The Coming China Wars phần 6 pptx

China is not the only country to produce bulk ephedrine for meth production. India, Germany, and the Czech Republic are also major players, but “China is the only country that still mass produces ephedrine from [ephedra] grass . . . and gets a better-quality product that is 60% cheaper to make.” 28 With its combination of a strong expertise in basic chemical man- ufacturing and its lax environmental laws, China is also one of only three countries that can cost-effectively mass produce chemically synthesized ephedrine and has the capacity to produce roughly 100 tons annually. 29 Favorable economics and market positioning have made China the de facto “factory floor” for meth precursors. Big customers such as the Mexican drug cartels are not the only customers that are ser- viced by the Chinese. China also clandestinely exports precursor ephedrine to Russia for the “domestic production of methampheta- mine in kitchen labs in quantities for personal use.” 30 Potentially a significant generator of political conflict is this star- tling fact: Although ephedra grass grows wildly in northern China, it is produced by the tons on China’s own state-run farms. Despite the presumed strict controls on its distribution, much of this government- produced ephedra winds up in the hands of criminal syndicates, often with the help of corrupt government officials. 31 The Chinese Ecstasy Connection Federal authorities have seized a record $25 million haul of the amphetamine-type stimulant, MDMA, also known as Ecstasy The seizure occurred on 28 March after Customs officers in Sydney targeted a shipping container for inspec- tion and allegedly found concealed within a consignment of pineapple tins, approximately 500,000 tablets (125.25kgs) of MDMA as well as 15 kilograms of heroin. The drugs have a combined estimated potential street value of $34 million CHAPTER 6•THE 21 ST CENTURY OPIUM WARS 121 The container, which was shipped from China, held 5,908 sealed tins of pineapple packed into 985 cartons. —Australian Ministry for Justice and Customs 32 The chemical name for Ecstasy is 3,4-methylenedioxymethampheta- mine, or MDMA for short. It is a white, bitter-tasting crystalline solid typically taken as a tablet or capsule and quickly absorbed into the bloodstream. Within 20 to 60 minutes, users begin “coming up.” Dur- ing its four- to six-hour high, this “love drug” induces strong feelings of “closeness and connectedness,” it “triggers intense emotional release,” and it dramatically enhances the senses, particularly the sense of touch. 33 At a biochemical level, what MDMA is actually doing is flooding the brain with both serotonin and dopamine, two of the brain’s principal chemical messengers of pleasure, mood eleva- tion, and satisfaction. The German pharmaceutical company Merck first synthesized and patented MDMA in the early 1900s, but it remained on Merck’s back shelves until the American CIA dusted it off in the 1950s. Along with other drugs such as LSD and scopolamine, MDMA was tested as a possible brainwashing and mind-control agent. That experiment went nowhere. MDMA was tested only on animals, and the drug remained off the public’s radar screen. That all changed in the late 1970s and early 1980s when the “love doctor” Alexander Shulgin, a Ph.D. biochemist from Berkeley, almost single-handedly popularized the drug. While working on the develop- ment of a number of highly profitable insecticide patents for Dow Chemical, Shulgin also experimented with MDMA. As the first human known to take MDMA, his own personal experience, as recorded in his lab notes, was remarkable: I feel absolutely clean inside, and there is nothing but pure euphoria. I have never felt so great or believed this to be 122 THE COMING CHINA WARS possible. The cleanliness, clarity, and marvelous feeling of solid inner strength continued throughout the rest of the day and evening. I am overcome by the profundity of the experience 34 The experience and his experiments soon turned him into a pros- elytizer for the drug’s therapeutic virtues, and MDMA quickly caught on. By 1981, in a stroke of drug-culture marketing genius, MDMA was dubbed “Ecstasy” by a Los Angeles distributor who chose the name because he thought “it would sell better than calling it ‘Empathy.’” 35 By the mid-1980s, Ecstasy was being profiled in news- papers such as the San Francisco Chronicle and magazines such as Newsweek and Harpers Bazaar referred to the drug as “the Yuppie psychedelic” and “the hottest thing in the continuing search for hap- piness through chemistry.” 36 Perhaps surprisingly, MDMA’s American cradle was not in hip and liberal California but rather conservative, cowboy bar Texas. In the 1980s, when it was still legal, Ecstasy was “distributed openly in bars and nightclubs in Dallas and Fort Worth. It could be purchased via toll-free 800-numbers by credit card. The drug was even mar- keted through pyramid-style selling-schemes.” 37 At this point, an alarmed U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency suc- cessfully lobbied to turn MDMA into a “schedule one” illegal drug just like heroin, cocaine, and speed. As both U.S. producers and users were forced underground, the followers of the Indian guru Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh began introducing MDMA on the European continent—slipping it into people’s drinks primarily as a way to woo potential contributors to the cult. 38 By the early 1990s, MDMA drug production had set down deep European roots. Today, sophisticated labs in Belgium and the Netherlands produce as much as 80% to 90% of the world’s MDMA. The bulk of the precursor chemicals needed for production comes from China. CHAPTER 6•THE 21 ST CENTURY OPIUM WARS 123 124 THE COMING CHINA WARS The Agony of Ecstasy 39 MDMA is a stimulant whose psychedelic effects can last between 4 and 6 hours and it is usually taken orally in pill form. The psychological effects of MDMA include confusion, depression, anxiety, sleeplessness, drug craving, and para- noia. Adverse physical effects include muscle tension, invol- untary teeth clenching, nausea, blurred vision, feeling faint, tremors, rapid eye movement, and sweating or chills. Because of MDMA’s ability to increase heart rate and blood pressure, an extra risk is involved with MDMA ingestion for people with circulatory problems or heart disease. 40 —Office of National Drug Policy Control, The White House MDMA advocates insist that the only reason that Ecstasy is consid- ered a dangerous drug is because it has been driven underground by legal systems around the world that mistakenly equate this “highly spiritual drug” with heroin, cocaine, and speed. There is at least some merit to this argument. One of the major health risks associated with “Ecstasy” today occurs because it does not contain MDMA at all. Instead, unscrupulous dealers pawn off adulterants ranging from mescaline and meth to codeine, dextromethorphan, and the synthetic hallucinogen paramethoxyamphetamine. Many users who seek to “rave” wildly at all-night dance parties rather than have the kind of religious experience originally prosely- tized by Dr. Shulgin, now combine MDMA with drugs such as speed, the dissociative psychedelic ketamine, and other psyche- delics such as LSD and psilocybin. Even if MDMA is taken in its pure form under ideal conditions, heavy users will suffer a variety of psychological and physiological effects. An unlucky few also die. Consider this poignant story from Counselor magazine: The languid high came on smoothly as [18-year-old Alexa Stevens] breathed in the fresh air off the Charles River. Thinking she had received a weak dose of Ecstasy, Alexa It’s Not Your Father’s Root Beer Anymore Today a handful of Chinese chemical companies are practi- cally the only firms to produce PMK, ostensibly for use in the perfume industry. These firms benefit from the fact that China is the world’s biggest producer of sassafras oil, way ahead of its nearest rivals, Brazil and Vietnam, whose sup- plies are thought to be diminishing. But apart from perfume, PMK has few legal uses: these days almost all of it is used to produce Ecstasy and other synthetic drugs. —The London Observer 42 Ecstasy is big business. According to the United Nations, clandestine labs now churn out more than 125 tons a year for close to 10 million users. Together with the meth market, organized crime rings up the cash registers to the tune of about $65 billion a year. 43 As with the synthesis of heroin and the production of speed, the lowest common denominator for MDMA criminal activity is China because, although there are many different ways to manufacture MDMA, the primary method for its mass production typically involves several essential precursors supplied in large part by China. The first ingredient is the same sassafras that has been used to make CHAPTER 6•THE 21 ST CENTURY OPIUM WARS 125 popped two more pastel-colored pills with the word “sex” engraved on them. Within minutes her heart began to race, terrified and confused she rushed down the stairwell, hair drenched in sweat, and dropped to her knees and convulsed. Twenty-four-hours later, after being admitted to a large Uni- versity hospital, her condition deteriorated rapidly and doc- tors had to intubate. Forty-eight-hours later, discovering her liver was about to fail, they found a donor and grafted part of the donated organ. The liver graft failed, she slipped into a seizure, and her brain hemorrhaged. At that point, her family requested she be taken off life support. 41 root beer for more than a century. Oil from the sassafras tree is used to produce “safrole” and then, from safrole, piperonyl methyl ketone or “PMK” is made. PMK is a versatile chemical, used in everything from perfumes and insecticides to soap. Today, however, the primary use for PMK is to produce Ecstasy. More than 100 tons of PMK alone are smuggled into European MDMA labs each year, which is enough to make more than 100 million tablets, and it comes principally from China. 44 China has become the ideal source for PMK for two reasons. It is the world’s leading producer by a large margin. China is also one of the world’s leading chemical and insecticide manufacturers. This means that China has the raw materials, expertise, and capacity to produce large amounts of PMK. It also has the distribution channels to legally export PMK and illegally hide PMK in shipments of other chemicals. As noted by the London Observer: US Drug Enforcement officials have become so alarmed at PMK shipments that they have practically banned the chemi- cal from being imported into the country. Such was their con- cern that two years ago they signed a resolution with the European Union to crack down and monitor PMK shipments. Yet this has had little if any effect. [China’s] Triad gangs have created a series of front companies to buy the chemical and ship it on to Ecstasy factories around the world, giving them profit rates of up to 3,000 per cent. Numerous internet sites market the chemicals to eager importers in places as diverse as Mexico, Indonesia and Europe. 45 More broadly, Chinese gang syndicates use a variety of methods to smuggle illegally both precursor chemicals and finished product to world markets. These methods include “mislabeling the [shipping] containers, forging documents, establishing front companies, using circuitous routing, hijacking shipments, [and] bribing officials.” 46 126 THE COMING CHINA WARS Although China’s economy and its manufacturing facilities are first class, much of its banking system is still very much Third World, which 47 has made China easy prey for drug syndicates seeking to launder money through the rickety Chinese banking system. As a result of the drug trade, China is now emerging not just as the “factory floor” for the world’s hard-drug production but also as a major money-laundering center. CHAPTER 6•THE 21 ST CENTURY OPIUM WARS 127 This page intentionally left blank THE DAMNABLE DAM WARS AND DRUMS ALONG THE MEKONG Before the Chinese Communist Party came to power in 1949, China had only 23 large and medium-scale dams and reser- voirs. Fifty-five years later, China has 22,000 of the world’s 45,000 large dams (those more than 15 meters [about 50 feet] in height). Excluding small farm-scale irrigation dams and mini and micro hydropower units, China has about 85,000 dams and reservoirs. And China continues to proudly be the most active large-dam builder in the world, despite the grow- ing scientific evidence that large dams are not economical and sustainable in the long run. [Essayist] Dai Qing calls this trend “a blind faith that engineers and technical fixes can solve all problems,” a “conscious failure by China’s leaders to respect and follow ancient [Chinese Daoist] wisdom [of self-restraint].” 1 —Tashi Tsering, Tibet Justice Center 7 129 Dam happy. That’s the only way to describe China’s water- management policy. At more than 85,000 dams and counting, Chinese leaders boast of having the tallest dams, the largest by reser- voir capacity, the dam with the highest ship lift, and the most power- ful electricity producer. From arch dams, earthen dams, and gravity dams to cascade and concrete-faced rockfill dams, China has it all. China should not be boasting about dams. Instead, China’s top leadership may well want to reconsider the perilous path it has cho- sen to take. For if ever there were a double-edged sword, a large dam strategy would be it. On the beneficial edge of that sword, large dams generate significant amounts of cheap electricity. They store water when there is a surplus for use in irrigation during times of scarcity. They protect arable land from flood and soil erosion. They can help promote aquaculture and fisheries development as well as tourism, recreation, and inland navigation. They can even change the local cli- mate (for better or worse) by increasing humidity and precipitation. 2 On the other far more costly and dangerous edge of the sword, large dams are quite capable over time of destroying the very waters they harness as well as the agricultural lands they are trying to improve. Because dams tend to slow down river flows, they decrease the ability of rivers to rejuvenate and cleanse themselves of pollutants naturally. They interfere with, and often destroy, natural habitats and fish reproduction. The reservoirs created by large dams displace sig- nificant population segments when they inundate villages and towns. Archaeological sites are literally drowned. Perhaps the worst aspect of large dams is their relatively short useful shelf life. As silt builds up behind a dam and the reservoir becomes shallower and shallower, less electricity is generated, less water for irrigation is stored, and flood control becomes increasingly more difficult. Last, but hardly least, is the possibly of a catastrophic accident should a dam be breached and collapse and send a roaring wave of water downriver on a devastating path of destruction. 130 THE COMING CHINA WARS [...]... mothers, the Yellow River is exhausted, her resources dwindling, her energy flagging The 360 0-mile-long waterway known throughout history as China s sorrow” because of a penchant for spilling over is now causing despair for precisely the opposite reason: It is drying up The Los Angeles Times4 132 THE COMING CHINA WARS China has seven major rivers, the two largest and most well-known of which are the. .. archeological sites Three Gorges as a Distraction and the Broader Problem The sheer pointlessness of the vast investment in dam building was brought home by the 1998 floods, which killed 4,000 people and cost the economy $ 36 billion The dams have done 1 36 THE COMING CHINA WARS nothing to stop the floods, which have been increasing in frequency and severity Even the Three Gorges Dam, big though it is, will make... polluters, fine them, or otherwise force them to comply with the pollution control standards Even though China has some strict environmental laws on the books, the fines that are levied to enforce the regulations are often so insignificant they are considered to be merely a cost of doing business CHAPTER 8 • THE BREAD AND WATER WARS 147 rather than a true deterrent As Wang Yongchen, the founder of China s... everywhere and, Nary a drop to drink —Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “Rime of the Ancient Mariner” 143 144 THE COMING CHINA WARS The “Rime of the Ancient Mariner” paradoxically laments the inability of becalmed sailors to slake their growing thirst with the ocean’s nonpotable saltwater In China, the problem is more perverse Much of China s fresh water in its rivers, lakes, streams, and wells is simply too... however, flow from the Mekong River helps deepen the lake to roughly 30 feet and increases the area of the 140 THE COMING CHINA WARS lake more than five-fold The result is to turn Lake Tonle Sap into one of the best breeding grounds for fish in the world This eloquent passage from London’s Independent explains why this is so: The waters carry fertile sediment, fish larvae and fingerlings into the forest,... flooding and the rest from famine and disease as the 138 THE COMING CHINA WARS breach effectively isolated millions of people from basic communications and transportation networks.19 Drums along the Mekong From its origin in the high plateau of Tibet, the Mekong River is 4500 km [about 2,800 miles] long and the 12th longest river in the world, flowing through six countries that include China, Burma,... is the fact that the flooded forest is also the breeding ground for the trey riel (Henicorhynchus siamensis), a sardine-like fish found in almost every net on the river As the forest slowly drains each autumn, the fattened fish migrate throughout the Mekong River system, where local fishermen, many living in floating villages, know almost to the hour when the fish will pass by The peak moment of the. .. Kummu of the Helsinki University of Technology, who is modelling the river’s hydrology, as much as half of the river’s natural annual sediment load comes from CHAPTER 7 • THE DAMNABLE DAM WARS AND DRUMS ALONG THE MEKONG 141 China, and an increasing amount is being captured behind the new dams [in China] He believes that the sediment, which is carried mostly in the monsoon floods, is critical to the fertility... (Mekong means Mother River in Laotian), the Mekong River is the lifeline to more than 60 million inhabitants in downstream countries such as Laos, Thailand, Cambodia and Vietnam Most of them are poor fishermen living off the river fish catch or poor farmers using the river water and rich silt to grow rice They also use the river as their principal means of transportation The biggest threat to their livelihood... from reservoirs into the Bei River to dilute a cadmium spill from a smelter The twin disasters highlight the precarious state of China s water supplies for industry and homes —Associated Press10 The Communist Party secretary of the village of Tangan, Zhao Hezeng, surveys the yellowing stocks in the paddy fields and the tar-black water in the gully alongside The stream that feeds the gully is brown and . the world’s MDMA. The bulk of the precursor chemicals needed for production comes from China. CHAPTER 6 THE 21 ST CENTURY OPIUM WARS 123 124 THE COMING CHINA WARS The Agony of Ecstasy 39 MDMA. million users. Together with the meth market, organized crime rings up the cash registers to the tune of about $65 billion a year. 43 As with the synthesis of heroin and the production of speed, the lowest. by China. The first ingredient is the same sassafras that has been used to make CHAPTER 6 THE 21 ST CENTURY OPIUM WARS 125 popped two more pastel-colored pills with the word “sex” engraved on them.