Mules Play Key Role in Opium Trade : Drugs: The caravans take poppies from inaccessible mountain areas to heroin factories spread throughout the Golden Triangle.

The thousands of mules of drug warlord Khun Sa are being rested and fattened in the rich pastureland beyond the mountains of Pangsue in eastern Myanmar.

They are gaining strength to carry a bumper opium harvest in the new year to clandestine laboratories that will convert it into heroin to satisfy the cravings of drug addicts the world over.

The 6,000 residents of this muddy capital of Khun Sa’s fiefdom in Shan state celebrated their New Year in November with games, folk dances, rock concerts at night and soccer matches during the day.

They spoke of hundreds of relatives, soldiers of Gen. Khun Sa’s Muang Tai Army, who could not join the festivities because they were tending mules beyond the mountains.

“The mules are allowed three months’ rest after the rainy season and they are being fed to regain their strength. After they are strong enough, the mules will resume their hard work after the Chinese New Year,” a villager said.

During the rainy season, when four-wheel-drive vehicles cannot get through, caravans of hundreds of mules are used to bring supplies from Thailand to the army and civilian population of Khun Sa’s rebel Burmese state.

After the February dry-season harvest, the mules move the state’s main product, opium, out of the inaccessible mountains to heroin factories spread throughout the Golden Triangle, where Myanmar, formerly Burma,Laos and Thailand meet.

In 1991, their burden is expected to be a heavy one.

“All the hills are covered with poppies this year,” said a soldier who had just returned from the opium fields for the festival.

“This year is the biggest I have ever seen and I have been with godfather Khun Sa for more than 12 years,” he said.

Another returning soldier said the poppy plants, which yield the opium from which heroin is made, are already 3 feet high and look ready to produce a bumper crop by February.

“They are blooming bright and will be ready for harvest by the Chinese New Year,” he said.

Thai anti-drug officials have predicted that favorable weather and political turmoil inside Myanmar would produce a record opium harvest.

U.S. drug officials put last year’s harvest at 4,000 tons, though they said some of this might have been damaged after harvest.

Half of the heroin sold in the United States originates in the Golden Triangle, they say, and about 65% of this comes from Myanmar.

Thai officials said nearly 300,000 acres of Shan state have been turned over to poppy cultivation.

Aides of the warlord say a drug-trafficking indictment handed down against him in March, 1989, in the United States has changed their boss’s way of life.

He no longer travels outside his own territory and, when he does travel, he is accompanied by 30 heavily armed guards.

Khun Sa sleeps in a different house each night, they say.