Opium Pipes Were Very Valuable in Hong Kong

Detectives in Wanchai Police Station catalog opium equipment siezed in a Hong Kong drugs raid. Two of the detectives examine opium pipes, while their detective sergeant writes a report. A third opium pipe lies on the desk in front of the camera. On the right of the picture you can see an opium lamp used to thicken the opium, and later to burn it as it is sucked into the pipe to be inhaled.

The opium drug itself is in the tiny white ceramic bowls in an open cigarette tin at the bottom center of my photograph. The deadly narcotic looks like Vegemite, Marmite or thick black molasses.

I never visited an opium den in Hongkong as a customer, although I saw a couple on police raids. But I did smoke an opium pipe once - only once - when I was in Laos. It made me throw up... but that's another story.

In the opium den, a girl picks up the sticky substance on a long needle and holds it above the lamp, heating the drug and changing its consistancy so it can be loaded into the opium pipe.

The needle is used to push the drug into the clay barrel of the pipe, after which the opium smoker holds the pipe head upside down directly over the flame of the opium lamp. The narcotic starts to vaporise, and the fumes must then be quickly sucked into the lungs in one long breath.
If you stop too early, the opium pipe blocks up and has to be cleaned and reloaded.

In old China before Communism, Opium had been considered a fairly harmless vice. And indeed some rich Chinese families would deliberately introduce their sons to the habit. Why? Because as addicts the young men would want only opium, which was cheap in those days. After the sons became opium addicts they would not fritter away the family fortunes in gambling and chasing women. All they would ever want would be the narcotic.

Once opium became illegal, the downside to taking it was that the smoking equipment was expensive and difficult to hide. Many addicts switched to morphine and heroin, because a syringe is easy to secrete. And also in Asia most addicts smoke the drug. You can't inject it anyway, because it is too pure in Asia.

An old friend of mine, who was addicted for many years, says Hong Kong heroin was 60 times stronger than the diluted street stuff sold in Western countries such as the US and Australia. I know when I was in Hongkong that visiting foreigners would often be found dead in their hotel rooms with their eyes popping out of their heads after scoring the drugs locally and shooting-up the way they were used to at home.

When the Communists took control of China in 1949, they executed all the landlords for exploiting the people. They also rounded up all of the drug addicts and shot them too. Kneel down here... pistol to back of the head. Whack!