DRUG TREKKIES EYED BY SE ASIAN AUTHORITIES

Opium Is Cheap and Plentiful, but Reality Can Bite in a Rat-Ridden Prison Cell

By Saturday, March 20, 1999; Page A26

MUANG SING, Laos—The dealers hang around the edge of an open-air restaurant
bustling with backpacking tourists, most of whom spent two days getting
here over barely passable mountain roads.

They know why the foreigners have come. The least eye contact triggers a
pantomimed puff on a pipe and insistent sales pitch: "Oh-pee-um! Oh-pee-um!"

Opium, at 50 cents a dose.

One by one, the tourists -- Americans, Canadians, Europeans, Australians,
Japanese -- head off to smoke their fill through a bamboo pipe under a tree
or at a makeshift opium den.

"I'm doing a drug tour of Southeast Asia," said Gareth, a 21-year-old
Australian whose T-shirt is stained ocher from road dust. "I've been to
Vietnam, Cambodia and Thailand, but so far, Laos is tops."

Nestled in the Laotian highlands near China and Myanmar, Muang Sing is the
hottest new stop on an informal but well-trod trail through Asia for
travelers whose main aim is not a suntan or historic sites, but sampling
various ways of getting high.

The trail stretches as far as India and Nepal, from where hippie tourists
in the 1970s took home stories about turning down cheap, fist-sized chunks
of hashish because marijuana was freely available. But the core trail for
dope-seeking tourists nowadays is through Thailand and Indochina. They
arrive in Bangkok on cut-rate air tickets, check in at seedy guesthouses on
Khao San Road, buy cheap tie-dyed T-shirts and cotton trousers, and head out.

One of their stopping places is the $2-a-night Number 9 guesthouse --
formerly the Cloud 9 -- in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. Travelers there said a
common odyssey can involve cavorting with the drug Ecstasy at an all-night
"rave" on a Thai island, followed by a trek through the "Golden Triangle"
opium producing region of northern Thailand, then crossing into Laos.

For them, "Laos is tops" because opium is cheaper and more openly available
and -- thus far -- police seem unsure how to handle the drug trekkers. The
trail then shifts to Vietnam, north to south, where narcotics use is more
discreet, then crosses into Cambodia, where marijuana can be had at a Phnom
Penh market for $2.25 a pound.

"I heard smoking marijuana was OK and that you can do it in the street with
no problem," said Charlotte, 23, a French woman who puffed a cigar-sized
joint as she lounged in a hammock at the Number 9.

The marijuana is so cheap and plentiful that most travelers never smoke all
they buy and leave the leftovers for others. Relatively few drug travelers
do the full circuit, and there are no statistics on their overall numbers.

Saengdaern Boonlert, president of the Trekking Association of Northern
Thailand, an umbrella group of 100 tour companies, estimates that in
Thailand alone drug travelers account for a fifth of the 150,000 people a
year who take organized trips through the northern highlands.

Saengdaern likens the drug tourists to a few rotten fish stinking up the
barrel. "A group will go to a trekking operator and say, 'We want to do a
trek, but there has to be opium.' If the operator says no, they go find one
who will," Saengdaern said.

"We've been talking with the police about this for 10 years," he added.
"They say the only solution is to completely shut down trekking."

But treks are important to the local economy; a three-day, two-night
expedition typically costs $50 a person -- and most tourists never touch
opium.

Drug travelers include a small minority of burnouts with thousand-yard
stares. Gareth, the Australian in Muang Sing, was unable to talk of much
besides opium, Ecstasy, speed and marijuana.

Most, however, are youths from affluent families taking a break from
college or young workers on a fling, indulging in what they see as
adventure in an exotic locale where no one knows them. They don't give full
names to journalists, fearing attention from authorities when they head home.

Linda, 24, a Canadian, was making the tour after a year of teaching English
in Japan. Wreathed in hill-tribe silver jewelry, she planned on staying at
Muang Sing a week on $5 to $10 a day. She'd never smoked opium before, and
the first night, she was violently ill.

"It wasn't what I'd expected," she said, still pale the next morning. "I
thought it was going to be a much more out-of-body sort of thing. I just
felt like laying there and thinking. Any time I moved around, I thought I
would get sick again."

Laotian communists shut down opium dens and most contact with the outside
world after taking power in 1975. But visa controls have gradually eased,
and the government hopes to double the number of visitors to 1 million
during 1999, which has been dubbed "Visit Laos Year."

One result is an influx of opium-seekers. In Muang Sing, opium is sold by
local addicts, but the whole town shares in the prosperity. The tourists
are the only source of hard currency.

"Not long ago, there was only one television and one generator in this
town," said Seng Maka, who just opened a 10-room hotel. "Now there are
many. Every year, the number of tourists is growing."

Police in Muang Sing show distaste for the scruffy travelers, but don't
generally hassle them. Arresting tourists would not promote Visit Laos
Year. But the U.N. Drug Control Program's representative in Laos, Halvor
Kolshus, said at a recent news conference that he had told Laotian
officials that the country risks a damaged image if it becomes seen as an
opium haven.

"We have yet to receive a formal report from the narcotic authority
regarding the matter and haven't reached any conclusion," said Sanya Abhay,
vice president of the National Tourism Authority. But if opium tourism
"becomes a trend, it would be really bad for Visit Laos Year," Sanya said.

Authorities are working on brochures to warn foreigners of Laotian laws,
Sanya said. Smoking opium is punishable by three to 10 years in jail;
possession of less than a kilogram can bring a jail sentence of up to seven
years.

Drug trekkers generally stay away from the countries that are toughest on
drug use -- Singapore and Malaysia, which warn travelers as they disembark
planes with signs announcing that the death penalty applies to narcotics
smugglers.

But drugs are illegal everywhere in Southeast Asia; many travelers mistake
their easy availability and infrequent arrests with official acceptance.
Thailand's prisons are filled with hundreds of foreigners serving life
terms for drug trafficking in overcrowded cells where, former inmates say,
eating rats and cockroaches is necessary to survive.

In a foreign environment they seldom understand, travelers seeking a big
drug score can easily run afoul of guesthouse owners or the police, who may
have a stake in the business. Still, Cambodian police Gen. Skadavy Math
Lyroun, deputy secretary general of the National Authority for Combating
Drugs, says arresting drug-using backpackers is a low priority at present.

More important, he said, is rooting out police corruption -- rival gangs of
anti-drug officers and military police battled with guns in Phnom Penh last
year over drug turf -- and shutting down big drug shipments.

That will take a few years, the general estimated. Then, his plan is to
move against low-level drug sellers and users, including foreigners. "We
know where they are," he said. "In the guesthouses, the night clubs and in
the casinos. We still have time to change things."