Beginning in the late 1920s, China's rising…
1935 CE
Beginning in the late 1920s, China's rising criminal syndicates shift from the import of heroin to its manufacture and distribution.
On balance, the growth of the heroin trade in northeast China is a market response to both global and local attempts at suppression.
In the decade following the League of Nations' first attempt at opiates control in 1925, Shanghai emerges as a major center for illicit heroin.
In the early 1930s, leading European drug dealers such as the notorious Eliopoulos brothers, pushed by Istanbul's violent criminal milieu and pulled by the scale of the Asian drug trade, move to Shanghai and Tianjin (Tientsin), where the majority of illegal heroin smuggled into the US in the 1930s is refined.
The Jewish syndicates that dominate New York's drug trade under the leadership of Yasha Katzenberg and Louis "Lepke" Buchalter, founder of the murder-for-hire organization popularly known as Murder, Inc., dispatch agents to purchase heroin through European dealers based in Shanghai.
Green Gang leader Tu Yueh-sheng simultaneously emerges as the city's leading drug dealer and a key intelligence operative for the Nationalist Government—an alliance that protects the narcotics network from the regime's anti-opium campaign of the 1930s.
(Source: The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade)
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