CRAZY MEDICINE: COUNTERING THE SCOURGE OF ADDICTION

CHIANG MAI, Thailand - Rungpet Harnchana's journey to hell began with the
best of intentions. Life was hard in his home village, and his family was
poor. And so, though he was only 17, Mr. Rungpet began taking the
harmless-looking tablets that friends said would enable him to work even
longer hours in the rice fields.

ERICH SCHLEGEL / DMN Rungpet Harnchana swallowed 50 pills a day at the
height of his meth habit, which cost him his family. Fourteen years later,
Mr. Rungpet says he has lost everything because of those tablets -
methamphetamines, known here as ya ba or "crazy medicine."

"I sold everything to get money to buy more pills," said Mr. Rungpet, 30.
"I sold my house, my car. My wife left me three or four years ago. Now, my
son is 11 years old, living with my ex-wife. I have nothing left."

As soaring ya ba addiction shatters families and sends shock waves through
this tradition-bound society, Thailand is locked in its own war against
terror - against drug-trafficking cartels based in the region's lawless
Golden Triangle. As the casualties mount, Mr. Rungpet's sordid story could
be that of any of Thailand's tens of thousands of ya ba addicts, a legion
of wrecked lives growing by the day, experts say.

"It's much more out of hand than the heroin abuse ever was," said a senior
U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration official based in Bangkok. "It's
widespread, and it touches all segments of society."

More than one-third of students at some schools have tested positive for ya
ba. Stunned government officials now characterize methamphetamines as the
No. 1 threat to Thailand's national security.

"Right now, I think it is the top priority for the government and Thai
society," said Chartchai Suthiklom, deputy secretary-general of the Office
of the Narcotics Control Board (ONCB), Thailand's equivalent of the U.S.
Drug Enforcement Administration.

Using the U.S. war against Latin American drug cartels as a model, Thailand
has unveiled tougher penalties and other new laws to combat the growing
power of the United Wa State Army (UWSA) and other regional drug
trafficking organizations.

Four years ago, the Thai army was pressed into the anti-drug fight in an
effort to block the flow of drugs from the Golden Triangle, the mountainous
northern region where the borders of Thailand, Myanmar and Laos converge.
The Golden Triangle has long been the cradle of opium and heroin production
in Southeast Asia, and the same drug cartels have branched out into
methamphetamine production.

ERICH SCHLEGEL / DMN Young men nap in a dormitory at Northern Drug
Rehabilitation Center in Chiang Mai, where most of those committed for
rehab are addicted to methamphetamines. Task Force 399, a special Thai
anti-drug commando unit trained by U.S. Special Forces last summer, is
taking the fight to the UWSA, the Golden Triangle's largest drug cartel, as
it moves ya ba and heroin into Thailand from factories in Myanmar and Laos.

Thai officials still fear that as many as 900 million ya ba tablets will
flood into Thailand this year, an increase of perhaps 30 percent over last
year, senior military officers and drug enforcement agents say.

The methamphetamine crisis is to some extent a tribute to Thailand's
success in curbing opium and heroin production over the past two decades,
Thai and U.S. experts say.

With the Golden Triangle supplying much of the heroin sold in the United
States, ya ba didn't merit much attention from Thai drug enforcement agents
and their U.S. counterparts in the early 1990s. But by mid-decade,
methamphetamine production was growing fast enough to warrant a crackdown
on the budding trade, which at the time was centered on Bangkok, the Thai
capital.

Methamphetamine producers simply moved their pill presses and chemicals to
the Golden Triangle and began cranking out even more ya ba, Thai drug
agents say.

A turning point in the ya ba story came in January 1996, when Khun Sa, at
the time the Golden Triangle's most powerful drug lord, surrendered to
Myanmar authorities. A few months later, orange ya ba tablets stamped with
the letters "WY" - trademark of the United Wa State Army - started
appearing in northern Thailand, Thai agents say.

Thai authorities discovered that the new ya ba contained double the
caffeine previously used in the Thai-produced tablets. The WY pills became
popular with construction workers, taxi drivers, long-haul truckers,
fishermen and farmers, allowing the low-wage laborers to work even longer
hours without falling asleep, authorities say.

Gradually, ya ba found its way into the most affluent sectors of Thai society.

"In the past, only the truck drivers or construction workers or fishermen
would take it so they could make more money," said Mr. Chartchai. "Now, so
many students are doing it. It's something fashionable."

At the Northern Drug Dependence Treatment Center in Chiang Mai, Dr.
Thirawat Wongtan, chief of the rehabilitation unit, has witnessed the rise
of ya ba and the human costs of its addictive embrace.

"When we started this center 20 years ago, most of our patients were
hill-tribe villagers addicted to opium," said Dr. Thirawat. "Ten years ago,
it was lowland people addicted to heroin. Today, most of our patients are
young people from the towns and cities who are addicted to methamphetamines."

The Chiang Mai center treated only four cases of ya ba addiction in 1996 -
and more than 1,500 last year, said Dr. Thirawat.

One of Dr. Thirawat's patients, a 15-year-old addict from a farming village
in Tak province, said that nearly everyone he knows has started using ya ba
in the past year.

"My friend told me that if I take ya ba, I would be stronger and be able to
work longer and lift heavy things," the teenager said softly, staring down
at the floor.

Within weeks of trying ya ba, he was "chasing the dragon," grinding up and
smoking one or two ya ba tablets a day. He and his friends would bum money
from their mothers to buy ya ba pills for 30 baht (about 75 cents) each.
They would slip away at night to smoke ya ba at the house of a local
pusher, he said.

His mother finally caught him and rushed him to the rehabilitation center,
he said.

"If I'm still at my home, I can't stop," he said. "There are a lot of
addicts in the village, and almost all my friends are using ya ba ."

Even as the government has stepped up its campaign against the drug
cartels, ya ba production and trafficking has soared to meet exploding demand.

Five years ago, authorities considered a seizure of 100,000 tablets a big
bust. Now, seizures of up to 6 million tablets are not uncommon, military
and police officials say.

The flood of ya ba pouring into Thailand from Myanmar's northeastern Shan
state has emerged as the single most-contentious issue between Thailand and
its military-ruled neighbor to the west. Some U.S. officials and
international human rights groups have accused Myanmar (also known as
Burma) of coddling the United Wa State Army and other drug cartels in
exchange for a slice of the profits.

Kobsak Chutikul, a leading Thai politician, recently called for the United
States to take military action against the Wa cartel if it doesn't honor an
agreement with the Myanmar government to end its drug-trafficking
activities by 2005.

Myanmar officials, however, say that economic development, not force, is
the best way to lure its ethnic Wa population away from the drug trade.

In the meantime, U.S. agents are lending a hand to their Thai counterparts.

On one level, the U.S. government is happy to repay Thailand for past
assistance in anti-drug operations and for its steadfastness as a strategic
ally in Southeast Asia, the senior DEA official said. But there is also the
fear that the ya ba epidemic could infect the United States, the official said.

In fact, Golden Triangle ya ba is already showing up in California, mainly
in Southeast Asian immigrant communities, Thai officials say.

Despite the grim statistics of rising ya ba production and the mounting
human costs, Mr. Chartchai says that "everything is now in place" for
Thailand to begin turning the tide in its fight against ya ba this year.

Mr. Rungpet, the ya ba addict, is hoping for the same as he tries to
rebuild his life after a stint in the Chiang Mai rehabilitation center.

Like many of Thailand's first wave of ya ba addicts, Mr. Rungpet was drawn
to the drug for economic reasons. He began swallowing three or four pills a
day as a 17-year-old farm laborer, "so I could work longer hours," he said.

After he got married and his wife became pregnant a couple of years later,
he graduated to four or five pills a day.

In 1996, he began "chasing the dragon," sometimes smoking up to 50 pills a day.

He would sit on the floor for two or three days on end, smoking ya ba and
swigging whiskey to combat the drug-induced paranoia, then crashing into a
coma-like sleep.

"Swallowing the pills enabled me to work harder and longer hours," he said.
"But after smoking ya ba, I only wanted to relax. I felt happy, until the
drugs wore off. Then I would sleep like death."

He started selling ya ba to support his habit, luring friends and relatives
into his dark world. In time, he sold everything he owned to buy more ya
ba. Finally, his wife and son left him, he said.

Mr. Rungpet says his village of Ban Suan, near the ancient city of
Sukothai, is now teeming with ya ba users and sellers - many of them his
former customers, he sadly admits. Some of the young men he introduced to
ya ba, like his cousin, Dokmai, are now heavier users than he was even in
his worst years, said Mr. Rungpet.

"I told them to stop or reduce the number of pills they were using, or they
would wind up like me," he said.