Inspired by Robinson’s seriousness about his craft, and finally weary of the life his own addiction was forcing him to lead, Davis resolved in 1954 to kick his habit. Characteristically, he decided to do it on his own. He had just finished an engagement with Max Roach in Hollywood and rode the bus halfway across the continent to his father’s farm outside East St Louis. His father told him: he could do nothing for him but offer him his love. The rest of it, he said, you’ve got to do for yourself. Davis did. He moved into a two-room apartment on the second floor of his father’s guest-house and locked the door. For seven days, as the craving for drugs raged, he neither ate nor drank, shivering with cold, and struggling to keep from screaming with the pain that tortured his joints. Then, he remembered, one day it was over. Just like that. I walked outside into the sweet clean air over my father’s house, and when he saw me he had this big smile on his face, and we just hugged each other and cried. All I could think of, Miles Davis recorded, was playing music and making up for all the time I had lost. ibid.
A lot of people think jazz musicians are dope addicts. But we’ve proved it ain’t so. Milt Jackson
There’s less love to go around. Because their dope is sucking all the love up. Wynton Marsalis
They just came out to see the world’s most famous junky. Charlie Parker, to friend
My father was on heroin. He was a wild man. Ray Charles junior
So I was smacked out on the Prime Minister’s jet, big deal. Will Self, Independent on Sunday 20th April 1997
Vancouver, Canada’s Pacific gateway: it attracts visitors from around the world. But there aren’t many tourists in the lower east side. Its streets and alleys teem with the homeless and destitute. Crime, disease and drug addiction are rampant. This is an open-air drug market where dealers peddle heroin, morphine and crack, and where syringes known as rigs are tools of the trade. Of all society’s outcasts, few are more reviled than jack-narcotics. Legal Drugs
The result is Insight – a supervised government-funded injection clinic that opened its doors in 2003 ... Insight is the leper colony of the drug world. ibid.
Troops Probed On Drug Traffic: Heroin smuggled to UK. Daily Mirror article 5th September 2010
It’s heroin. And in Britain and the rest of the world almost all of it comes from one place: Afghanistan. Despite international aid projects, attacks on crops, and rough justice, an explosion of heroin is coming out of Afghanistan – purer and cheaper than ever before. Fed by fighting, instability, poverty and corruption, this is another battle with global consequences. Afghan Heroin: The Lost War
The pain-killing properties of opium have been exploited for more than five-thousand years. Modern pharmacology has refined this potent narcotic into new forms, creating drugs like Codeine and Morphine. Heroin was first created in the late nineteenth century, a wonder drug synthesised from Morphine and three times as strong. Beyer Pharmaceuticals introduced it to the public in 1898, mistakenly marketed as non-addictive painkiller. The newly created drug was quickly removed from pharmacy shelves and went underground, creating the demand Afghan farmers feed. ibid.
It’s easy to begin the processing of opium into heroin. It requires only the most basic of chemicals. And a large supply of water. Opium is harvested from ripened poppy pods that are cut with small blades releasing a milky resin. The resin is raw opium. This sticky paste is boiled with slate lime creating a water-soluble morphine solution. The liquid morphine is filtered and re-heated with ammonium chloride. The end product, a dry morphine powder, is packed, transported to secret laboratories and processed. ibid.
Today, opium production in US-controlled Afghanistan, which now provides more than 90 percent of the world’s heroin, breaks new production records nearly every year. The Washington Post, Afghanistan Opium Crop Sets New Record
The contracting Powers shall use their best endeavours to control, or to cause to be controlled, all persons manufacturing, importing, selling, distributing, and exporting morphine, cocaine, and their respective salts, as well as the buildings in which these persons carry such an industry or trade. 1912 Hague International Opium Convention
Before 1980 Afghanistan produced 0% of the world’s opium. After the US/CIA backed Mujahideen won the Soviet/Afghan war, by 1986 they were producing 40% of the world’s heroin supply. By 1999, they were producing 80% of the total market supply. Michael C Ruppert, Crossing the Rubicon
Rosalie Garcia specialised in heroin right under the nose of the law ... Fort Apache the Bronx ... A pint-sized gangster known as Shorty. Gangsters: America’s Most Evil s1e9: Wanted Lethal Beauties, commentator, Reelz 2012
‘Two options – death or jail.’ Gangsters: America’s Most Evil s2e8: Thelma Wright, Thelma
1986: Jackie Wright – ten years her senior ... Heroin. In weight. By the kilo. ibid.
Auntie supplied Thelma with kilos of heroin; Thelma in turn supplied her crew. ibid.
‘I dealt strictly in weight. And you had to have the money.’ ibid. Thelma
Cocaine was the now drug ... ‘So now we’re doing the cocaine and the heroin.’ ibid.
Laos had enormous strategic importance in the fight for Vietnam. The Vietnamese communists from the north had been using a secret trail which ran through Laos to direct troops, weapons and supplies to fight the US troops in the south of Vietnam. The Americans couldn’t invade Laos, so the CIA was called in and ordered to take care of the problem. Secrets of the CIA, 1998
A huge quantity of the heroin produced by the tribesmen was delivered straight into the hands of the American GIs stationed in Vietnam. ibid.
The simple poppy has incredible power. For centuries it gave us opium, the world’s most dependable painkiller. But this flower has become known for a much more lethal drug – heroin. And its power of destruction. Heroin: Hooked, H2 2015
Heroin was a product of the Beyer company. Like Aspirin, Heroin was sold through shops and mail-order catalogues. ibid.
In the past of just twenty years, heroin had gone from heroic medicine to public villain. ibid.
Did you pricks give me heroin? … The Taliban have been altering it for years to make us infertile. Everyone knows that. Utopia s1e2, blind bloke, Channel 4 2013
If you use it [heroin] for any length of time your teeth just go to hell. And that’s the good part. Inherent Vice 2014 starring Joaquin Phoenix & John Brolin & Owen Wilson & Katherine Waterston & Reese Witherspoon & Benicio de Toro & Jena Malone & Joanna Newsom & Jordan Christian Heard & Jong Chau & Jeannie Berlin & Maya Rudolph et al, director Paul Thomas Anderson
During the 1990s, Spasojevic had established a monopoly on the heroin trade in Belgrade so that, according to the local police, ‘He was processing about 100 kilograms of hard drugs monthly – this was bringing in tens of millions of dollars.’ Misha Glenny, McMafia
With no wars left to fight, former paramilitaries became engaged full-time in the transit of heroin, cigarettes, labour migrants and women into Western Europe. The Keystone Cops’ regime of UN and NATO in Kosovo had no resources to combat the Albanian fighters from the Kosovo Liberation Army, who had consolidated Kosovo as a new centre for the distribution of heroin from Turkey to the European Union. ibid.
It did not take Dawood long to choose a new product ... and started trafficking in drugs, chiefly in heroin bound for the European market and Mandrax for South Africa. And in Dawood’s part of the world, if you want to guarantee the success of a narcotics business, there is only one organisation you need to cosy up to – the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), Pakistan’s secret service. ibid.
By 1990 Nigerian nationals (the majority of them Igbo) made up 30 per cent of all people imprisoned by British ports of entry for heroin smuggling, according to the Howard League for Penal Reform. ibid.
Turkish syndicates control large parts of the heroin trade’s wholesale distribution and, in countries like Germany and Great Britain, much of the retail end as well. ibid.
Burma, the world’s second-largest opium-growing region after Afghanistan – a significant part of the resistance to Burma’s foul military junta is financed by two less-than-salubrious trades: trafficking in heroin and trafficking in women. ibid.
Heroin has made a forceful comeback. It returned with the millions of migrant workers that Shanghai needed to construct its hyper-modernist skyline. ibid.
Luciano seizes what’s left of Genovese’s drug operation and makes it his own. The Making of the Mob s1e7, AMC 2015
Luciano is now in control of a global narcotics empire. ibid.
There’s severe over-prescribing. Heroin: Cape Cod, pharmacist, Sky Atlantic 2016
Prescription opioid abuse costs society $55 billion a year in healthcare, criminal justice and lost productivity. ibid. caption
Massachusetts had 1,256 opiate overdose deaths in 2014. ibid.
On the Cape, 85% of crimes are opiate-related. ibid.