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The Real Midnight Express |
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 Tom
Brosnahan came to Turkey in 1967 as a US Peace Corps Volunteer. He taught
English for a year, then wrote a guidebook: Frommer's "Turkey on $5 a Day."
He went on to write the Lonely Planet guides to Istanbul and Turkey, and
over 35 other guidebooks for Berlitz, Frommer's and Lonely Planet covering
Belize, Canada, Egypt, England, France, Guatemala, Israel, Mexico, Morocco,
New England, Tunisia and Turkey, with nearly four million copies in print
worldwide in more than 10 languages. The following is an excerpt from his
humorous travel memoir, "Turkey: Bright Sun, Strong Tea," soon to be
published by HOMER in Istanbul. For more information, check out his
excellent website at www.turkeytravelplanner.com
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 a
while, 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.
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