Flowers of Darkness (1972)

Paul Newman: Self - Narrator

Quotes 

• [first lines] 

  Paul Newman : [narrating]  There are oases of comfort throughout the world. However, the earth offers few pleasures for most of its inhabitants. For his 10,000 years of grubbing a living off the planet, man has found life, for the most part, to be cruel. Disenchantment abounds. Fatigue, hunger and cold. However, nature, almost as an afterthought, softened her terms. She sprinkled the harsh earth with a variety of plants, each offering momentary escape, a passport from reality. Their protective effects have been known since the time of the ancients.

• Paul Newman : [narrating]  In virtually any of the hot countries of the world, where the soil is fertile and farmers still employ the oldest methods of cultivation, flourishes a plant scientifically known as Papaver somniferum, more commonly known as the opium poppy. Its pods contain a milky fluid that for centuries provided the raw material for one of the most demoralizing and dissipating vices in the world.

• Paul Newman : [narrating]  Known as far back as 4,000 BC, use of opium historically centered on the Mediterranean. Eventually, Arab and Persian traders introduced the mystic wonders of the poppy to all the communities with whom they bartered. By the 16th century, India was cultivating it. In the 17th century, China discovered the euphoric delights that came from smoking it.

• Paul Newman : [narrating]  Opium dens, set back in sinister alleys, flourished throughout the Far East. Even though millions of Chinese were thrust into moral and physical degradation, the use of opium was actually romanticized in literature, by Edgar Allan Poe, Thomas De Quincey, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. All brilliant writers - and each an opium taker.

• Paul Newman : [narrating]  Then the emperor cracked down. In 1838, in one haul, he confiscated six million dollars worth of opium from the British ships in Canton. England retaliated with a naval squadron, and the notorious Opium Wars were on. Although she would be censured in the eyes of the world, the war enabled Britain to force a treaty giving her the greatest port in the Far East: Hong Kong - as well as unrestricted opium trade for her enterprise and sea captains.

• Paul Newman : [narrating]  In the 19th century, a German refinement. Through a relatively simple chemical process, raw opium was transformed into morphine base. In 1898, another refinement from Germany. From morphine base came the derivative: heroin.

• Paul Newman : [narrating]  It took at least 60 centuries to bring poppies' euphoric effects from the cradle of civilization all the way to the opium pipes in Canton. But within only a few decades, modern science was able to funnel the poppy's impact straight into the central nervous system in one, cool blast.

• Paul Newman : [narrating]  Today, thousands of prisons and hospitals, all over the world, are crowded with patients who have experimented with the poppy's final derivative and who have become addicted to it. Its astronomical profits on the street corners of the Ginza in Tokyo, the Piccadilly Circus in London, and the Great White Way in New York, have made it the world's number one illicit commodity.

• Paul Newman : [narrating]  The Turkish farmer sells 10 kilos of raw opium, or about 22 pounds, for $350 on the black market. Through conversion, it is reduced to 1 kilo of heroin, now worth $3,500.

• Paul Newman : [narrating]  Heroin, in its relatively pure form, enters the United States in a variety of ways. The Port of New York is, by far, the most common route, and is the main target for Narcotics Bureau investigators working hand-in-hand with customs inspectors.

• Paul Newman : [narrating]  An estimated two tons of pure heroin is annually smuggled into the States. And it's considered a good year when the inspectors manage to intercept a hundred pounds of it.

• Paul Newman : [narrating]  The second major port of entry into the United States is the Mexican border. This is the main entrance for illicit marijuana shipments, but a good supply of heroin slips through as well.

• Paul Newman : [narrating]  Once the heroin reaches its American distributors, it is blended with milk sugar and is cut at least one more time by the peddler himself. The heroin's strength is now only five per cent - normal for the retail market. Each packet, or deck, will sell for five dollars.

• Paul Newman : [narrating]  The original 22 pounds of raw opium, sold by a Turkish farmer for $350, is eventually worth, on the sidewalks of Manhattan, over $410,000 and, in a panic, half a million.

• Paul Newman : [narrating]  The urban ghettos house nearly three-fourths of the hardcore addicts, with New York's teeming slums far out in front.

• Paul Newman : [narrating]  America's known heroin population of over 60,000 collectively shoots nearly two tons of opiates a year. More than half live within the tenement shadows of Harlem and the Bronx.

• Paul Newman, Narrator : [narrating]  Possession alone is sufficient evidence for conviction. Users, anticipating raids, frequently conceal their day's supply in a toy balloon, keeping it in their mouth. If apprehended, they swallow the evidence, knowing that they can retrieve it later.

• Paul Newman : [narrating]  At the same time that the law was taking a harsher look at the addict, popular opinion began to swing back in his favor, recognizing that he was not just a criminal, but a sick person - a pathetic, tortured, human being in need of help.

• Paul Newman, Narrator : [narrating]  The Narcotic Addict Rehabilitation Act of 1966 set forth a new national policy for treatment of addicts. At the core of the policy is the premise that addiction is an illness that should be treated, not a criminal act in itself. For the first time, federal law permitted addicts to apply for treatment, instead of being prosecuted.

• Paul Newman, Narrator : [narrating]  We are all potential drug takers - if not heroin, then tranquilizers, stimulants, sleeping pills, and alcohol.

• Paul Newman, Narrator : [narrating]  Even if we live in the country's finest communities, our children, at this moment, may be experimenting with marijuana, hallucinogenics, amphetamemes. Tight laws and stiff penalties are not the answer.

• [last lines] 

  Paul Newman : [narrating]  Nature's strange gifts, which Thomas De Quincey called "the abyss of divine enjoyment," have been with us for 60 centuries. But only in the last 60 years have we released the truly lethal derivative.