COUNTYWIDE : Smoking Foe Says Role Is Her Destiny

At first blush, Nampet Panichpant-M might seem an unlikely lieutenant in Orange County’s new war on smoking and tobacco use.

Petite and manicured and looking younger than 41, she is the scion of a wealthy tobacco family from the fertile land of the Golden Triangle, an area where Thailand, Laos and Burma meet and where tobacco and opium grow on lush farms.

“My family has been involved in the tobacco plantation for some time. My mother’s side is still involved,” said Panichpant-M, director of the county Health Care Agency’s immigrant services.

“They call me the Pat Reynolds of Thailand,” she quipped in a reference to the wealthy R.J. Reynolds tobacco heir who has become a leader in the national anti-smoking movement.

In her drab cubbyhole of a county office on 17th Street, Panichpant-M is helping to map the county’s strategy for a two-year, $2.9-million anti-tobacco campaign targeted at minorities. The effort will be paid for with the county’s share of the Proposition 99 statewide tax, which added 25 cents to the cost of a pack of cigarettes in January, 1989.

The money will be used to build a network of educational and counseling services, including a 24-hour multilingual hot line. Panichpant-M will help shape the program for the county’s 200,000 Asian-born residents--a diverse group with 17 distinct populations.

“That’s going to be a real tough challenge,” Panichpant-M said. “It’s hard to find a really relevant--culturally relevant--program for Asians whether it be in drugs or alcohol or nicotine.

Panichpant-M was also named last week to a state advisory committee on addiction and alcoholism within the Asian community. Panichpant-M, who maintains her Thai citizenship despite her high-profile job here, said she sees a karmic order to her calling as an anti-smoking advocate.

Karma is the Buddhist precept that one’s actions determine one’s fate, Panichpant-M explained. Her maternal grandfather, she says, became a rich man in the Golden Triangle but was killed by a shot to the back by business associates who double-crossed him.

Her father, a high government official in Thailand, for a time ran the state’s monopoly on the production and sale of whiskey. He died of esophageal cancer, commonly linked to alcohol.

“I have learned from the life experiences of my family,” Panichpant-M said. “There is some truth to that” Buddhist teaching.

She has had a wealth of life experiences herself.

Panichpant-M has spent time in more than 30 countries, traveling extensively as a child, and speaks five languages and many more dialects. After postgraduate work in health administration at UCLA, she returned to Thailand for a stint as a journalist, working for an international business and political affairs magazine.

She moved back to Southern California in 1980 rather abruptly, she said, shortly after predicting a military coup that came to fruition the subsequent autumn.

Since then she has returned only for visits. Back in the United States, she met her college sweetheart, whom her parents had rejected a decade earlier as marriage material.

In the intervening years, both she and her former boyfriend had been married to--and divorced from--someone else. Neither had children. Now, they are married to each other and have one daughter and one son.

Says Panichpant-M: “Yes, there is a certain order to things.”