional basis and with the tightest of security. It was clear that the low level

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