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24-Aug-2005
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Sao Sony, 16, stares ahead with glazed eyes as he talks about his escape from life as a methamphetamine-addicted child labourer on a commercial farm. He remembers scores of friends and colleagues he left behind and says he is lucky. He believes he escaped the new Killing Fields as Cambodia, freshly emerged from civil war, finds itself caught once more in a different sort of regional conflict that seems equally beyond its control. And this war against methamphetamines is one experts warn has the potential to overshadow even the Khmer Rouge regime in its destructive scale and toll.

At his farm in remote Phnom Proek district, a former Khmer Rouge stronghold on the Thai-Cambodia border, Sony says, all the male workers smoked the drug they call by its Thai names of ‘yaba’. He first tried it at age 12, when friends took turns waving a lighter under tablets on foil or in bottles and then sucked the milky smoke into their lungs through a straw. Yet others swallowed the purple or orange tablets whole so the effects would be milder but last longer. A few had already picked up the new fashion from Thailand of mixing it with their blood and injecting it into each other’s veins with a shared syringe.

“I think about the drug every day, and I want it, but it has been one year without it now, and I think I am normal,” Sony says. “Most workers on the farms used it, especially the ones who work at night. At age between 14 and 16 they usually start to use methamphetamines. It helped me work long hours. I felt strong, not sleepy, but I also became very thin.” On the other side of the farm belt from Phnom Proek, it is late at night in the tiny village of Toul in Sampov Loun district, and knots of youths are pacing up and down the main dirt road, wild eyed, teeth grinding. Yaba is here, too.

“I’d say about 80 percent of people under 40 in Toul use yaba, and maybe around 40 percent of these are teenagers and younger,” says a user known as Korea, aged 26, a labourer. “It helps you work. It makes you feel stronger and fresher.”

Both Sony and Korea say it was at the farms that they were introduced to the drug. The massive industrial farms on the Thai border cover hundreds of square kilometres and were created just a few years ago when Cambodia’s long civil war ended, freeing up huge tracts of land. The land was handed out as a reward to former Khmer Rouge defectors, government officials and wealthy landowners to grow commodity crops such as soybean and corn.

Labourers come from all over the country to earn money which is so difficult to come by in Cambodia’s largely subsistence farming economy. After months of working long hours and using yaba to keep them going, many return home to their villages, helping to accelerate the spread of the drug throughout the country.

A lack of education about the dangers of the drug and the ease of access to the drug as it enters over porous borders with Thailand, Myanmar and Lao have also been factors.

With the average wages on the farms being just US $1.25 for a 14- to 18-hour day, rumours are rife that a handful of owners are supplying the drug to ensure hard work and loyalty from their labourers.

Deputy police chief of Sampov Loen, Chan Dara, says his station has brought farm owners in for collective ‘education’ sessions to warn them about what will happen if they find proof this practice is occurring. At best, the farm belt is an example of what could happen to Cambodia if yaba spreads further without controls.

What everyone agrees on is that Cambodia is a front line that has been breached and the yaba problem is growing faster here than perhaps any other country in the world.

The US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) first reported a massive increase in methamphetamine abuse in Cambodia in 2000. With 60 percent of its population aged under 25 and the majority employed in labour intensive jobs requiring long hours and paying little money, methamphetamines, which produce a feeling of euphoria, hyperactivity and dull pain and fatigue and sell for as little as US $1.25 per tablet quickly gained popularity. Now, in the wake of Thailand’s crackdown on drugs, Cambodia has become the new market with little or no resistance from the country’s poor social, legal, judicial and health infrastructure. Initially the drug of choice for sex workers and labourers, it has quickly spread to the upper echelons and emerged as a popular party drug for the country’s growing middle class of disco hopping youth.

“I would call it catastrophic,” says Graham Shaw of Phnom Penh’s UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC). “Yaba will potentially claim more Cambodian lives than the Khmer Rouge. It is potentially worse than a war.”

The more insidious effects of the drug such as the spread of HIV/AIDS, or engaging in unsafe sex while under its heady influence may not be fully felt for years, warns Shaw. Also of concern is the cost to society through lost lives, illness and financial factors such as the laundering of illicit and untaxed revenue reaped from a drug-fuelled black market, which has the potential to severely impact on the nation’sthout immediate and radical action by the government, assisted by international donors, we are looking at a problem that will cripple the country. Statistically, we usually look for figures of around three to four percent of people in their mid-20s having tried drugs. For yaba in Cambodia, an informal survey showed that figure at around 50 percent.”

Last year his office examined 15 of the country’s 24 provinces and municipalities and found yaba was available in all 15 - the only drug they found that was universally available in a country that until recently was deemed by the DEA as ‘the only Southeast Asian country without a significant drug abuse problem’.

Labourer Korea admits to smoking the drug between 20 and 30 times a month. He says he will not take his habit with him when he returns home, but he also says he does not know of any ill-effects from yaba, which many here regard as no more than a strong vitamin. “I have smoked today. I had two tablets after breakfast at about 9am,” Korea says, adding he does not see it as a problem, but more as a unifying factor in Cambodian society. “Everybody takes it; police, the military, government officials and the ordinary people. I have seen some people go crazy, or steal, but that will not happen to me.” dpa