Word: shabu
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...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...
...good indicator of usage patterns, increased from 85 kg to nearly 2,000 kg?about 65 million hits. The story is the same in South Korea, where there are now more than 7,000 meth-related arrests annually, up from just 479 in 1992. In Indonesia, 218 kg of shabu were seized in 1999, up from just 3 kg two years earlier. The amount of ice confiscated in China doubled in 1999 and then doubled again last year to 20.9 tons. In Taiwan, speed now accounts for 85% of all drugs seized; in Cambodia, police seized 35,000 amphetamine tablets...
...During the early '90s, I went through a period when I was smoking shabu with a group of friends in Tokyo. I inhaled the smoke from smoothed-out tinfoil sheets folded in two, holding a lighter beneath the foil so that the shards of shabu liquefied, turning to a thick, pungent, milky vapor. The smoke tasted like a mixture of turpentine and model glue; to this day I can't smell paint thinner without thinking of smoking speed...
...stories; I don't believe meth really helps you in any way at all. But in those months, it became arguably the most important activity in my life. Certainly it was the most fun. And I looked forward to Haru coming over with another 20,000-yen baggie of shabu, the drug resembling a little, oily lump of glass. Then we would smoke, at first only on weekends but soon we began to do it on weekdays, whenever I had a free evening. At first only with my friends. Then sometimes I smoked alone. Then mostly alone...