CAMBODIA'S NEW KILLING FIELDS

Sao Sony, 16, stares ahead with glazed eyes as he talks about his
escape from life as a methamphetamine-addicted child labourer on a
commercial farm. He remembers scores of friends and colleagues he left
behind and says he is lucky. He believes he escaped the new Killing
Fields as Cambodia, freshly emerged from civil war, finds itself
caught once more in a different sort of regional conflict that seems
equally beyond its control. And this war against methamphetamines is
one experts warn has the potential to overshadow even the Khmer Rouge
regime in its destructive scale and toll.

At his farm in remote Phnom Proek district, a former Khmer Rouge
stronghold on the Thai-Cambodia border, Sony says, all the male
workers smoked the drug they call by its Thai names of 'yaba'. He
first tried it at age 12, when friends took turns waving a lighter
under tablets on foil or in bottles and then sucked the milky smoke
into their lungs through a straw. Yet others swallowed the purple or
orange tablets whole so the effects would be milder but last longer. A
few had already picked up the new fashion from Thailand of mixing it
with their blood and injecting it into each other's veins with a
shared syringe.

"I think about the drug every day, and I want it, but it has been one
year without it now, and I think I am normal," Sony says. "Most
workers on the farms used it, especially the ones who work at night.
At age between 14 and 16 they usually start to use methamphetamines.
It helped me work long hours. I felt strong, not sleepy, but I also
became very thin." On the other side of the farm belt from Phnom
Proek, it is late at night in the tiny village of Toul in Sampov Loun
district, and knots of youths are pacing up and down the main dirt
road, wild eyed, teeth grinding. Yaba is here, too.

"I'd say about 80 percent of people under 40 in Toul use yaba, and
maybe around 40 percent of these are teenagers and younger," says a
user known as Korea, aged 26, a labourer. "It helps you work. It makes
you feel stronger and fresher."

Both Sony and Korea say it was at the farms that they were introduced
to the drug. The massive industrial farms on the Thai border cover
hundreds of square kilometres and were created just a few years ago
when Cambodia's long civil war ended, freeing up huge tracts of land.
The land was handed out as a reward to former Khmer Rouge defectors,
government officials and wealthy landowners to grow commodity crops
such as soybean and corn.

Labourers come from all over the country to earn money which is so
difficult to come by in Cambodia's largely subsistence farming
economy. After months of working long hours and using yaba to keep
them going, many return home to their villages, helping to accelerate
the spread of the drug throughout the country.

A lack of education about the dangers of the drug and the ease of
access to the drug as it enters over porous borders with Thailand,
Myanmar and Lao have also been factors.

With the average wages on the farms being just US $1.25 for a 14- to
18-hour day, rumours are rife that a handful of owners are supplying
the drug to ensure hard work and loyalty from their labourers.

Deputy police chief of Sampov Loen, Chan Dara, says his station has
brought farm owners in for collective 'education' sessions to warn
them about what will happen if they find proof this practice is
occurring. At best, the farm belt is an example of what could happen
to Cambodia if yaba spreads further without controls.

What everyone agrees on is that Cambodia is a front line that has been
breached and the yaba problem is growing faster here than perhaps any
other country in the world.

The US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) first reported a massive
increase in methamphetamine abuse in Cambodia in 2000. With 60 percent
of its population aged under 25 and the majority employed in labour
intensive jobs requiring long hours and paying little money,
methamphetamines, which produce a feeling of euphoria, hyperactivity
and dull pain and fatigue and sell for as little as US $1.25 per
tablet quickly gained popularity. Now, in the wake of Thailand's
crackdown on drugs, Cambodia has become the new market with little or
no resistance from the country's poor social, legal, judicial and
health infrastructure. Initially the drug of choice for sex workers
and labourers, it has quickly spread to the upper echelons and emerged
as a popular party drug for the country's growing middle class of
disco hopping youth.

"I would call it catastrophic," says Graham Shaw of Phnom Penh's UN
Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC). "Yaba will potentially claim more
Cambodian lives than the Khmer Rouge. It is potentially worse than a
war."

The more insidious effects of the drug such as the spread of HIV/AIDS,
or engaging in unsafe sex while under its heady influence may not be
fully felt for years, warns Shaw. Also of concern is the cost to
society through lost lives, illness and financial factors such as the
laundering of illicit and untaxed revenue reaped from a drug-fuelled
black market, which has the potential to severely impact on the
nation's GDP.

"Cambodia is at about the same point Thailand was five years ago, but
the trend has been much more rapid in Cambodia," Shaw says. "Without
immediate and radical action by the government, assisted by
international donors, we are looking at a problem that will cripple
the country. Statistically, we usually look for figures of around
three to four percent of people in their mid-20s having tried drugs.
For yaba in Cambodia, an informal survey showed that figure at around
50 percent."

Last year his office examined 15 of the country's 24 provinces and
municipalities and found yaba was available in all 15 - the only drug
they found that was universally available in a country that until
recently was deemed by the DEA as 'the only Southeast Asian country
without a significant drug abuse problem'.

Labourer Korea admits to smoking the drug between 20 and 30 times a
month. He says he will not take his habit with him when he returns
home, but he also says he does not know of any ill-effects from yaba,
which many here regard as no more than a strong vitamin. "I have
smoked today. I had two tablets after breakfast at about 9am," Korea
says, adding he does not see it as a problem, but more as a unifying
factor in Cambodian society. "Everybody takes it; police, the
military, government officials and the ordinary people. I have seen
some people go crazy, or steal, but that will not happen to me."