It is a long, winding and perilous journey from the suffocating heat of the Golden Triangle’s poppy fields, a near hypnotic carpet of bright red petals, to the wet cement of fire-fly backstreets in the West Midlands.
It is a secret journey – punctuated by stop offs, swapped couriers and juggled transportation – paved with, and paid by, misery.
Jungle laboratories turned the soporific sap into a granular grey substance that has the pungent smell of vinegar. This is the brown sugar Mick Jagger sang about. Known simply as Number Three by those that cultivated the poppies, it is coarse and for smoking. The then Custom and Excise’s first major blow in the war against heroin – a war that can never truly be won – was struck in Walsall, a town once famed for its saddle-making industry.And it was a bust that spanned both the West Midlands and Far East, with specialist officers sent to Hong Kong to prevent hundreds of local people becoming hooked on the highly addictive, synthetic drug’s barbs.
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