From New York Times
By Walter Goodman
"Sorting out the good guys from the bad in The Opium Kings is no problem once you conclude that there are no good guys. This report on three decades of unrest in the Shan area of Myanmar, on the borders of Thailand and China, finds that revolutionary leaders can also be drug traffickers.
Adrian Cowell, a British producer who has been paying attention to Myanmar, the former Burma, since the 1950s, begins with the troubling fact that the Shan opposition to the repressive Burmese military Government has been relying on the poppy crop--the main income producer of a desperately poor area--to finance its revolution. American officials say that this Golden Triangle area of Myanmar, Thailand and Laos delivers 60 percent of the United States heroin supply."
"...The FRONTLINE report, which is enlivened with battlefield photography, ends in 1996 with a deal involving Khun Sa, Lo Hsin Han and the Burmese Government. The Shan liberation movement has for now been crushed; its former leaders are prospering as businessmen; villagers are trying to scrape by; the heroin trade flourishes."
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