TAKEN TO EASE PAIN, OPIUM HAS VILLAGERS HOOKED

Trapped by Addiction, Many Farmers in Myanmar Fear a Looming Ban,
Geoffrey York Finds

PAR NAUK, MYANMAR -- As he puffs deeply on his opium pipe in the
evening gloom of his thatched-roof hut, Kya Teh is wreathed in clouds
of sweet, heavy smoke.

And slowly his pain disappears.

The 56-year-old farmer has been hooked on opium for 30 years. It began
as a form of medicine. Like most of the impoverished villagers in this
remote drug-producing land in northern Myanmar, opium is the only
medicine he can afford.

But a few years ago, Kya Teh felt a severe new sickness, a sharp pain
in his lungs, and he began coughing up blood. His addiction grew. Soon
he was smoking three or four pipes of opium every morning, another
three or four pipes in the afternoon, and 10 or more every night.

Kya Teh's enslavement to opium has exacted a terrible price on his
family. Their own poppy fields, which produce about 1.5 kilograms of
opium per year, are not enough to satisfy his habit. So his children
work in neighbouring farms to pay for their father's addiction.

Every morning he watches them trudge off to their work while he stays
at home to take care of the chickens, the pigs and the grandchildren.
He is too weak to work. His only happiness is the opium pipe. "If I
don't smoke it, I feel the pain more and more," he says. "It's easier
to sleep when I smoke. But then later I worry about tomorrow. I worry
how I will get the opium tomorrow."

For more than 140 years, opium has been the main crop in the remote
hills of the Golden Triangle, where Myanmar meets the borders of
China, Laos and Thailand.

Because opium is so easily available, many villages are full of
addicts. But a new ban on opium is due to be enforced in most of this
territory in July of next year, and the addicts are frightened. They
know that when the drug flow stops, they will suffer horribly. "If I
can't find any opium, my pain will get worse and worse," Kya Teh says.

With the coming ban, the United Nations drug-control agency is working
frantically to help free the farmers from their addiction. Every
month, 40 villagers are forced into a detoxification program in the
town of Ho Tao, often with police escorts. Some addicts are as young
as 13 years old. Many struggle to escape the detox centre, and more
than 40 per cent fall back into opium addiction when they go home.

"Using opium as medicine is an ingrained habit in these communities,"
said Dr. Sai Seng Tip, head of the detox centre. "They take opium for
everything -- stomach aches, diarrhea, even for labour pains when they
are giving birth."

A harsher form of detoxification is imposed by the Wa tribal army that
controls this region. Army brigades have forced hundreds of addicts to
quit their habit cold turkey, often by isolating them in jails or pits
in the ground. This method can be fatal to addicts, the UN says.

In a village of the Akha tribe, near Ho Tao, more than half of the 29
families have opium addicts. "When we're hungry for opium, we don't
want to do anything or talk to anyone," says one of the addicts,
56-year-old Ah Chan, who wears the elaborate metal headband and
colourful costume of her tribe.

"When I'm hungry for food, I can last a day. But when I'm hungry for
opium, I can only last for half an hour. Even if the most delicious
food is sitting right beside me, I won't touch it if I want opium. If
there is no opium in the village, I'll walk to another village to get
some."

One day last month, 11 of the Akha addicts walked down from their
village to Ho Tao to enter the detoxification program. A few days
later, they were slumped mutely on beds in dormitory rooms, heavily
sedated from the tranquillizers given to help them survive the ordeal.

The hilltop villages, with their bamboo-walled huts on stilts, seem
unchanged from a century ago. Villagers hunt for squirrels and
porcupines with battered old rifles, and they gather cicadas from the
trees as another source of food.

Every five days, Chinese merchants visit the markets in the nearby
towns to haggle with the farmers, who bring in balls of opium wrapped
in leaves. The merchants use stacks of century-old silver coins from
India to weigh the opium and pay the farmers. The current price is
about $220 (U.S.) per kilogram -- double the price of two years ago.
The merchants and other middlemen reap huge profits, because the price
rises drastically as the opium is refined into heroin and sent to
cities in Asia and the West.

In Kya Teh's small hut, the only sources of light are a small cooking
fire and the tiny lamps that heat the opium. He grinds headache
tablets to mix with the opium, to make it last longer. Then he takes a
small ball of opium, heats it over the flame with a metal stick, and
moulds it with his hand to make it fit into a hole in his bamboo pipe.

The only sound is the clucking of the chickens and his greedy puffing
on the pipe. His children sit and silently watch. "He is getting old,"
they say. "We feel pity for him."