Author Takes A Trip Into Darkness

THE SHORE BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL: A Report from Inside Burma's Opium Kingdom, by Hideyuki Takano. Kotan Publishing, 2002, 264 pp., $23.95 (cloth)

"The Shore Beyond Good and Evil" is a book about a little-known region called Wa. "The name 'Wa' is not indicated on maps," writes author Hideyuki Takano. "Yet, despite its anonymity, perhaps no other place on earth wields such an effect over the world." Just what is so influential about this 10,360 sq. km, semiautonomous territory in eastern Myanmar (Burma), bordering China? The answer is simple: The cool, dry climate of Wa State is ideal for the cultivation of a particularly valuable plant called papaver somniferum, better known as opium poppy, which is refined and smuggled around the globe as the lethally addictive drug heroin.

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