“Uh, Nick,” I said, “you’re about to be told to piss in a cup. It’s part of the country’s anti-drug campaign. Everybody in the bar will now be tested for drugs. The cops will take us, one at a time, into the toilet and watch us as we give them a urine sample. They will then pour it into that flask of blue liquid on the table and if it turns purple, we’re going to miss the train.”
This sort of thing had been going on for some time as a part of the new prime minister’s crusade to make Thailand drug-free, a key part of what he called his “New Social Order.” Cops had been raiding bars for several months, conducting on-the-spot tests for two of the city’s favored drugs, amphetamines—called yaa baa, or “crazy medicine”—and ecstasy. Arrests had been few, but the inconvenience to the bars and their customers had been enormous; if the place had a good crowd, as the Q Bar did on weekends, it might be dawn before the last patron was released. I was glad we were first in line.
Nick and I did as we were told and then watched a cop pour the samples one at a time into the flask and stir it around. The color didn’t change and we were told we could depart. We stood around for a few minutes to watch. The cop emptied the flask following each test, poured in more of the blue liquid without any attempt to clean the flask, added the next poor soul’s urine, and swirled it around with the same swizzle stick that he’d used in ours. What if we’d tested positive? (A reaction that was known to be caused by numerous legal pharmaceuticals, such as anti-histamines.) Would the same unwashed flask and stirrer continue to be used, and contaminate the next sample?
It wasn’t a question that I felt compelled to ask and we walked home and the next morning we made our scheduled eight-hour train ride upcountry and on Monday, the first day of January, 2003, I was married.
Exactly one month later, the prime minister got serious and took his “War on Drugs” nationwide, promising a country the size of France with a population of more than sixty million that it would be completely drug-free in three months. (Don’t laugh. The same guy once said he’d end Bangkok’s traffic problems in six months. He was serving in another prime minister’s cabinet, five years earlier.) Lists of suspected drug users and dealers were compiled in every province at the Interior Minister’s order. Provincial governors and police were told that those who failed to eliminate a prescribed percentage of the names from their blacklists would be fired. In two months, the body count surpassed two thousand and the newspapers were accusing the cops of “extra-judicial killings.”
The police denied the charge and said the dealers were killing each other in battles over territory and to eliminate people who might snitch to the cops. The Interior Minister said that he didn’t like the use of the word “killed,” asking media to say “expired.” After that, the government continued to announce figures for suspects arrested—a figure reported to be over ninety thousand—but stopped releasing the number of deaths. At the end of the ninety days, when the Prime Minister declared his mission accomplished and now reported a body count of 1,612, the actual number was thought to be more than two thousand three hundred. By year’s end, the official number of dead dropped to 1,320, only fifty-seven of them reportedly killed by police.
The U.S. State Department, Amnesty International, the United Nations, national and international NGOs criticized Thailand harshly and in the first report by Thailand’s own National Human Rights Commission, created by a progressive new constitution, lamented what it called (quoting The Nation of August 6, 2004) “the drastic deterioration of civil liberties and the ever-growing, intertwined powers of the state and groups with vested interests.” The government was accused of fomenting a “culture of authoritarianism,” saying it had “committed gross human rights violations, particularly with its brutal war on drugs, in its quest to promote state power.”
The government’s response was to blame the commission for its “disservice” to the country, saying that its report had (now quoting Kavi Chongkittavorn, The Nation’s editor, August 9) “undermined the country’s international standing.” As for all those killed in the War on Drugs, the government ordered the police to conduct an investigation, giving them a month deadline. A year later, no report had been submitted.
Drugs have played a major role in Thailand’s history and its government. For centuries, the monarchy held a monopoly on the sale of opium (along with gambling, alcohol, and a national lottery) and not until 1954 was the residue of the poppy plant and its byproduct heroin outlawed, by which time the police themselves figured prominently in the trade. As chronicled in David K. Wyatt’s authoritative Thailand: A Short History (1984) and quoting a columnist who wrote under the name Chang Noi in The Nation (Jan. 20, 2003), the Golden Triangle was developing into the world’s primary area of production when the chief of the national police, General Phao Siriyanon, used his men to “move the goods from the Triangle to the world market. Police escorts met the convoys at the Burmese border and took them to Chiang Mai or Lampang. From there the goods traveled to Bangkok by train or plane. The marine police then guarded their transfer to freighters in the Gulf.
“In 1955 the police made a record capture of twenty [metric] tons of opium, and Phao himself collected a massive reward on behalf of an informer. When asked to display the haul, Phao said it had been thrown in the sea. The public disbelief almost undid him. On another occasion, a seized cache of high-grade opium turned out to be low-grade mud.”
It wasn’t until the 1990s—with the infusion of tens of millions of dollars from the United States, police and army raids on opium farms in the north coordinated by the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency, and a royally supported crop substitution program—that the plant was marginalized as a source of income for mainly hill tribe minorities who had used opium for millennia not only as a cash crop but as their primary medicine.
About the same time, amphetamines swept across Thailand like a monsoon rain, quickly becoming the national buzz of choice. Simply and cheaply produced primarily in China and Burma, it found a market in Thailand that ranged from poor truck drivers and construction workers to rich university students. This was followed by ecstacy and, to a lesser degree, cocaine and LSD and ketamine, the last one easily manufactured, with ingredients purchased at the neighborhood pharmacy, by anyone with access to a microwave oven. This is what led to Thailand’s “piss in a cup” campaign.
According to Father Joe Maier, an American Catholic priest who worked with the poor in the Bangkok slums for more than thirty years, the War on Drugs was a complete and utter failure.
All it did, he said, was make the dealers smarter and quadruple the price of yaa baa, which drove those who could no longer afford it to seek other chemical highs—among them smoking powdered Tylenol and mosquito coil. Father Joe, whose Human Development Foundation administers Bangkok’s most modern AIDS hospice, also points to the damage done by the government’s refusal to introduce a needle exchange program for intravenous drug users, many of whom end up in his and the government’s care.
Marijuana, generally known in Thailand by its Hindi term, ganja, has a more benign history, although it was from the 1960s onwards a cash crop grown by the Thai “mafia” for export largely to Europe and North America; one of the favored smokes in the U.S. at that time was a stem of sticky flowers and buds, tightly tied around a sliver of bamboo and called Thai Stick. It was also commonly grown as an herb used in household and commercial cooking, along with basil, chilis and lemongrass, especially in Thailand’s rural eastern seaboard and poor northeast. Long after its cultivation and sale were made illegal, if you were a known customer in many small restaurants, you could have it added to your curry or soup at no extra cost.