My idle pondering leads me to sniff out one of the most jaw-dropping episodes in the history of socialist Hungary.

In Hungary, poppy seeds or mák have been used in baking since at least the Middle Ages. I’m not sure whether that was because poppies grew naturally in abundance, as they do at Rákospalota on the outskirts of Budapest, or if they were cultivated. By the 18th century, poppy seeds were the staple ingredient in Hungarian baking that they are today. They were considered a symbol of wealth, prosperity and fertility. Cooking with them brought good fortune to the household.

Apparently, the seeds used in Hungarian baking don’t come from Papaver rhoeas field poppies but from Papaver somniferum, the opium-producing variety. Thus, I suspect there was another reason for eating poppy seeds that has been lost in the mists of time.

For centuries, malaria was endemic in Hungary, maybe because of the number of rivers and lakes. Poppy varieties such as the Hungarian Blue Opium Poppy, which has edible seeds, were used to make poppy tea and beer, which was imbibed in the hope that they would ward off malaria. Poppy tea contains opium. Thinking about opium led me to consider the history of drug use in this country.

Up until the beginning of the 20th century, I would imagine that drug use in Hungary was pretty much the same as in any other European country. But between the World Wars, when this country became one of the largest producers of morphine in the world (I’ve no idea whether this is connected to an abundance of opium poppies or not), there may have been a corresponding increase in the number of users of morphine and its derivative heroin.

When the communists came to power in Hungary in 1948, they claimed that there wasn’t a drug problem because, according to Dr. Ned Richardson-Little, “socialism produced a drug-free society. Under capitalism, young people were driven to narcotics due to the emptiness of consumerism and the despair of exploitation; under socialism, there was no such need for escape.”

Hard Currency

Whatever the truth of this, as Richardson-Little says, “there was no mass drug culture in Eastern Europe.” This wasn’t because people didn’t want to get their hands on narcotics. It was more that the drug dealers who braved the 1960s and ’70s Hippy Trail’s Balkan Route, smuggling drugs from Afghanistan or Pakistan either through Bulgaria and Yugoslavia or via Romania, Hungaria and Czechoslovakia wanted Western money, which ordinary citizens didn’t have.

Eastern Bloc citizens who did want to get high had to improvise. The Poles made a form of heroin called “kompot” from poppy straw, the dried stems and capsules of the plant. Given that it was János Kabay, a Hungarian chemist who first discovered a method of producing morphine from poppy straw in 1931, revolutionizing how morphine was produced, maybe enterprising Hungarians were doing the same thing.

Under socialism, taking illegal drugs was severely punished. But, according to the eye-opening “Vörös narkó” (“Red Dope”) documentary first shown on Hungarian television in January 2024, that didn’t stop the socialist government from profiting enormously by satisfying and stimulating the appetites of depraved U.S. drug-fiends and doing their bit to torpedo the American dream.

I was turned on to “Vörös narkó” by my Hungarian brother-in-law. Levente Jamrik, who directed the film, is a writer, journalist and historian. He was responsible for the Falanszter and Járdasziget blogs, which seem to focus on the more weird-and-wonderful side of Hungarian culture.

“Vörös narkó” tells the story of how the Los Angeles’ Hungarian mafia, controlled by this country’s Military Intelligence (MNVK-2), facilitated the smuggling of cocaine into America by the Colombian Medellin Cartel in the 1970s. Several kingpins in the LA “maffia” (to use the Hungarian spelling) were Budapest gangsters who’d been spirited out of this country on false IDs. A large chunk of their profits from the coke business found their way back to Hungary.

I have absolutely no idea how much of this is fact. Some is undoubtedly true. Some is nothing more than investigative speculation.

International Isolation

The story begins in 1956 when, after the Hungarian Revolution was crushed, the János Kádár regime became isolated internationally. In desperate need of money, the government focused on exploiting Kabay’s morphine-producing method. By 1958, Hungary was producing half the world’s medical morphine.

Not content with the revenue from this, it started to sell morphine and heroin illegally. This came to an end when, Jamrik alleges, a Málev Hungarian Airlines flight crashed at Paris-Le-Bourget airport because it was overloaded with illegal heroin.

Next, the Hungarian government focused on making methaqualone, the active ingredient in the extremely powerful sedative marketed as Quaaludes in the United States. By 1978, according to “Vörös narkó,” the government of Prime Minister György Lázár, who served under Kádár, was selling five tons of methaqualone legally to the United States and smuggling in 25-30 tons through its connection with the Colombian cartel.

In today’s money, the income for the Hungarian government from methaqualone amounted to around USD 80 million a year. Some of this went to prop up the government, but some funded the consumer goods imports that gave Hungarian citizens a little more choice than other Eastern Bloc countries, earning it the name “the Happiest Barracks.”

Come 1981, the DEA, which had known about Hungarian government involvement in the drug trade pretty much all along, had had enough. It offered Hungary a deal: get out of the methaqualone smuggling business, and we’ll make sure you’re the first Eastern Bloc country to receive Western computers, stereo systems and microchips. The government agreed and promptly began sending its methaqualone to the Far East.

You can watch “Vörös narkó” on YouTube with English subtitles.

This article was first published in the Budapest Business Journal print issue of May 22, 2026.