Turkish Hashish: Good for the Sole

Samuel Dolbee, New York University

The most sensible way to use a shoe is to put a foot in it.  But there are also more lucrative and dangerous ways of using a shoe.  Like drug smuggling.    

And indeed, these beautiful soles stamped with the word "Stambol" and an image of a water pipe (above) carried a scent not of feet but of hashish.  In February of 1934, Lebanese authorities intercepted 7.5 kg of this intoxicant "compressed in the shape of shoe soles" about to be exported by sea by a certain Giorgio D'Orsi of Beirut.  The French forwarded all of this information to the League of Nations, citing the picture of the soles as evidence that post-Ottoman pot flowed from Turkey.  The letter also included a picture of a shipment of drugs intercepted by British authorities at the Transjordanian border.  In this photograph, the stamp of the crescent on a bag (below) also seemed to limn a Turkish connection (though when reading the description of the image in French - which refers to "le croissant" - I couldn't help but imagine a a French bakery connection, too).

We know why the French were eager to blame Turkey.  The League of Nations had charged them with ostensibly civilizing Syria and Lebanon and a part of this charge was adhering to new international anti-trafficking regulations.  We also know that France and other industrialized countries were keen on getting their pharmaceutical industries off on the right foot, which meant eliminating heroin in favor of morphine, which is similarly concocted from poppy seeds.  Finally, French zeal for enforcement of anti-trafficking laws in Turkey might have been driven by their knowledge of where the drugs ended up.  If they looked the other way in Lebanon and waited for the proverbial other shoe to drop, Turkish drugs would probably end up in France itself, as Marseilles functioned as an entrepot for trafficking of all kinds. 

Though statistics regarding the volume of this trade are hard to come by, Turkey's historical implication in the narcotics business is worth mentioning.  Some of these linkages - the racist 1978 American film Midnight Express, for example - are less credible than others.  But sometimes the shoe fits.  As Ryan Gingeras has argued, a decades-long game of footsie has existed between high levels of the Turkish state and organized crime, just as in many other parts of the world.  This was most notably evident in Turkey in the 1996 Susurluk scandal, when a car crashed that contained a member of parliament, an Istanbul police official, and a known heroin trafficker-cum-assassin, bringing the vaunted "deep state," as many refer to this intersection of drugs, politics, and paramilitaries, into the open quite spectacularly.     

But why would smugglers - people whose livelihood rests on being undetected - include a logo on their shipments?  As fans of the Wire ("WMD!  Got that WMD!") and Breaking Bad (Heisenberg's Blue Sky) know, brand matters, even in an illicit trade.  And this is one way to use a shoe.  

Reverse side of sole photo.

Source: MAE-Nantes, 1SL/1/V/2608

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smugglers