Hong Kong in the U.S.-UK War on Drugs, 1970–1980.

The CCINC designated Hong Kong among twenty "priority countries" for U.S. anti-narcotics efforts, noting that the colony "undoubtedly plays a major role in the transit/trafficking of Southeast Asian heroin" and urging that "the seriousness of the trafficking problem demands increasing CCINC attention to enforcement efforts in Hong Kong."[23] Meanwhile, the U.S. Congress proved equally energetic in meeting public demands for tougher action against drug abuse. 16 For description of the Thailand-Hong Kong pipeline, see: McCoy et al. I The Politics of Heroin i , 236-237; "Southeast Asia: The Road to Hong Kong", I Drug Enforcement i 1, no. 5 (1974): 32-33. 17 For an overview of Hong Kong police corruption and narcotics trafficking, see Peter N. S. Lee, "The Causes and Effects of Police Corruption: A Case in Political Modernization", in I Corruption and its Control in Hong Kong: Situations up to the Late Seventies i , ed. C. K. Hawkins, "The Drug Problem in Hong Kong", May 7, 1957, enclosure in "Memorandum for Executive Council", February 11, 1958, Foreign and Commonwealth Office (hereafter FCO) 1030/899, The National Archives, Kew, United Kingdom (hereafter TNA); and Hong Kong Legislative Council, I The Problem of Narcotic Drugs in Hong Kong i (Hong Kong, 1959). U.S. Treasury officials during the early 1980s, for instance, noted that the flow of money from the United States to Hong Kong closely followed the flow of heroin from Southeast Asia to the United States.[72] Narcotics trafficking and money laundering, in other words, were tightly correlated, so while Hong Kong was no longer the "heroin-producing capital of the world", it remained at the center of various illicit global flows well after the 1970s. [Extracted from the article]