THAI KIDS HOOKED ON MAD MEDICINE

BANGKOK - Little pastel pastilles of Ya Ba don't look particularly
dangerous. But the pink speed pills resembling baby aspirin now come
infused with a whiff of vanilla or chocolate, and middle-class Thai
schoolchildren find them hard to resist.

In the past six years almost a million under-age methamphetamine addicts
have kick-started a pernicious new drug trade inside Thailand. Four per
cent of the country's 5-to-9-year-olds have started to experiment with or
sell speed, a recent report said.

Youngsters swallow Ya Ba tablets - literally "mad medicine" - after school
and clamour for more. For a quicker rush, they crush them and smoke lines
off foil.

Hard-core users dissolve the tablets and inject them.

Jittery young addicts suffering from psychosis, heart damage, memory loss
or severe depression now crowd Bangkok hospitals and rehabilitation units.
In some urban clinics, 40 per cent of the beds are occupied by patients
suffering from the mental and physical side- effects of methamphetamine abuse.

Several politicians have suggested that the Government sponsor
methamphetamine shops to distribute cut-price Yaba and undermine the
illicit trade, but this horrifies conservatives who prefer to execute
dealers or jail the users in army-run treatment camps .

Thai authorities seized 10 times as many Ya Ba pills last year as in 1996 -
83 million of them - but clandestine factories keep cranking them out in
the lawless Golden Triangle where Burma, Thailand and Laos converge. There
is also a big demand in China, right across the border.

General Watanachai Chaimuanwong, the deputy army chief, blames the influx
on narco-guerrillas of the Wa hill tribes' ethnic army, former headhunters
who earned an estimated $550 million through drug trafficking this year and
use the money to arm 10,000 insurgents in the northeastern hills.

"These drugs are made in Burmese military camps," Watanachai said. "The
Burmese Government gives the Wa self rule and uses them as soldiers."

Analysts say that the Burmese Government condones the lucrative Ya Ba
traffic because the junta gets a cut of the profits. It costs under 5c to
produce a pill that sells for more than $1. Burmese officials vehemently
deny the allegations of drug profiteering, but they admit that Ya Ba
production is burgeoning in the border zones following a regional crackdown
on poppy production that reduced heroin trade by 20 per cent this year. The
Burmese belatedly launched an anti-speed campaign last month.

Despite extremely stiff penalties against narcotics, including capital
punishment for heroin smugglers, methamphetamine is widely available in
Thailand. For years the odourless powder was the preferred stimulant for
long-haul truck drivers and factory drudges, who relied on the drug to keep
alert. You could buy it at most petrol stations.

But now this cheap and convenient form of speed is replacing heroin as the
mainstay of Southeast Asia's illicit drug industry. The arrest of 7000 Thai
Ya Ba dealers has not stopped the flow.

Drug traffickers of the Wa hill tribes subsidise the United Wa State Army,
and have been unfazed by crop substitution programmes that eliminate a
ready supply of opium poppies. Stepping up production of Ya Ba has kept the
cash coming in, and there is no lack of eager customers.

All the ingredients for Ya Ba are easily obtainable. Thai teenagers view it
as a cheap form of Ecstasy which lets them dance the night away.

"It costs less than a bottle of beer and the effect lasts from one to 10
hours," says Yngve Danling, a Bangkok-based adviser for the United Nations
Office on Drugs and Crime. "Adolescents see it as a harmless party drug.
It's not."

Ya Ba far outsells the E tablets imported from Europe for full-moon raves
at Thailand's resort beaches.

Southeast Asian gangs introduced Ya Ba tablets to the California clubs this
summer, and Europe's rave scene is next in line. The old heroin- smuggling
networks are well established and the price is right.

An American Drug Enforcement Administration agent who has worked in Asia
for a decade warns: "The opium war may be nothing compared to the Asian
meth war."