Word: opium
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...Like Tip, Pim comes from eastern Burma. A member of the Akha minority, one of the hill tribes that populate that region, she was born in a settlement outside Kentung, an area of wild jungle mountains that doubles as rebel country and forms the heart of the Golden Triangle opium and amphetamine production zone. Pim remembers a tough but happy childhood raising chickens and working the rice fields on her parents' land, which clings to a steep ridge above a clear rushing stream...
...consequent war in Afghanistan. The bombing severely disrupted a main source of the world's supply of heroin, while heightened border security is leaving hundreds of tons of illicit drugs lying undeliverable in smugglers' hiding places from Tijuana to Tehran. Already, producers in Peru are switching from coca to opium poppies to fill the gap - but 2002 will see fewer lives ruined by heroin addiction, largely thanks to Osama bin Laden...
...keeps many Muslim women locked in bad marriages, as does the prospect of losing their children. Typically, fathers win custody of boys over the age of six and girls after the onset of puberty. Maryam, an Iranian woman, says she has stayed married for 20 years to a philandering opium addict she does not love because she fears losing guardianship of her teenage daughter. "Islam supposedly gives me the right to divorce," she says. "But what about my rights afterward...
...excrement up and down twisting Phoenix Mountain trails and mine coal from primitive pits, theirs is not just another grim and baleful tale of forced labor. For these pals are merry pranksters at heart whose spirits never falter. At their first meeting with the village headman, an ex-opium farmer turned communist cadre, the narrator's violin is adjudged a stupid and bourgeois city toy. To prove differently he plays a Mozart sonata. "What's it called?" challenges the headman. Mozart Is Thinking of Chairman Mao is Luo's politically correct and resourceful?if grossly inaccurate?response...
...person who apparently shares that view is Mohammed Azin. A peasant sharecropper outside the town, he stopped planting opium poppies after the Taliban banned the golden harvest last year and decimated the country's poppy fields. Azin's annual income shrank fivefold, he says, to less than $150. His nine children dress in rags, and his own flowing salwar kameez is so threadbare it has split at both elbows. He stands barefoot in his freshly plowed field with a football-sized lump of opium seeds gathered into the front of his garment. With flicks of his right hand, he scatters...