Word: yaba
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...motorbike messenger, shuttling packages back and forth throughout Bangkok's busy Chitlom district. She was laid off after the 1997 devaluation of the baht when her company released those messengers who didn't own their own motorbikes. "Now I don't think about the gift shop anymore. Smoking yaba pushes those kinds of thoughts, and the thoughts about my children, to the back of my mind. It's good for that. Smoking means you don't have to think about the hard times." Bing nods his head, agreeing. "When I smoke, it makes everything seem a little better. I mean...
...point I ask Yee if she ever tells Bing he should stop smoking yaba. "I tell him he shouldn't do so much, that it's bad for him. But he doesn't listen." Perhaps she lacks credibility, since she smokes herself? "I don't smoke that much," she insists. "She's right," Bing agrees. "Since she doesn't smoke that much, I should listen to her." "And he's only 15 years old," Yee adds. Bing reminds her he's 17. "I don't know where the years go," Yee says, taking another...
...crisis with tougher enforcement has had virtually no effect on curtailing the numbers of users or addicts. Asia has some of the toughest drug laws in the world. In Thailand, China, Taiwan and Indonesia, even a low-level drug trafficking or dealing conviction can mean a death sentence. Yet yaba is openly sold in Thailand's slums and proffered in Jakarta's nightclubs, and China's meth production continues to boom. Even Japan, renowned for its strict anti-drug policies, has had virtually no success in stemming speed use and abuse. "The drug situation is so serious right now that...
...Saturday, big and his fellow bikers from the Do It Yourself Happy Homes are preparing for a night of bike racing by smoking more yaba and then, as if to get their 125-cc bikes in a parallel state of high-octane agitation, squirting STP performance goo from little plastic packets into their gas tanks. The bikes are tuned up and the mufflers are loosened so that the engine revving at full throttle sounds like a chain saw cutting bone: splintering, ear-shattering screeches that reverberate up and down the Sukhumvit streets. The bikers ride in a pack, cutting through...
...stunts are executed. Souped up and fitted with performance struts and tires, these bikes accelerate at a terrifying rate if you're on the 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...