"Whitening & Freckles," read the boxes of soap that arrived at San Francisco International Airport last week. "Acne & Blemish, with Vitamin C," read others. The ingredient not listed on the packaging: opium.

According to the U.S. Customs and Border Protection Agency, on September 9, a package containing 66 individually-wrapped bars of the popular Thai-made Soafty brand soap arrived at the U.S. Postal Service Center at SFO.

When the package, which was sent from Thailand to an undisclosed Northern California address, went through their x-ray machine, agents grew suspicious. They popped open the package, removed one of the Soafty boxes, and sliced open one of the bars of soap. That's when they realized that the bars of soap had been hollowed out and stuffed with opium.

"The soap bars look like whole bars. They came in actual boxes of soap, just like you would buy in a supermarket. They cut open the soap and each individual box was filled with opium," Customs and Border Protection spokesperson and cool-guy nameholder Frank Falcon told ABC7.

Bar of opium-filled soap confiscated at SFO on September 9, 2014: U.S. Customs and Border Protection Agency

The 66 bars of soap, which can retail in the US for as much as $30/bar, contained about 8.9 pounds of opium, in total.

Falcon tells the Chron that the smuggling of straight-up opium is unusual, as "Opium is kind of an obscure drug. It's not really a street drug like heroin, cocaine or marijuana."

Customs and Border officials declined to comment on the estimated value of the confiscated opium, or if any arrests had been made, only saying that the investigation is ongoing.

[ABC7]
[Chron]

There was a time when San Francisco was known more for its brothels, seedy boarding houses and gambling parlors than its high rents, tech companies and leather parties. And according to a rare map from 1885 uncovered by Wired (and probably conceived in a racist power grab by City Hall), there was no seedier spot than Chinatown.

Witness row upon row of "opium resorts," gambling dens and whorehouses, conveniently color-coordinated in pink (gambling), yellow (opium dens), and green or blue (an ethnicity-based prostitution designation, see "WP" for white prostitution and "CP" for Chinese prostitution). There's also a fair amount of slice-of-life being mapped here, with areas of broom and cigar factories, lumber yards, bakeries, pawn brokers and barbershops.

The map comes from the collection of David Rumsey, who says the map figured into a plan by city supervisors to marginalize and vilify the Chinese population. It came out around the time of several ordinances forbidding various activities by the Chinese, as well as the unsubtle "Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882." But it's unclear just how much of the map was a fabrication, or whether these particular stretch of Chinatown was indeed as fun as it looks. Click over to David Rumsey's collection for a zoomable look at the map.

[Wired]
[David Rumsey Map Collection]

More than twenty pounds of sweet, pain-alleviating opium were discovered "wrapped in plastic and concealed inside false walls of drums" arriving from Thailand, found at SFO. The incident, which happened in "mid-February," prompted San Francisco Area Port Director John Leonard to boast, "Diligent work by CBP officers locally and across the nation helps to keep this narcotic from getting to the general public. [Too late, it's here already. -- SFist] In addition to our primary role of preventing terrorists and terrorism-related articles from entering the U.S., CBP takes active measures to interdict narcotics at the gateways to our country." So just to be clear: pot, good; opium, bad. (Last link NSFW.)