Surrounded by Drugs, Even the Children Are ‘Chasing the Dragon’

By just about any measure, Lavu Saiwang should have a bright future. His village in northwestern Thailand has recently received an abundance of development assistance which for the first time has brought a paved road, a school, a clinic and even electricity to the remote mountaintop.

But at age 10, Lavu is instead the village’s youngest heroin addict.

Ju Saiwang, the village chief, said the boy has a lot of company. A recent survey of Pakia’s 800 residents, who are mostly Hmong tribesmen, showed that more than 100 were addicted to heroin. “You can tell just by looking at them,” Ju said.

Shaking his head with disbelief, Ju said the village was undergoing a crime wave caused by desperate addicts. His own tiny shop had been broken into three times in two months, and the shiny new hasps and padlocks on homes in the poverty-stricken village attested to the problem’s scope.

Pakia, about 50 miles northeast of Chiang Mai in the Golden Triangle, represents a cruel twist in the story of this famous opium-producing region. Traditionally, poppies from the fields where Thailand, Myanmar (formerly Burma) and Laos meet have produced opium for export. But increasingly, the opium is being refined into heroin here, as well, and sold to a rapidly expanding local market represented by addicts like Lavu.

“Consumption of heroin is working its way back up the chain of production,” said a Western official. “While these areas were traditionally producers and refiners of opium, they have become consumers of the finished heroin. They can’t escape it.”

Dr. Annop Visudhimark, director of the Northern Drug Dependence Treatment Center in Maerim, said heroin addiction was unknown in the highlands of northwestern Thailand and Myanmar as recently as a decade ago, but the affliction is now spreading rapidly among the hill tribes. About 3,000 addicts in northern Thailand have sought treatment so far.

Opium has long been the primary cash crop of the Golden Triangle, with the climate perfectly suited to growing the opiate-producing red poppies. Along the way, many villagers smoked opium, which, while also addictive, was less debilitating then heroin.

According to Annop, heroin was introduced to the hill tribes by Western tourists who came to the region because of the abundance of cheap drugs. Heroin produced in clandestine local laboratories started finding its way from lowland areas into the mountains.

Like opium, heroin is smoked--locals call it “chasing the dragon.” In the hills, the tribesmen simply mix heroin with tobacco and smoke it through a water pipe fashioned from plastic tubing.

Ironically, the heroin epidemic has emerged just as a Thai government campaign to stamp out opium production has really begun to pay off. Thailand, which produced 150 tons of opium annually in the 1960s, cut production to just 50 tons last year--a fraction of the Golden Triangle’s estimated total 3,000 tons--and is expected to cut output to less than 35 tons by the end of the year.

The Thai program has been successful largely because of the government’s use of a “carrot and stick” approach, offering alternative cash crops to villagers and providing sufficient infrastructure, such as roads, so the crops can be brought to market. Only when these measures fail to convince villagers do the Thai authorities resort to crop destruction.

In villages such as Pakia, the program has been immensely popular, according to Ju Saiwang. The village chief said that in the past families earned about $800 a year growing a crop of opium. But now with cabbages, carrots and garlic planted in the fields, farmers were bringing in two crops a year and earning over $1,600.

But heroin addiction is threatening to undo many of the accomplishments of the Thai development effort. Already, according to Wichian Sangsong, a local development official, at least 10 families have been forced to sell their land, homes, trucks and motorcycles to finance their dependence on heroin.

Mang Saiwang, the father of Lavu Saiwang, the 10-year-old addict, seems a typical case. He said he has been smoking drugs for 10 years, starting with opium and then switching to heroin.

Mang’s wife started smoking drugs two years ago. Lavu and older sister Mai, 11, also started smoking heroin two years ago, according to Ju and Prapat.

The drug habit costs the family $4 a day, a princely sum to the hill tribes. Even with both parents working as laborers, they only earn about $3 a day.

As a result, Mang has started selling off his assets--first farm land, and now personal possessions. He sold eight of his 10 pigs last year and all of his chickens.

“Everything just gets worse and worse,” Mang said as he puffed on his blue plastic water pipe. “Before, I used opium to get my energy back from working the farm. Now, with heroin we always feel so tired. I’m very concerned about the children.” Lavu and Mai appear unusually small, even by the diminutive norm of the high-tribes peoples. They are among half a dozen village addicts below age 14.

The village chief said he was drawing up a list to turn over to the police. At least then, he said, the addicts of Pakia will be forced to seek treatment.