U.S. heroin addiction rose sharply in the late 1960s and reached epidemic proportions by the early 1970s. Since Turkish opium, converted into heroin via the “French Connection” in Marseille, was the principal source of supply for the U.S. market, federal drug enforcement officials persuaded president Nixon that the most effective way to solve the problem was to control the supply at its source. Threatened with a loss of American aid, the Turkish government grudgingly cut back on the amount of opium grown and the number of provinces growing it so that, by 1973, Turkish harvest projections had declined to an all-time low.

Officials in the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) and the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs (BNDD) declared the operation a success. Perhaps even too much of a success. Raw opium supplies of American pharmaceutical companies had become dangerously low. Lobbyists for the industry appealed to Congress for relief. In response, Turkey was permitted to expand its opium crop to meet the increased demand in the licit market, and government sponsored experiments in domestic opium farming were initiated in Montana and Arizona as a backup for possible future shortages.

The optimism of DEA and BNDD officials was short lived. While it was true that the cutback in Turkish opium production had reduced the inventories of legal opiates, it had done nothing to prevent large amounts of illicit heroin from flooding the U.S. market. What had gone wrong?

As some experts had warned, other suppliers simply took up the slack. But even the experts were confounded by the new source of the supply. The logical candidate was the Golden Triangle region of Southeast Asia (Burma, Thailand, Laos), at that time the source of 70% of the world supply of illicit raw opium. But as one can see from Figure 1., heroin from this source did not claim a significant share of the U.S. market until 1976, and this lasted for only four years. On the other hand, by 1975 almost 90% of all heroin sold in the U.S. originated in Mexico (thus the nickname “Mexican Brown” because of its origin and brownish color).

Small amounts of Mexican Brown first surfaced in the U.S. during the Second World War when Asian and Turkish heroin were in short supply. After the war, Turkish heroin reappeared and monopolized the attention of drug enforcement officials, who were caught off-guard when Mexican Brown began to flood the market in the early 1970s. After all, opium farming has always been a Middle East and Asian occupation and the image of thousands of poppy fields dotting the Sierra Madre Mountains seemed strangely out of place.

How did the poppy fields get there and how long have they existed? The short answer is that Chinese immigrants introduced opium poppies into Mexico nearly a century ago. But like the last line in an old saw, “Thus for want of a nail the kingdom was lost,” this was but one link in a long chain of events that began nearly four hundred years ago with the attempt by Europeans to open trade with China. European traders eventually got their way, but only after creating an international narcotics market.