TOURISTS FULFIL PIPE DREAMS IN LAOS

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.

Opium, at 75 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 den.

"I'm doing a drug tour of Southeast Asia," said Gareth, a 21-year-old
Australian whose T-shirt is stained ochre 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 Burma, Muang Sing is
the hottest new stop on an informal but well-trodden trail through
Asia for travellers whose main aim isn't a suntan or the sights, but
sampling the 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 since marijuana was freely available.

But the core trail for dope-seeking tourists nowadays is Thailand and
Indochina. They arrive in Bangkok on cut-rate air tickets, check in at
seedy guesthouses on Khao San Rd., buy cheap tie-dye T-shirts, and
head out.

One of their stopping places is the $3-a-night Number 9 guesthouse --
formerly the Cloud 9 -- in Phnom Penh, Cambodia.

Travellers there said a common odyssey can involve cavorting with the
drug Ecstasy at a rave on a Thai island, followed by a trek through
opium country in 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 drug
trekkers.

The trail then shifts to Vietnam, north to south, where narcotics are
more discreet, then crosses into Cambodia, where marijuana can be had
at a Phnom Penh market for about $8 a kilogram.

Relatively few drug travellers do the full circuit but there are no
over-all numbers.

Saengdaern Boonlert, president of the Trekking Association of Northern
Thailand, an umbrella group of 100 tour companies, estimates that in
Thailand alone, drug travellers 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, and most tourists never
touch opium.

Most of the drug tourists are kids from affluent families taking a
break from college, or young workers on a fling.

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 $7.50 to $l5 a day.

She'd never smoked opium before. 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 eased
and the government hopes to double the number of visitors to 1 million
during 1999.

One result is an influx of opium-seekers. In Muang Sing, opium is sold
by local addicts -- increasing their dependency on the drug for income
- -- but the whole town shares 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."

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

Drug trekkers stay away from the countries toughest on drugs -
Singapore and Malaysia, which have death penalties for some offences.

But drugs are illegal everywhere in Southeast Asia. Many travellers
mistake their availability 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.