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Opium has always been complex issue in Laos

Drug played role in tribal culture, but addiction to it also ruined reputations

Special Report

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By Monte Mitchell and Richard Gould

JOURNAL REPORTERS

Published: May 20, 2009

HICKORY -- When Tong Yang was a boy heading out from home in the highlands of Laos, his mother would prepare him a bag with rice, a little salt and a tiny pack of opium.

"If you see a yellow cloud in the sky it must be poison from the communists," she said, passing along the wisdom of the community. "You need to run away and eat a little opium. But don't eat too much or you'll die."

The Hmong called the chemicals "yellow rain," part of a genocide of Hmong and other hill tribes in Laos, meant to kill them or drive them from their land for helping Americans in the secret war there.

Yang never saw the yellow cloud, but he was taught that opium was an essential painkiller, a crucial part of mountain life in Laos.

His father, a defense commander, passed out opium to his troops for everything from snakebites to bee stings.

Yang, 40, passed through refugee camps on his way to eventually settle in Hickory, among the area's about 10,000 to 15,000 Hmong.

He owns and hosts the radio show Hmong Talk. In the studio, he opens up the phone lines to talk about the killings of four members of a Catawba County family.

Not one person calls in to talk about it.

Yang says he thinks that people are afraid to talk publicly about what many in the Southeast Asian community are discussing among themselves.

"In the Hmong community at the beginning everybody suspected opium," Yang said.

Cash crop in the mountains

For hill tribes in the mountains of Laos, miles from doctors and drug stores, opium was important because it contains morphine and codeine, analgesics that reduce pain without a loss of consciousness. In addition to killing pain, opium mimics the release of high levels of endorphins and produces a feeling of euphoria and well-being.

"Most Hmong adults -- if they are being truthful -- will tell you that no medicine is better than opium," Yang said.

But while opium was part of life among the Hmong, the Mien and other hill tribes in Southeast Asia, there was a strong stigma attached to someone who became an opium addict. In the villages, opium addicts were viewed as lazy, not the type of person one would want one's son or daughter to marry. No one wanted an opium addict as a neighbor.

They were mountain people, proud and hard working. Imagine the mountain people of North Carolina, winking at each other over a drop of moonshine, but not liking a shiftless drunk.

Like moonshine in Appalachia, opium was a cash crop for the mountain people of Laos.

Most grew rice, corn and opium.

The opium fields were high in the mountains, usually 3,000 feet or more above sea level and on slopes of 20 to 40 degrees to drain the rainwater.

Before the rainy seasons started in April, farmers burned off the dry brush to prepare the land for planting. Hundreds of thousands of farmers used the slash- and-burn method, setting so many fires that people choked on the smoke for weeks. The haze blocked out the sun at times.

In August or September, near the end of the rainy season and after the ash had settled into the soil, farmers started to turn the soil to plant their poppy seeds.

They needed a pound of opium poppy seeds for an acre of crop, tossing the seeds by hand or dropping them into shallow holes they poked with a stick.

The flowers blazed in purple, crimson, white, red and pink petals for just a few days. They dropped off to reveal a small green fruit that continued to grow into an oblong bulb about the size of a golf ball.

When the plant was ready, the farmer would use a blade to score the opium pod, allowing the white raw opium latex to ooze out.

The raw opium would oxidize and turn brown overnight, and the next morning the farmer would scrape the opium gum from the pods with a flat iron blade.

They would dry the wet opium, wrapping it in banana leaves or plastic for storage, until they were ready to sell or trade it.

But while opium might have been accepted as a way of life, the children of the hill tribes heard bad things about heroin, which is where much of that opium went, processed in secret jungle labs to produce most of the world's heroin supply.

Times have changed

That is the way it was done for generations in Southeast Asia. But times have changed for opium production in the land once known as the Golden Triangle.

The area accounts for only about 5 percent of the world's heroin supply now, according to the United Nations.

China put pressure on governments to crack down on opium farmers. Criminal syndicates switched to methamphetamine production.

Now, more than 90 percent of the world's opium production is in Afghanistan, where farmers make money, and opium provides money for the Taliban and such organizations as al-Qaida.

Although opium was accepted as a medicine back in Laos, it was a complex issue. Just as people in the United States readily accept the use -- but not the abuse -- of prescription drugs, the stigma of opium addiction was strong in the villages in Laos.

"It has virtually enslaved families for generations," Yang said.

But things are changing for the hill-tribe generations growing up in the United States, where opium is illegal and there is access to other health care.

In California, where there are large populations of elderly immigrants from Southeast Asia, clinics offer methadone treatment for elderly clients looking for help to overcome their opium use.

Yang said that when he was the director of the Hickory area's United Hmong Association, from 1999 until last year, he never heard of a young Hmong person using opium or heroin.

Counselors in California say that back in Laos, a host might offer opium to a friend who would visit their home, just as people here offer someone a drink.

That custom has changed in the United States, where opium is illegal and more expensive.

But habits are hard to break.

After Brian Tzeo's family was killed March 12, he told investigators that he had been dealing in opium. There was also an extramarital affair in his past.

Investigators asked themselves why someone would wipe out a family?

Sex? Drugs? Money? Or something else? Revenge?

■ Monte Mitchell can be reached in Wilkesboro at 336-667-5691 or at mmitchell@wsjournal.com.

■ Richard Gould can be reached in Hickory at 828-304-6916 or rgould@hickoryrecord.com.