Chapter 4 Tribal People 125rain as it is maturing. But the rain should stop about the time the petals begin
to fall so the seed heads remain dry and the latex sticks to the heads when they
are tapped. Poppies can grow in the same field for 10 years before the soil
becomes exhausted, while padi fields need 10 years of fallow after only two or
three years of use. It would seem to make sense to plant a field in rice, then shift
to poppies after two years, but this is difficult because rice, being a kind of
grass, is almost impossible to clear away sufficiently to allow room for the pop-
pies to grow. The solution, when clearing a new area for cultivation, is to select
some fields for rice, and others (higher up) for poppies. Maize is planted first in
the poppy fields to keep them weed-free, then about August or September pop-
pies are planted among the maize and harvested in December or January. This
gives a bonus of maize, which is fed to pigs, important in the ceremonial life of
the Hmong, and can be eaten or sold. Thus, a poppy economy is actually a
poppy-pigs-maize complex.
At harvest time, after the petals have fallen, the seed heads of the poppies
are tapped. This is highly labor-intensive work, as each head has to be handled
twice. A special three-bladed knife is made by binding together three blades at
different angles so each blade will cut a different depth into the seed-head to
tap a different layer of the sap. After the first stroke, the sap immediately begins
to ooze, quickly congealing along the gashes of the head. Four hours later,
when the sap is viscous and amber-colored, it can be scraped off with a flat iron
blade and wrapped in poppy petals. There can be as many as 30 heads to a
plant, though the average is seven or eight. Though each poppy is only tapped
once, workers go over each field many times to be sure they have it all.
Efforts to study opium production have been hindered by an understand-
able tendency on the part of cultivators to underreport production and earn-
ings. Nevertheless, the Thai government estimates 3.25 kg of raw opium per
acre is an average for all producers. Some groups, such as the Mien, tap the
poppy heads several times and get much higher yields, perhaps as much as 10
kg per acre. Using the lower figure, together with data on the amount of land
actually under poppy production, Geddes calculated during the time of his
fieldwork (1965–1966) that the 71 Hmong households of Meto village pro-
duced 1.3 metric tons of opium. The total value was $59,880, or $843 per
household. The richest household, the headman’s large extended family of 20
persons, earned $2,968. The Hmong were viewed as richer than other tribes,
even richer than nearby Thai farm families whose average annual income from
crops other than opium was $155.
The opium trade went through somersaults during the last century as
entrepreneurs in and out of government, tribal brokers, and assorted drug lords
waxed and waned in the “politics of heroin” (McCoy 2003). Chinese warlords
during the struggle against the Communists in the 1930s and 1940s maintained
their armies with opium wealth. The rural physician, Wu Lien-teh, wrote: “I
often saw mile upon mile of land covered with multicolored poppy plants in
Manchuria, Shansi, Shensi, Jehol, Fukien, Yunnan, and Szechuan, from