With thousands of ships and planes arriving and departing every year, the chances of stopping all narcotics smuggling are practically nil. A complete search of every arrival would be physically impossible, and even in cases where the police or the Preventive Service of the Commerce and Industry Department have been tipped off to an incoming shipment, it may take a full day to locate the hiding place. The drugs may be packed inside a cable drum, buried in bales of waste, concealed in double-bottomed baskets, cached inside the bodies of dolls or surrounded by bundles of firewood; the hiding places are as inexhaustible as the cleverness of the smugglers. Where do the narcotics come from? Harry J. Anslinger, United States Commissioner of Narcotics from 1930 to 1962, had been telling the world for at least a decade that Red China was the chief source of supply. Anslinger said the Chinese Communists were up to their necks in the traffic because it brought them the foreign exchange they desperately needed and simultaneously undermined the morale of the West by spreading drug addiction among its people. Not one official in the British crown colony accepted Mr. Anslinger’s thesis for a minute. Hong Kong Police Commissioner Henry W. E. Heath, the Secretariat for Chinese Affairs, and the Preventive Service of the Commerce and Industry Department unanimously declared that there was absolutely no evidence that any large amount of the drugs smuggled into the colony came from Red China. American customs officials in Hong Kong were inclined to sustain the British view. Anslinger had named Yunnan Province in southwestern China as the leading opium-growing area. Colony officials will concede that some opium may be grown in Yunnan, but they believe that a much greater share is cultivated in northwest Laos, northern Thailand and the Shan States of eastern Burma. These four areas are so close to one another that the difference between the two hypotheses is more political than geographic. Regardless of which field the poppy comes from, colony officials have found that more than half the opium seized upon entering Hong Kong has arrived on ships and planes that made their last previous stop at Bangkok, Thailand. It is presumed that few drugs arrived bearing the name and address of the manufacturer or the stamp giving the country of origin.