Word: piped
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...When he first got to Vang Viang, in central Laos?about six hours by plodding diesel bus from Vientiane?it had taken four pipes for Fitz to get high. Seven, and he would begin to drift into his own subconscious, as though he were the director of his own pipe dreams. He had come via Thailand from Toronto, where he had been laid off from an Internet magazine. Now, after a month in town, it took a dozen pipes to get to that blissful nodding state, and if he didn't come down to see the dragon at least once...
...Laos' linguistic legacy to the rest of the world comprises just one word: bong. Commonly used in the West to describe a water pipe for marijuana smoking, the word means bamboo in Lao and is indicative of what the country has come to represent to many of the 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...
...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 it's Opium No. 1, okay?" she tells him, pointing at the black goop wrapped...
...Hmong cultivate the crop in the otherwise arid highland climate, and bring it down to sell to Vietnamese dealers in the main towns. Ton pays about $20 for a wax-paper sheet of opium, 6 mm thick and as wide as his hand. Broken down into the individual pipe loads he prepares for foreigners, that nets him a profit of about $300?minus the 10 pipes a day he needs to feed his own habit. "Opium, opium," he calls out to foreigners who walk past his sugarcane juice stand. Anyone who tries to actually buy any juice is shunted away...
...Laos and indulge in a bit of Oriental opium, there is little risk. But opium is a brutally addictive substance, and withdrawal from the drug is chemically identical to heroin withdrawal. The process has been described by at least one addict as "bone-crushingly painful." Harmless as a few pipe loads in exotic Laos may seem, too many visits to the O-man, coupled with a genetic disposition to substance abuse, can leave travelers with a nascent addiction that can cause problems once they return to Toronto or Tokyo?where opium is scarce but its more addictive chemical cousin heroin...