Word: heroines
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...adopt him. Someone responsible should have. This sensitive waif starred in Bryan Singer's film of the Stephen King Apt Pupil, but over the years his rap sheet proved longer than his movie résumé. Constantly in trouble on drug-related charges, Renfro died of a heroin overdose...
...makes a fair job of conveying the sheer tedium of prison life, in the sense that reading his book feels like a jail sentence. After describing the already well-documented horrors of Klong Prem Central Prison (rats, roaches, squat toilets), Botts spends his time smoking heroin and giving his fellow convicts amusing nicknames. "The Brit looked like a gravedigger with his wide stained teeth and sinister smile," he writes. "We named him the Gravedigger...
...Answering the first is easy: there's a lot of trouble to get into. With Thailand bordering the opium-rich Golden Triangle, there will always be men like Botts who are fooled by the country's freewheeling reputation and corrupt police force into thinking that smuggling out heroin in cans of shaving foam is a sensible way to earn a living. The second question is tougher. But apart from Alex Garland's classic novel The Beach, the books I see most tourists reading in Thailand are the his-and-hers prison memoirs The Damage Done (convicted Australian heroin trafficker Warren...
...Compared to its rivals, Nightmare in Bangkok is, to lift a phrase from the classic backpacker T shirt, "same same but different." In Thailand, Botts gets jailed for heroin smuggling, but not before being incarcerated in his native Hawaii, several times, for stealing things from cars. "You could write a book on this," says a police officer, studying his lengthy rap sheet. "Please don't," is the reader's quietly muttered invocation - but Botts does...
...problem with Nightmare in Bangkok, and books like it, is that it is hard to sympathize with the narrator. Botts, who is eventually transferred to a U.S. prison and granted parole after spending less than five years at Klong Prem, is not a lovable rogue but a thief and heroin trafficker, and his time behind bars prompts little self-reflection. Seeming to sense this, he closes the book with a lame attempt to recast his dismal life as a parable about overcoming addiction, with the suggestion that he should never have been jailed. I agree with him that criminalizing drug...