Heroin, commonly called “the living death,” is from 30 to 80 times stronger than opium. An opium smoker may go along for years, suffering no more physical damage than a heavy drinker; a heroin addict, who may be hooked in as short a time as two weeks, sinks into physical, mental and moral ruin within a few months. A peculiar kind of economic injustice operates among drug addicts, who are most often found among the poorest segments of the colony’s Chinese population. Even in the years when the British traded openly and without compunction in opium, they almost never became addicted to it, and today a British addict in Hong Kong is an extreme rarity. A number of young Americans living or visiting in the colony have picked up the habit, probably under the impression that they are defying conventions. They, at least, can afford the price of the rope with which they hang themselves. This is not so for the Chinese addict, whose habit costs him an average of $193 a year (HK $1,100), or much more than he can earn in a similar period. Unless he has saved enough money to keep him going until the drugs kill him, he turns to various kinds of crime to support his habit. Opium-smoking is a cumbersome process requiring a bulky pipe, pots of the drug, a lamp to heat it and scrapers to clean the pipe. Smoking produces a strong odor which makes a pipe session vulnerable to police detection and arrest. There are no opium dens in Hong Kong; the usual term is opium divan, implying an elegance seldom encountered in the addicts’ squalid hangouts. Heroin, odorless and requiring no bulky apparatus, is taken in various ways. “Chasing the dragon” is done by mixing heroin granules and base powder in folded tinfoil, then heating it over a flame and inhaling the fumes through a tube of rolled paper or bamboo. When a matchbox cover is substituted for the tube, the method is called “playing the mouth organ.” A third technique involves the placing of heroin granules in the tip of a cigarette, which is lit and held in an upright position while the smoker draws on it; this is known as “firing the ack-ack gun.” Needle injection, and the smoking or swallowing of pills made by mixing heroin with other ingredients are additional methods. The opium poppy may only be grown illegally in Hong Kong, but the few farmers who attempt to raise it in isolated valleys have produced hardly enough for their own use. Practically all of it comes in by ships and planes in the form of raw opium or morphine, which can be converted to heroin within the colony. On ships, the drugs are hidden in the least accessible parts of the vessel or concealed in cargo shipments; they can also be dumped overside in a waterproof container with a float and marker as the ship nears the harbor, to be picked up by small, fast boats which land them in sparsely settled areas. Variations of the same methods are used by incoming planes, with a prearranged airdrop sometimes being employed.