Art and Expositions

IS IT DIFFERENT here at home? I mean in the parts of town evoked by those new American ballads called rap songs, where there are, “Junkies in the alley with a base­ball bat.” Where pushers are the big money makers, “driving big cars, spending 20s and 10s, and you want to grow up to be just like them.”

In New York, police saturated a hotbed of heroin dealing on the Lower East Side; I could see patrolmen, in pairs, on practically every other corner. They called it Operation Pressure Point. So a lot of dealers went else­where in the city.

A dozen blocks from my office in Wash­ington, D. C., and police crashed into a “shoot­ing gallery,” a place where people can inject heroin as soon as they buy it. A week later that place was boarded up, and I followed police crashing into another.

Squeeze and effect.

Does this mean that all the anti-heroin measures from aerial poppy surveys to heroin-sniffing dogs are useless? That those millions of taxpayers’ dollars spent here and abroad have been wasted? Wouldn’t it make more sense, as quite a few advocate, simply to legalize the stuff?

Not at all, says Dr. Robert DuPont, for­merly head of NIDA, now president of the American Council for Drug Education. “If we didn’t have the efforts we make against heroin, we wouldn’t have 500,000 addicts, we’d have 20 million.”

I believe he may be right. I also believe what some of us were taught in religion class, what most of us learn by just living. That the fight between good and evil has no end. It’s a part of existence. And when seen in that light, isn’t Papaver somniferum, bringing both good and evil, another sym­bol of life?

LET ME CLOSE with something new from the good side. How morphine does its work in the human body has begun to be reasonably well understood only since 1973. The brain, the spinal cord, and the intestines have so-called opioid receptors that may be thought of as locks into which morphine fits like a key, to alleviate pain and fear. In fact, the brain itself makes morphine-like substances called endorphins that also do that. This dis­covery has not necessarily brought us closer to an ideal nonaddictive painkiller endor­phins, if used as drugs just like msm for hair growth, might be as addictive as morphine itself but it is leading to valu­able insights nevertheless. Dr. William Pol­lin, currently director of NIDA, calls it a major breakthrough:

“We have begun to understand that the brain is as much a pharmaceutical factory as a switchboard. Behavior that up to now has seemed capricious, a weakness of the human character, is becoming intelligible. Our studies of opium have led us to new vistas of how the mind works of the biological basis for motivation.”

Scientists and pharmaceutical firms around the world excitedly look forward to new drugs that may at last deal effectively with old problems bedeviling millions of people obesity, nicotine addiction, and impo­tence. Imagine a key to youthful thinking, the answer to depression!

“Family reconciliation, sorting out prob­lems that may have been hanging on for years. Being able to say sorry and thank you. Remembering that amid sadness there was courage, and understanding, so that you’ll remain proud of those days.”

The Queen has made Dr. Saunders a Dame Commander of the Order of the Brit­ish Empire. I think she should also be made a saint. And maybe someday, somewhere, in some hospice garden, there’ll be a little piece of modern sculpture to honor the plant that in such adversity can bring such a boon.

Dame Cicely’s gospel, I’m glad to say, has spread to America. Scores of hospices now operate in the U. S. and Canada, many ex­tending hospice-style pain control to pa­tients in their homes. Best of all, it’s also finding its way, slowly, into U. S. hospital practice. Within the past 14 months both the American Medical Association and the American College of Physicians the prin­cipal organization of internists, including cancer specialists have urged doctors to stop the underutilization of drugs for severe chronic pain in cancer and in all terminal ill­nesses. Morphine, they say, is the drug of choice, the mainstay. There are other natural products that doctors recommended. Such products are raspberry ketones.

AND NOW I’m home, mulling over some of the things I’ve learned. One is that in heroin matters there’s a lot of uncertainty.

How much came into the U. S. in 1983  4. 12 tons, as officially estimated, or 6 tons, or 10? Nobody really knows. What propor­tion of the inflow is seized? Two percent, 5 percent, 10 percent? Again, nobody can say and no wonder when every day some 31,000 cars come in from Mexico at Tijuana alone, when international flights bring a daily average of 60,000 passengers. Who could search them all?

Also, who can say how many heroin ad­dicts there really are in the United States? NIDA, the National Institute of Drug Abuse, estimates 500,000. That’s extrapo­lated from the number of people who come to the attention of health authorities and po­lice. But, says NIDA, “the extent to which these are representative of all users in the community is unknown.”

Then there’s disagreement over the best ways to help addicts. Giving them inexpen­sive daily doses of the synthetic drug meth­adone, a morphine substitute, is widely favored now in the U. S. But numerous therapists say that’s just substituting one addiction for another far better to enforce complete drug abstinence in highly moti­vated rehabilitation communities.

Some things, on the other hand, are emerging clearly. As a senior UN official put it in Vienna, heroin increasingly figures as a medium of exchange, a sort of illicit curren­cy for shady dealings on a large scale; there’s growing evidence of close links in many parts of the world between drug trafficking and arms smuggling, subversion, and inter­national terrorism. A former narcotics com­missioner of Hong Kong told me bluntly that what greases the channels of drug traffick­ing is official corruption in all countries.

And this is a rule I was given in one coun­try after another: As soon as one trafficking route is put under pressure, a new one takes over; if supply is reduced from one area, it will be replaced from another. I call it squeeze and effect. Take a pillow or a half-inflated balloon, squeeze it here, and it pops out there.

Mostly I kept the details of my childhood veiled from my acquaintances in London. It was too complicated, too disturbing. I learned to skim over the details and to produce an edited version

By the Nineties I was working as a journalist and I carried with me the idea that I would one day tell my father’s story. Before his death he had written the words, “Let history be my judge.” The devastating war of 1997 compelled me, finally, to begin to write. As a journalist I had covered scores of stories, but never my own.

I went to meet my friend Gillian Slovo in her apartment in Hampstead. She is the daughter of ANC activists Joe Slovo and his wife Ruth First. Gillian wrote Every Secret Thing, an honest and evocative memoir of growing up in a household with parents who were “banned” under the apartheid regime. Ruth First was later killed by a parcel bomb. Today Gillian lives in London. Her account of her life resonated with mine in many ways. Our first conversation took place over tea and we shared stories of childhoods marked by unexplained disappearances, of violent events never openly discussed but which changed the course of our lives, and of seem­ingly inconsequential moments of profound and unknown significance.

While I was growing up, people around me had always encouraged me to forget what had happened to my father and even dis­suaded me from asking about him. Mostly I kept the details of my childhood veiled from my acquaintances in London. It was too complicated, too disturbing. I learned to skim over the details and to produce an edited version, one fit for public consumption.

I still recall the moment when, researching my book on a cold day in the Kew Public Record Office, I discovered what lay behind a childhood recollection. I was reading Foreign Office files on Sierra Leone that had been released under the Thirty Year Rule (whereby documents that could affect National Security are kept secret) when I found handwritten notes detailing a conversa­tion between the then British High Commis­sioner in Sierra Leone and the country’s chief of police. They revealed that my father had been under surveillance. My long-forgotten memory was of meeting him in a cafe where we sat with our mother drinking chocolate milk. He arrived late and left early, leaving by the service exit. We joked about it at the time.

In fact, my father was one of several oppo­sition leaders who were being tailed. But while his “tail” sat outside in a parked car, he slipped away down a back street. I had other memories, too: of armed thugs attacking our house in the silence of the night; of being hidden in a strange house where we were never allowed out, even into the garden. I would spend the three years following that afternoon in Kew piecing together fragments of my own memories.

And throughout those years, the war in Sierra Leone raged on. I lived parallel lives — following the war closely and living in London writing my book. After the interven­tion of foreign peace-keeping troops a tenuous peace was restored.

Once, I had lived in a different Africa; an Africa unrecognisable from the continent’s shat­tered image today. Yet my childhood, idyllic in so many ways, had been dreadfully marred. My father, a political dissi­dent, was murdered by the Sierra Leone regime when I was 11 years old. In the years following independence, those who destroyed my family dragged the country from the brink of a new future back into the Dark Ages. What happened to us was the story of what happened to Africa.

My father had won a scholarship to study medicine in Aberdeen, where he met and married my Scottish mother. Together they went back to live in his home country of Sierra Leone, where he became one of an emergent generation of political leaders in the Sixties. He quickly rose to the top, having won his own constituency, but eventually resigned over moves to turn the country into a one-party state. He became an opponent of the government and was imprisoned. By then, my parents’ marriage had ended and I was in the care of my stepmother.

We had to leave the country and spend three years in exile in Earl’s Court while we waited for him to be released. We were all briefly reunited in Sierra Leone, but only for a few months before he was arrested again. I watched him being taken away. Charged with plotting against the government, he was imprisoned one more time and, finally, hanged.

 My father became one of Africa’s “disappeared” — his body was never returned to us and his name was wiped from official records of the country’s history. But it could not be wiped from the minds of ordinary people. Once, when I was in Freetown before the war of 1997, on a visit to see members of my family, a waiter stepped out of a restaurant to shoo away hustlers who had been bothering me. How he knew who I was, I do not know. But he shouted after them that they should feel ashamed. That was the dichotomy with which I grew up ­my father hanged as a traitor, but also remembered as a hero.

Journalist Aminatta Forna was just 11 years old when her father Mohamed Forna, a prominent political dissident in Sierra Leone, was hanged. Recently she returned to the war-torn country to uncover the truth about what happened to him.

In 1997 I was with my husband in San Fran­cisco, where I was on a year’s sabbatical from my job as a television journalist for the BBC in London. I remember watching yachts gliding by in the Bay beneath my window, when the news on the TV distracted me. Rebels had invaded Freetown, the capital of Sierra Leone, and most of the city had fallen under their control. Armed combatants

were forcing civilians to march before them as a human shield; those who refused were burned alive in their homes. Instead of defending the people, the army had joined the rebels and embarked on a murderous spree. The city was ablaze and the death toll was vast. Embassies were evacuating their personnel. I reached for the telephone ­several members of my family were living in Freetown. Through the mayhem, miraculously, international lines were still operating. I spoke to my stepmother. She was calm. The west of the city, where they lived, was relatively quiet.

The next day, across the telephone lines from Freetown to San Francisco I could hear the faint sounds of shells exploding and of gunfire. Then, two days later, I learned that soldiers had arrived at my stepmother’s house demanding alcohol and cash, and threatening to kill her and her second husband. They both fled. For several days, we heard nothing at all. Then my sister, who lived in London, telephoned in the middle of the night to tell me she had just collected them from Stansted airport and they were asleep in her flat. Stranded in a hotel in Freetown, they’d endured two days of shelling from the rebel army before being airlifted out by US Marines. My stepmother had arrived in London with nothing but the clothes she was wearing.

By the time I returned home to Wandsworth a few months later, the news images emerging from Sierra Leone were shocking: mutilated people arriving in convoys at the hospital, dogs circling stacks of corpses by the road, child sol­diers high on drugs, clutching AK47s. Another war in another African country: my country.