Another voice
Traveller's tales
Auberon Waugh
Chiang Mai, North Thailand There comes a moment in the life of most travellers, I imagine, when they ask themselves: 'What on earth am I doing here?' Such a moment of doubt came to me a few days ago when I found myself alone and stranded beside a car stuck on an unmarked, unsurfaced mountain track in the region of the Golden Triangle between Laos, Burma and Thailand whose only inhabitants — primitive, opium growing tribesmen — were said to shoot at any farang or Caucasian on sight.
The reason for their hostility is quite understandable. The only white faces they ever see belong to people who are trying to stop them growing opium — whether directly employed by the dreaded Drug Enforcement Agency, whose highly paid American employees and vast network of spies give the impression of running an alternative, vastly richer and less accountable administration holding their government in suspicion and ill-disguised contempt — or Western journalists anxious to write an exposé of this Trade in Misery and Death for their miserable, boring colour supplements. Thai poppy growers — and no doubt their Laotian and Burmese colleagues in this delightful corner of the world where national frontiers do not seem to possess the magisterium attributed to them in the chancelleries of the West — see their occupation as an honourable one. The activities of the Thai government and DEA are seen rather as small businessmen and farmers in England regard the VAT inspectors, health inspectors, cruelty inspectors, fire inspectors, planning and child welfare inspectors who batten on their labours and try to prevent them doing any work — except that here the welfare gang is liable to arrive in armoured helicopters with flamethrowers and medium machine guns.
The explanation for my presence in Chiang Mai dates back to a conversation of two years ago with Richard West, the celebrated traveller, philosopher and visionary, in a Soho pub. I had just returned from a visit to Bangkok and was feeling generally sick of England. He said the only place to go was Chiang Mai. When pressed to explain its advantages over Bangkok, the one thing he could think of was that it had an English pub. He looked benignly around the bar where we stood, with its dingy, furtive inhabitants, its revolting beer, its abiding smell of stale cigarettes and cats' piss and the permanent, haunting presence of Jeffrey Bernard. Oh yes, he said, and there were also the most beautiful girls in the world and opium dens.
All my life — or at any rate, ever since reading Ernest Bramah's Kai Lung stories and discovering Graham Greene at the age of 15 — it had seemed to me that an English writer who had not smoked opium was like a soldier who had never seen active service, a politician who had never been down a coal mine, a female contraceptive guidance welfare health counsellor who had never been ... anyway, I wanted to do it.
And so I did, although those who wish to discover how will have to buy the February issue of Business Traveller. That admirable publication, one of the very few remaining outposts of free journalism, paid for my tickets and arranged my luxurious accommodation in Chiang Mai's Rincome Hotel, although it did not actually pay for the opium. But when on my first visit to the town's famous English pub — a strange and marvellous institution, not at all like the model which inspired it — I mentioned the purpose of my visit, I noticed that a chill descended on the company. The pub, which is in fact an elegant, well-appointed restaurant situated just round the corner from the Rincome Hotel, admits Americans too. Several of the overpaid boy scouts who work for the US Drug Enforcement Agency use it as their local. And it was an American who reacted most violently.
Was I aware that I would almost certainly be shopped, if not shot, by the traffickers, he asked. The penalty for opium possession was 30 years, he said. Did I know that their gaols provided no food for prisoners, and there was no longer a British consulate in Chiang Mai to look after them? No, I was not aware of any of these things, but it seemed rather a long way to have come if I was going to abandon my quest now. Then he became emotional. He was tremendously opposed to drugs, he said, and he would tell me why. He had told nobody this before. He once had a little niece in Florida who was nine years old. A bad man started giving her drugs — it was quite normal, this, in Florida — so that she would become addicted and, when she was grown up, buy his wares. Then, by accident, he put too much dope in a pretzel he was giving her one day, and she died. Snuffle, snuffle. We all looked into our beer. I suggested he tell his story to the Pulitzer Prize committee. There might be some money in it. He said he wasn't interested in money, just the facts. The atmosphere was becoming rather heavy so I left, having an early morning appointment.
No doubt he thought he remembered losing a niece in this way. But what sort of businessman is going to give away good dope for seven or eight years on the offchance of a paying customer at the end of that time? The story's literary origins will be familiar to many from Tom Lehrer's song, The Old Dope Pedlar: He gives the kids free samples, because he knows full well That today's young innocent faces are tomorrow's clientele.
But nobody has suggested that Mr Lehrer was offering a serious contribution to any study of the subject. He was making a grisly joke about the irrational fears of parents. Another example of how the Drug Enforcement Agency sustains its morale as it sets about destroying the livelihood of the poppy farmers was suggested by a picture in Bangkok's The Nation. This showed a former American employee of the Drug Enforcement Agency posing with the corpse of his wife who had been shot in the head by a lone kidnapper, himself shot by police. But all this happened in Chiang Mai last October. The reason the sad picture was being reprinted was that the American government, unsatisfied by the Thai police conclusion that robbery was the motive for the kidnapping, had demanded a second policy enquiry to establish that a drug trafficking syndicate was involved. Terrified of offending the Americans, the Thai government has set up a new commission, under two generals of the police force, to revive the enquiry and reach a different conclusion.
At the same time, a report by Thailand's Narcotics Control Board reveals that Thai addicts, denied their usual opium and heroin, are being forced to look for substitutes in petrol, paraffin, volatile lacquer and insecticides. Although heroin can be a powerful toxic agent, the effect of these substitutes on the nervous system and blood corpuscles is almost instantaneous. But then nobody supposed the DEA was concerned about the welfare of Thai addicts. It is purely concerned with the law and order problems created by the illicit trade in the United States. That this illicit trade is entirely of its own creation is a thought best suppressed by preposterous tales about nine-year-old girls caught in the flower of their innocence.
Obviously, heroin is a hideously dangerous substance, and the extreme libertarian position — that if adult human beings wish to destroy themselves, it offers the most agreeable means — is not tenable in a `responsible' democracy largely dominated by strident social busybodies. But when these same busybodies start visiting their own problems on peaceful corners like the Golden Triangle between Laos, Thailand and Burma, then the time has surely come to put insecticide in their beer and tell than to go home.
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