Book review: Gripping read will see frenzy for film rights

Patrick Winn's 'Narcotopia' is an enthralling book, one with multiple plotlines and characters

Patrick Winn is an award-winning investigative journalist. He mostly covers rebellion and black markets in Southeast Asia.

• Narcotopia: In Search of the Asian Drug Cartel That Survived the CIA 
• Patrick Winn 
• Public Affairs, €27.00 

What a cast, what a setting, what an imagination-bending exposé of hypocrisy, ambition, ruthlessness, and routine betrayal.

If that sounds like little more than your local election candidate selection process underway right now, add the fact that Patrick Winn’s page-turner is set in an ungovernable, mountainous borderland, in an “unofficial” country you may not have heard of, one alive with spooks — at least two competing American agencies — and an a high-energy evangelist Christian missionary determined to drag his disinterested hosts into the modern world, or at least his happy-clappy version of it.

That this region — the Golden Triangle straddling the border dividing China and Myanmar — is one of the world’s primary producers of heroin and opium provides the catalyst for a sobering contemporary fable coloured by Defcon 1 corruption.

Put the vast fortunes available to those ready to inculcate and support opiate addiction, especially among American grunt soldiers in Vietnam, and the stakes become clear.

All of this is animated by a slightly left-of-stage boogeyman — the communist Chinese army that might, or at least according to those happy to sow psychological insecurity, finally make good their tacit threat to invade Myanmar and try to subdue the mysterious, defiant Wa State.

All of that may be enough to make Harrison Ford, or even Tom Cruise, wish they were young enough to play the lead in what would, no matter how the filmmaker tried, be an implausible spy-cum-crime thriller.

Their advancing age may not be the prime barrier to either … in this diversity sensitive age, their ethnicity disqualifies them.

The real brains and gritty gumption in this story are supplied by local Wa leaders, especially Saw Lu, and their paramilitaries, Burmese fixers, and foot soldiers.

If all that was not enough to bring some frenzy to the auction for the film rights, there was the local tradition, still active at the beginning of this journey, of head hunting.

As that tradition faded — largely through the efforts of evangelist missionaries — a new unified, entity took shape and became powerful enough to run their informal state as an international narcotics cartel.

That is just one of the grand shifts recorded by Winn, but the greater one by far is how the roles of America and China are reversed in the few decades covered in Narcotopia.

In the 1970s, America was the biggest outside influence and supported Burmese efforts to arm the Wa.

Two American agencies, the CIA and DEA, were vigorous opponents of each other in this project.

The DEA acted as uncompromising policemen and acted accordingly.

The CIA better understood the realpolitik and exploited opportunities that a closer, less flexible relationship with the drug runners offered.

That hypocrisy was underlined by Winn when he records that, at the very moment America’s first lady Nancy Reagan was giving one of her strident war-on-drugs speeches, CIA planes were being used to transport the poppy crop that eventually became heroin.

The legacy of those operations casts an ever-darkening shadow today.

That drug trade created the seed capital for today’s online crime.

Winn has written an enthralling book, one with multiple plotlines and characters.

It underlines how very difficult it is for a modern state to contain a crime consortium with almost boundless resources.

This left me, though Winn may not have intended to do so, with one of those counterfactual questions that provoke a kind of harmless day dreaming: What would this small country be like if South Armagh were as bountiful for poppy growers?