“Fifty Years of Opium and Conflict in the Shan State of Burma: A Visual Retrospective”
Last update: May 26, 2015
URL: http://guides.lib.washington.edu/content_mobile.php?pid=671715&sid=5561749
Dates:  May 29th – 30th, 2015, University of Washington, Seattle
Locations of Events

Friday, May 29th:  Film Screening, Odegaard Library, Rm 220, 9am – 5 pm
Saturday, May 30: Panel Discussions, Husky Union Building (HUB), Room 334, 9am – 4:30pm

This conference and film series highlights the work of documentary filmmaker Adrian Cowell, while exploring the intersections of US drug policy, opium use and the political and social conflict within the opium-growing region of Burma’s Shan State that are the geographical focus of Cowell’s work. By the mid-1960s, Burma had become one of the world’s largest exporters of illicit opium. As the Shan State became embroiled in conflicts involving both foreign and local armed groups, farmers increasingly specialized in opium cultivation. In 1965, Adrian Cowell along with Christopher Menges spent six months in the Shan State with one of its many resistance armies and visually documented the nexus between opium and conflict. This trip was the first of several extended visits to opium-producing areas undertaken by Adrian Cowell over the next three decades. The documentary footage shot during these trips remain one of the few first-hand depictions of opium trafficking in the Shan State. They continued to explore the issue of opium by investigating users in Hong Kong and policy debates in Washington, DC. This program aims to facilitate a greater understanding of the inter-relationships between questions of state control, ethnic conflict, and the drug trade.