Mr. Shaw acknowledged that such an action would only have been simple justice, but he denied the allegation. Besides, he pointed out, heroin was now out of favor in the West. The drug-using populace had dwindled with the aging of the population, and modern users were more sophisticated. They preferred untraceable neurochemicals to crude vegetable extracts. These very neurochemicals now boiled out of the high-tech drug vats of the Caribbean.