A man sits in public on a bench and smokes heroin in public in New York. A professor sits behind his desk and in front of him is a book about poppies. The scene changes to Turkey with a shot of a palace followed by a man leading a camel and goat down a highway. The scene changes to Beirut, Lebanon, where morphine made from the poppies makes it’s first sale to the French in open air markets. In a desert, a man is laying out nets to dry poppies. A dock with large shipping liners in shown, followed b a dark room with a pair of hands weighing a white powder on a balance scale. The hands fold the white powder into a tiny package, and then the scene turns to New York. At the port men sort through containers and move boxes on carts.