Customer Services Engineer

Used to make 8Cr/year smuggling H*roin in 1986. Now a professor...

Came to know about this story from an old friend of my dad. Here's his story: The three main producers around the world today are Mexico( for the market in the US), in South Asia it is Cambodia and Laos. And ofcourse Afghanistan which tops all of them in sheer volume. 1. His first trip to 🇦🇫 was in 1976. He always used to say that the best method to make a contact with a supplier is NOT through introduction. Because they could be an agent of any international Narcotics agency. That's why he used to go through the Afghani farmlands and meeting the opium farmers directly. He used to live with the farmers for a few days and help the local community with money for a well etc. 2. Back then the farmer used to get Rs. 5000 for every kilo of processed sap of the opium flower. The way the sap is extracted is by scraping the side of the mature bulb of the opium flower. This is then locally processed into a brick, which was the base for creating H*roin. It contains a very high yield of Morphine in it. 3. It used to work in a decentralized way. It was not an organization running it back then. The farmers were independent and so were the manufacturers and the smugglers and the traders. Only the distribution side was organized. 4. He has often said that although you could call them chemists, they did not have fancy labs to make that stuff back then. Literally some pots made of diesel cannisters, some scraped clean paint buckets, some cloth for filtering, some drums of chemicals and a danda for stirring. Literally barebones. 5. Essentially, the base was mixed with Ammonia and then washed out to extract morphine and then dry it out and cooked with acetic anhydride. It still looks like brown shit so the rest of the job was to clean the product and purify it to improve yield. You could use the brown product for smoked and it wasn't as strong as the cleaned up product which was used for injecting and snorting. 6. He used to say that all lab tests to find purity were shit back then and there was no better test than taste. He could tell from the smell, the texture and taste of heroin: where it came from and very close to how strong it is. 7. It was challenging to get the product out of Afghanistan because it was a a stone age landlocked country. So he used to get it into Pakistan, which was not that challenging because all he had to do was bribe border patrollers. "Har cheez ka daam hota hai" is still a catchphrase I hear from uncle. 8. They used to use hardcover books and get it pressed within the covers. In 1986 he had made 8 Cr in one year. 9. He even got arrested in Pakistan at some point according to him and it took him 3 years to get a not guilty plea. 10. Soon, he moved back to India and decided to leave that life for good. It was very hard for him to find another job, so my father helped him study for his Masters and PhD. 11. He is now a professor and is clean for many decades now. Would not want to say more but he has a big house at his village with farm animals and agricultural fields. I came to know about this story only recently when my dad's other friend told this friend's story at a wedding. Can't believe how crazy this story is and it makes me wonder how many people have lived insane lives. His turnaround story is actually insane but also very inspirational.