Word: yaba
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...When the yaba runs out after half the slum's population has been up for two days bingeing, most of the inhabitants feel a bit like Jacky, cooped up in her squalid little hut, her mouth turned up into a vicious little scowl and her eyes squinted and empty and mean. She looks like she wants something. And if she thinks you have what she wants, then look out. She slices at her cuticles with the straight razor. And curses Bing...
...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 last year, up from 22,000 in 1999. And in Thailand, the government estimates that an astounding 800 million yaba tablets were imported and consumed last year?enough for every man, woman and child in the country to smoke a dozen each. A U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration agent who has worked in Asia for many years warns: "The opium war may be nothing compared to the Asian meth...
...Bing. And even the slum has its nicer alleys, where the huts are made of finished wood and there are flush toilets and the skittering rats don't root through piles of festering garbage. The teens and twenty-somethings in these parts of the slum also like to smoke yaba, but they look down upon Jacky and Bing and their flagrant, raging addictions. Sure, the cool guys in the neighborhood, guys like Big, with a shaved head, gaunt face and sneering upper lip, drop into Jacky's once in a while to score some drugs. Or they...
...slum neighborhood in a year. He doesn't work. He doesn't do anything but smoke. (Bing just shrugs when I ask if it's true that he hasn't left in a year. "I'm too skinny to leave," he explains, "everyone will know I'm doing yaba.") Big has a job as a pump jockey at a Star gas station. And he has a girlfriend, and he has his motorcycle, a Honda GSR 125, and this weekend, like most weekends, he'll be racing his bike with the other guys from the neighborhood, down at Bangkok's superslum...
...neighborhoods. And while they profess to have nothing but disgust for the slum's hard-core addicts, by 4 a.m. that night, in Big's room in his parent's house, on a mattress laid on the floor next to his beloved Honda, Big and his friends are smoking yaba and there suddenly seems very little difference between his crowd and Jacky's. "Smoking once in a while, on weekends, that really won't do any harm," Big explains, exhaling a plume of white smoke. "It's just like having a drink." But it's Thursday, I point...