Word: mads
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Around the same time, mad medicine began making its way into Do It Yourself Happy Homes. It had originally been the drug of choice for long-haul truck and bus drivers, but during the go-go '90s, it evolved into the working man's and woman's preferred intoxicant, gradually becoming more popular among Thailand's underclass than heroin and eventually replacing that opiate as the leading drug produced in the notorious Golden Triangle. While methamphetamines had previously been sold either in powdered or crystalline form, new labs in Burma and northern Thailand commoditized the methamphetamine business by pressing little...
...This mad medicine is the same drug that's called shabu in Japan and Indonesia, batu in the Philippines and bingdu in China. Perhaps it's appropriate that speed is Asia's drug of choice, with an estimated 30 million users across the region. Hard work remains this part of the world's indomitable virtue. Making money and getting rich are viewed as glorious ends in themselves, no matter the means. And methamphetamine use, at first, dovetails nicely with those 16-hour days slaving on a construction site or hunched over a workstation. It is the perfect drug for those...
...country after country throughout Asia, meth use skyrocketed during the '90s. And with the crash of the region's high-flying economies, the drug's use has surged again as battered, tired populations try to work through their hangovers with even more mad medicine. If you used the drug to push yourself to work harder when the region was on its way up, you then used it to alleviate the boredom of unemployment when the region was on its way down. It has now become a continent-wide crisis, one that is creating millions of addicts and threatening to cripple...
...back of one of them. And that blast off the line makes for an unstable and dangerous ride. It is the internal combustion equivalent of yaba: fast, fun, treacherous. And certain to result, eventually, in a fatal spill. But if you're young and Thai and loaded on mad medicine, you feel immortal and it doesn't occur to you that this night of racing will ever, really, have to end. The hundreds of bikers thronged on the street, the revving engines, the other kids cheering as you make your runs, even the cops coming and setting off concussion grenades...
...around is the stench of smoldering trash. The horror of this daily existence is tangible. I don't like being in this place, and I find depressing the idea of living in a world that has places like this in it. And I know a hit of the mad medicine is the easiest way to make this all seem bearable. Taking a hit, I know, is a surefire way of feeling good. Right now. And I want...