|
Here's
an excerpt from my humorous travel
memoir, Turkey:
Bright Sun, Strong Tea. (The
previous episode was The
Thumb in My Soup.)
She was a PCV [Peace
Corps Volunteer] teaching English
in Ankara in 1969. I'll call
her Mary. She would have been quite
attractive if there'd been somewhat
less of her, but it was a Peace Corps
commonplace that when volunteers
got lonely the men lost weight and
the women put it on.
I
was in Ankara for
the September Peace Corps conference.
August had raced by in a flurry
of research for my guidebook—bus trips and note-taking—and
here I was one evening with a few
other PCVs sitting in Mary's Ankara
apartment. She took out a guitar,
gave it a tune, and played the
old Peter, Paul & Mary ballad "I'm
Leavin' on a Jet Plane," singing
it sweetly.
Mary
had a boyfriend called
Moe, an African-American vagabond
out to see the world. Hippies were
commonplace in Istanbul but
rare in Ankara, and in 1968 a black
hippy was rare anywhere. Moe was
exotic and charming, a good talker,
and Mary fell for him. He gave
her attention, sex, excitement
and a whiff of devil-may-care freedom,
and she gave him food, sex, love,
and a place to stay.
Moe
wasn't in Ankara for the sightseeing,
or even for Mary. He was there because
he was a convicted drug smuggler.
He had been caught with an industrial
quantity, hauled into court, found
guilty, and sentenced to a long
vacation in a Turkish slammer.
As was customary at the time, his
case was automatically sent up for
appeal. The Turkish authorities gave
him back all of his possessions except
his passport—and the drugs—and
released him on his own recognizance.
In theory he was supposed to appear
at his appeal hearings.
What? A
convicted drug smuggler walking
the streets?
Sure! While
he waited for Turkish justice to
grind along, he dossed with Mary
and enjoyed life. It was part of the
system.
The
system was this: in certain parts
of the country, Turkish farmers grew
a lot of opium.
They had grown opium for centuries.
Their pastoral life was built on
the cultivation of the opium poppy.
They ate the tender leaves of the
opium plant in their salads. They
fed the harvested plants, deprived
of their precious opium gum, to their
cattle. The only thing they didn't
use from the plant was the drug.
They sold the raw gum to the government,
as required by law, for use in making
morphine-based pharmaceuticals.
The
problem was, illegal traders
paid far more for the gum
than the government's low fixed price,
so many farmers sold only part of
their crop to the government and
the rest to the traders because that's
where their real profit was. The
traders turned the gum into heroin,
increasing its market value a thousandfold,
and sold it to European and American
drug dealers, who passed it on at
a princely price to addicts.
What's the Problem?
Drugs
were a pestilence in American
society, causing not only the illness
and death of countless Americans,
many of them young, but also increasing
all the other crimes related
to the drug trade: robbery,
burglary, fraud, racketeering,
blackmail, assault, murder.
"First-world" countries
needed to do something about their
drug problem. What they did was to
blame the Turks for "being the
suppliers," choosing to ignore the real problem,
which was the demand for
drugs. Without demand, supply
would dry up. With demand, closing
down supply in one country would
only cause it to pop up in another.
But it was much easier and politically
expedient to use Turkey as
a whipping-boy than
to solve the problem at home in the
USA.
President
Nixon and the Congress put heavy
pressure on the Turkish government
to solve the western world's drug
problem. To pay for the fix, the
USA gave the Turks $40 million.
The money was for increased surveillance,
arrests, prosecutions and convictions,
and to smooth the transition to the "poppy
straw" process whereby the poppy
plants are harvested before they
mature and the sap (prelude to gum)
forms. Opium can be extracted from
poppy straw only in an elaborate
factory, and the factory would be
run by the government. With no sap
and no gum there could be no heroin.
Turkey
had gotten a reputation as an
easy place to buy drugs which,
for awhile, it was. Few Turks used
drugs but supply met demand:
if foreigners came asking for drugs,
the market would meet their needs.
In a way, foreigners probably
invented the modern Turkish drug
market, or at least the
export department.
With
the pressure on from the American
government, the Turkish police were
ordered to cut down on the trade
and arrest drug smugglers,
which they did. The foreign traders
were the easiest because they didn't
know the territory as well as the
local talent. Most of the foreign
dealers were rank amateurs, easy
to pick up, charge and convict.
Due
to that jolly absurdity which infuses
so much of modern life, arresting
foreign drug smugglers earned the
Turks no praise from the
people who were demanding that they
do it. In one memorable incident,
a British woman put her 10-year-old
son, his luggage packed with illegal
drugs, on a plane from India to London
by way of Istanbul. The Turkish authorities
discovered the drugs, took the boy
into custody and his mother too when
she arrived on a later flight. The British
tabloids crucified the Turks for
persecuting a child and demanded
his immediate release. The tabloids
apparently thought nothing of sending
off a child by himself on a halfway-round-the-world
plane trip along with enough illicit
drugs to earn the owner a death penalty.
The boy was released, with no thanks
to the Turks for interdicting a shipment
of poison meant for British youth.
When
a foreign smuggler was convicted,
the Turkish government had a different
problem: it had to imprison the criminal.
This was expensive because
foreign prisoners were held in special
prisons that were more modern and
comfortable than the spartan traditional
Turkish lock-ups. Foreign prisoners
had to be treated better or there
would be even greater howling from
the media in their home country.
As the Turkish police acceded to
American pressure and arrested more
and more foreign drug smugglers,
the problem of room and board for picky
foreign crooks got ever
more expensive for the Turks.
What
to do? The Turkish authorities came
up with a creative plan. They'd release
the convicted smugglers pending appeal.
This cut the incarceration expense
right away. As the convict was being
released, someone would casually
whisper that a train ran
from Istanbul to Edirne through
Greece—slowly.
It
was true.
After
the collapse of the Ottoman
Empire, when the new border was
drawn between Greece and Turkey,
the old railway line ended up partly
in Turkey and partly in Greece. Until
the 1970s when a new line was built
entirely on the Turkish side of the
border, a slow train departed Istanbul each
evening at 10:10 pm bound for Uzunköprü,
near the Greco-Turkish frontier.
After leaving Uzunköprü it
headed north toward Edirne, crossing
the frontier into Greece at Pythion
(Pithio). It stopped there to take
on Greek border guards who
rode the train until it crossed back
into Turkey, reaching Edirne at
8:01 am.
Because
it was a Turkish train going from
one place in Turkey to another place
in Turkey with no stops in Greece
(except for the border guards), this "corridor
train" was officially
a domestic run, and no passport was
needed to board it.
Although
drug smugglers called it the Midnight
Express, it was not
an express at all but a yolcu (passenger)
train, Turkey's slowest kind, trundling
along at a pace just above a run.
If you had a good reason to get off
in Greece, you could work up the
courage to jump.
After
a convict jumped off the Midnight
Express he'd call the American
consulate in Thessaloniki, claim
that he had lost his passport, apply
for and receive a new one, and be
on his way. If the border guards
saw him jump, they'd jail him for
a night, consult with the US consulate,
get him a new passport, and send
him on his way.
Mary
Takes the Train
Mary
showed up on my doorstep in Istanbul one
day and asked for a favor.
"We're
leaving," she said. "Moe
and I." She told me about the
train.
"We're
going to meet in Thessaloniki. Moe
left last night, without his backpack
of course, so he could jump.
It's in our hotel room with mine.
I was wondering if you'd help me
get our stuff down to the station."
"Sure," I
said, "but no drugs. No
drugs! I suppose Moe has
learned his lesson, but just in case,
I want you to go through his stuff
and make sure there are no drugs."
"There
aren't any drugs," she said, "but
I'll check again just to be sure."
I
hesitated, then asked, "Are
you really doing the right thing?
I mean, with Moe. Do you really think
he's good for you?"
"I
love him," she said. "Yes,
I'm doing the right thing."
"I'll
meet you at your hotel an hour before
train time," I said.
When
I got to her room in Sultanahmet,
she was tying up the top of Moe's
backpack.
"I
checked," she said. "It's
clean."
"Okay."
I
lifted the pack and strapped it on.
It was heavy. Mary strapped on hers
and we hiked down to Sirkeci
Station. We climbed aboard the
train, found an empty compartment
and stowed the packs.
"Good
luck," I said, giving her a
hug. "I hope it works out. Mary, stay
away from drugs. It's a
dirty business and everybody in it
knows more than you do. The
winners are the people at the top. The
little people at the bottom are expendable,
and everybody except the little people
knows it."
"Thanks," she
said. "I've got my head screwed
on right this time."
It
was a beautiful system. American
politicians were happy: Turkish
arrest and conviction statistics
were up. Turkish politicians
were happy: they were saved
the expense and media headache of
incarcerating the foreign criminals. The
criminals were happy: they
were back on the road. Drug
users were happy: when it
got tough to trade in Turkey, they
looked to Thailand and found a new,
abundant source of supply.
Hollywood
was happy: it got together
a group of Turkish-speaking actors
with Greek and Armenian surnames,
cast them as "Turks" to
Oliver Stone's racist anti-Turkish
screenplay, and produced
a movie that magically transmuted
the Turkish police—who had
acted in response to, and for the
good
of, the American public—into perverts,
and a convicted American
drug smuggler into a suffering
hero.
The
movie was a box office hit, and no
one who saw it ever wanted to set
foot in Turkey. For helping
to curb America's drug problem, Turkey
lost millions of dollars in tourism
revenue.
Several
months later I got a thank-you letter
from Mary. She wrote that she met
Moe as planned and they hit the road.
A few weeks later he dumped her for
another girl and she was alone.
"By
the way, when you carried it to the
station, his backpack had two kilos
of drugs in it," she wrote.
Of
course it did. I felt exceedingly
stupid.
But
not as stupid as Mary.
Click
here to order an autographed
copy of the book online with
credit card or PayPal.
(Excerpts
from Turkey: Bright Sun, Strong
Tea copyright © 2004 by
Tom Brosnahan. All rights reserved.)
(The
next episode is Aladdin's
Lamp Shop.)
More Excerpts
from Bright Sun, Strong Tea
Bright
Sun, Strong Tea Photo
Gallery
Turkey
Travel Planner Homepage
|
