All Smooth Sailing Ahead
Chapter 36
Puneet Chopra was ecstatic when he heard the good news from Amar. First it was the new opium arrangement with General Pang and now the deal for large quantities of yaba. He believed both suppliers would be able to reliably meet the requirements for his distribution network and then some. Moreover, the ship he’d arranged for had just delivered its first batch of opium. He couldn’t wait for Amar to find one in Myanmar so he hired a ship and crew berthed in Kolkata Harbor. It was an old freighter that had seen better times, but still wholly serviceable according to its captain.
Puneet planned to pay a bonus to Amar, if things continued to go well. While he failed in securing a ship, he delivered on his promises to supply product beyond what Puneet thought possible. He now believed Amar was a brilliant negotiator, businessman and trusted partner and looked forward to a long and profitable relationship with him.
The laboratory selected by Puneet was located in a rundown section of old Kolkata, formerly called Calcutta. He had the choice of using several others, but didn’t see the wisdom of using one a distance away. It was just a pragmatic, business decision that saved him some time and money. He found the process of turning raw opium into high grade heroin to be a fairly simple, straightforward one, assuming one knew what he was doing. It was much easier than spinning straw into gold, but the two actions were essentially the same in Puneet’s view. Money was the end result and that’s all he cared about.
Puneet learned it all started with harvesting the opium from the poppy, something he already knew. The pods were scored with a blade and the raw opium collected into balls and sent to a laboratory where the morphine was extracted and processed into heroin.
The opium was unpacked, crushed and first placed into tubs with boiling hot water. The tubs were frequently stirred and any solids floating on the surface removed. More hot water was added over time. The tubs were then covered and left to sit overnight. The following day more insoluble oils and resins would be floating on the mixture’s surface and removed. The opium solution containing the morphine was then siphoned off into separate containers. It was simply a matter of separating the wheat from the chaff in Puneet’s ever logical mind.
At this point in the process, the solid morphine came out of the liquid and ammonium chloride was added and stirred continuously. Perhaps that was the spoonful of medicine that made the medicine go down in a most delightful way, but Puneet decided not to ask and show his ignorance or fondness for American musicals to his new found colleagues.
The tub was then covered and left to stand overnight. The dark brown solution was siphoned off and filtered through cloth several times to remove any insoluble particles. The following day, the contents of the tub were poured into a bucket lined with cloth and then the cloth squeezed to remove any liquid. The brownish-grey morphine base in the filtering cloth was spread out in the sun and left to dry. The dried morphine was then scraped off the cloth and weighed. Next, the crude morphine base was placed in an aluminum pot and a slight portion of acetic anhydride was added to the pot. The pot was then stirred until all the morphine had dissolved and then left for 45 minutes. A fire was built during this time and after 45 minutes passed, the pot was heated for 30 minutes. It all seemed a simple, but labor intensive process to him.
Puneet had watched each step of the formulation because he was curious as to how it worked. He took meticulous notes and snapped photos using his i-Pad. As a savvy businessman, he had to know his product and he was amazed at the simple, low-tech methodology used in processing the stuff. For some reason, he’d envisioned visiting a fairly modern laboratory rather than a crude, rudimentary backstreet operation in a black hole of the city. However, it was what it was, he mused. At least they saved on overhead since the lab was merely a walled courtyard sans roof. That meant his processing fee couldn’t go through the roof, he chuckled to himself.
The white heroin end product was about 75 percent pure morphine and commanded the highest price on the black market. However, at that high level of potency, it had to be cut or stepped on, as the dealers liked to say, several times to bring it down to street grade. Talcum powders and powdered milks were the preferred methods of cutting the morphine based product. If taken at full strength, there would be many overdose cases among Puneet’s clients which meant less profit for him in the long run. He didn’t want to kill off any geese that laid his golden eggs.
So, things were off to a good start, Puneet thought. They would only get better when the yaba landed and able to be pushed onto the streets of every sizable city in India, the blessed, Hindu gods willing.