Missionary Turns Tribes Off Heroin, Onto Wholesome Crops : Thailand: Hill people live with benefactor for three months after undergoing detoxification. They learn how to live without drugs, then return home.

In the tribal villages in the hills of northern Thailand they tell visitors about Richard Mann--the modest, lanky American who weaned them off opium, introduced lucrative crops and now refuses to leave them for retirement in his own homeland.

For two decades Mann masterminded an internationally funded project to replace the opium poppy grown by the tribes with cash crops like strawberries, cabbages and coffee.

Trekking and driving into hundreds of primitive settlements, Mann persuaded the Hmong, Akha, Lisu and other hill tribes to stop age-old practices more ruinous to Americans and Western Europeans of whom they had little notion than to themselves.

Although originally a Baptist missionary, he was recruited by the United Nations and other organizations. His efforts won accolades and a decoration from the king of Thailand rarely accorded foreigners.

“Dick’s passionate commitment doesn’t change no matter what outfit he works for because he is basically for nobody but the hill tribes,” a veteran U.N. anti-narcotics official, Jorgen Gammelgaard, once said of Mann. “Our program is quite unthinkable without him.”

From his first involvement in 1972 until last year, opium production in the hills plummeted from about 150 tons to as little as 10 tons. It was a success story and the 61-year-old Los Angeles native, who holds a master’s degree in agriculture, contemplated returning home to take up a university teaching job.

But he and his wife, Marleen, changed their minds.

“You saw what the situation was up there today. Nobody is doing any rehabilitation for them,” Mann said. “We felt we had to stay on and make an effort.”

Today, there is a new scourge of the hills, far deadlier than opium addiction. A vast supply of heroin, refined from opium, was reaching the tribes from neighboring Myanmar, peddled by aggressive “salesmen.”

The stresses of rapid modernization in recent years and, ironically, the virtual elimination of local opium had turned thousands into heroin addicts. At the village of Pa Khia and a growing number of other sites, families are being ruined economically, split apart and infected with the AIDS virus.

So the Manns moved from Chiang Mai, the north’s largest city, to an old Baptist mission house of hand-sawed pine deep in the hills. Their neighbors are the Hmong and Karen, whose language Richard Mann speaks fluently.

On their forested land they’ve built simple lodgings, the “House of New Hope,” where hill tribe men, women and youngsters live for three months after undergoing detoxification at government institutions and before returning to their villages.

They grow coffee, vegetables, fruits and rice on the Manns’ property and are taught better, conservation-oriented techniques. There are recreational field trips and talks by outsiders from Richard Mann’s wide network of contacts.

But most of all, he said, there is talk and dialogue about human values, a person’s self-worth and the reeling changes that have propelled the tribes from isolated, traditional lifestyles into the 20th Century in little more than two decades.

“You have to do it on a small scale. It has to be intimate, like a family,” Mann said. “It’s still a pilot project, but we have to find what is appropriate to these people and then replicate it.”

The first group, last year, included eight addicts, seven of whom are still off drugs months later. A second group is now with the Manns and a third shortly will be taken in.

Some in the field say Mann’s small-group approach would prove too expensive. But his project, funded by church groups and other sources, is being carefully watched because the few efforts at combatting the heroin epidemic have failed and because Mann has a record of being right about the tribes people.

He proved right about Mee Sae, who smoked opium for 11 years and then switched to heroin after being treated for his addiction. The 38-year-old member of the Karen tribe, a father of six, asked to join Mann’s first group without having gone through detoxification.

Mann made an exception and elicited the support of the other seven group members to help Mee Sae get through his ordeal without medicine. It worked and Mee Sae is back in his village, spreading the kind of anti-heroin messages to his neighbors that Mann hopes will be taken to heart.

Others are not so fortunate, and Pa Khia is full of them. Located on a major drug-smuggling route out of Myanmar, its villagers are easy prey. It is estimated that every fourth adult is an addict.

“These are the kinds of guys you almost have to give up on,” said Mann, after meeting Na Lu, a 67-year-old Hmong who switched from opium to heroin and whose son is likewise addicted.

The old man agrees: “It’s no use for me anymore.”

Mann enters the dim, squalid hut of Sang Saewan, 21, and his 17-year-old wife, Pan Ying, trying to cajole and argue with them to seek treatment. They had escaped from a detoxification center after one week, and don’t want to go again. Their stares are vacant, their young bodies already showing signs of deterioration.

“When they get addicted they don’t think about anything: the present, future. Just the next fix,” said Mann, walking back into the sunlight.

Dealing with the ravages of heroin is only an aspect of what Mann sees as his larger task: helping the tribal people cope with change. He talks almost romantically about his early days in the north.

True, there were no roads, no World Bank and USAID projects, no cash. But there were also virtually no suicides, no shattered families, no psychological traumas, no clashes over money or property.

That’s when Mann, who arrived in Thailand in 1959, worked on agriculture development with the Karen under the auspices of the Baptist Missionary Society. He roamed the hills, sharing tea with smugglers as their opium-laden mules rested by the trail.

The Manns sank their roots in the north where their five children were born. Two have returned after educations in the United States to work with the hill tribes and a third hopes to do so.

“We feel more at home here. We’ve got more in common with the values here than those in the California culture,” Mann said. “We started working with the Baptists and we’re back with them again. I guess we’ve come the full circle.”