Photographs from the French Connection

Illegal heroin labs were first discovered near Marseilles, France, in 1937. By the ‘50s and ‘60s, about 80 percent of the heroin consumed in the US was made in Southern France and controlled by the Corsican Mafia - the French equivalent to the New York mafia.

Marseilles is one of the busiest ports in the Mediterranean, making it the perfect place to smuggle morphine base from the Middle East and Asia in and heroin out. Morphine base was extracted from opium from Turkish poppy fields. Turkish farmers were licensed to grow opium poppies for sale to legal drug companies, but many sold their excess to the underworld market. After arriving in France, it was refined into heroin in concealed laboratories. These ‘laboratories’ were crude but highly portable facilities that could be set up in only a few rooms of a small villa.

The heroin was then cleverly hidden in false-bottomed suitcases, ships’ cargo holds, or inside the panels of large American cars and dispatched to the illegal US market. This global network was eventually termed “The French Connection.”