Word: opiumeators
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...more money we make, and the more of our people learn to speak English, and that's good for the village." When it is suggested that tourists are coming here in part because they can get very stoned very easily, he shakes his head, sternly intoning: "There is no opium in this village...
...youthful, Western travelers who have made this Indo-Chinese nation of 5 million a haven for narco-tourists seeking the Asian high life. At any given moment in Vang Viang, a town of about 20,000, at least 50 foreigners are here mainly to partake of the opium scene, and another 100 stick around because potent, green, budded marijuana sells for $1 an ounce. (Both drugs are illegal in Laos, though the laws are loosely enforced.) Since opening up to tourism in the early '90s, this sleepy communist country?the hammer and sickle still sags from most flagpoles?has welcomed...
...Across the street from the village chief's wood-frame house, however, in a little bar where two Vietnamese men sit drinking bottled Bia Lao beer, smoking A-daeng cigarettes and spitting onto the concrete floor, there is plenty of opium. Several foreigners are already in the back-room den, crashed out on dank mattresses having puffed their way through half a dozen pipes each. Sophie, a blond English girl in her 20s, insists the black-trousered O-man, as she calls the Vietnamese boy loading pipes, give her and her friends the best possible dope. "Make sure...
...opium poppy, indigenous to Asia Minor, was probably first introduced to Southeast Asia by Arab merchants during the Middle Ages, remaining an exotic rarity until British and French trading companies began importing it into China during the 18th century. Chinese EmigrEs then brought their habits with them, setting up opium dens in most of Asia's major capitals and introducing locals to the drug. At one point, during the 1930s, the kingdom of Siam earned 14% of its revenue from its 1,000 licensed opium dens. In French-controlled Indochina, 15% of government revenue came from taxes on opium sales...
...However, with the end of the colonial era and then the cold war years of colonialism by proxy, successive generations have increasingly seen the drug as a vestigial tradition, as antiquated as foot binding or entrail reading. The Cultural Revolution obliterated mainland China's opium scene. Hong Kong's last opium den shut down in the '70s, and even famously dissolute Bangkok is reportedly bereft of a working opium den, the pipes consigned to antique stalls at the Saturday flea markets. The fast-lane kids of Asia's supercities prefer to get their kicks smoking speed or swallowing Es. Opium...