InterPress News Service (IPS); Tuesday, 26 March 1996.
Peter Lowe

The bad news is that a potentially more harmful vice has taken its place -- heroin abuse.

Development experts monitoring the worrying trend that has seen heroin addiction rates among locals double every year for the past five years, link the shift in drug use in tribal areas to the effective international efforts to replace opium-poppy cultivation with alternative cash crops.

Non-governmental organisation (NGO) workers say it is ironic that the very law enforcement tactics adopted by governments to counter the illegal drug trade has had a negative side-effect on some villages that have reaped some economic benefits with the switch to cash crops.

"Before these farmers lived a self-sufficient simple life in the traditional way and they lived together quite peacefully. But development has brought many new concepts to the village," says development worker Walait Worakul, director of the South-east Asia Training Centre in Chiang Mai.

"The income levels of the villagers have risen after more than ten years of development, but the structure of the society has been completely destroyed," adds Walait.

He says traditional tribal values no longer prevail and so instead of putting their increased spending power to uses that would uplift the family and society, an unhappy younger generation is instead turning to the use of hard drugs. "They regard heroin as a symbol of modern life."

Two years ago, there were five opium smokers and 11 heroin users in Meeju, a village four hours drive north-west of Chiang Mai. Today just one old man continues to smoke opium, while 32 of the villagers have turned to heroin.

One heroin addict is a three year old tribal girl. Her parents started giving it to her a year ago to stop her crying.

Health experts fear that the switch from opium use to injected narcotics will exacerbate another deadly problem faced in Thailand -- AIDS, the Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome caused by the HIV virus which spreads through the exchange of bodily fluids.

Thailand has an estimated 800,000 HIV cases and about 24,000 cases of full-blown AIDS. The incidence of HIV infection is expected to exceed the one million mark within one to two years.

Health experts and NGO workers say people in northern Thailand are dying of AIDS at the rate of one a day. "There is virtually no village that has not lost people to HIV/AIDS," says Jon Ungphakorn, head of the Thai NGO Coalition on AIDS.

Health experts say while unprotected sex is still the main reason why the dreaded disease is spreading fast across Asia, intravenous drug use is another major factor.

"As it is, the disease is growing rapidly," says a NGO worker involved in the anti-AIDS campaign in Indochina. "This just makes it worse."

The people of Meeju belong to the Hmong, a minority ethnic group from China who have spread throughout the region in migrations forced by the periodic attempts of Chinese authorities to subjugate them.

More than 60,000 Hmong live in Thailand in over 250 villages. Those in northern Thailand are an easy target for drug traffickers whose traditional markets in the west and Bangkok are being eroded by police enforcement efforts.

Meeju has no police station. In fact, infrastructural development seems to have just passed it by. The neglected village is made up of the ramshackle huts of the villagers, a dirt road, an empty school, a tea shop where local politicians nail up their posters, and the new Catholic church on the hill.

Besides religious activities, the church serves as a venue point for weekend entertainment and recently, for drug prevention lectures.

A recent Friday evening began with villagers glued to a colour television in front of the alter. Later a stranger wearing denim cowboy jacket entertains them on a microphone, while his assistant twiddled the knobs of a portable radio broadcast console under the state of the Virgin Mary.

The strangers are part of the Thai-Worldview drug prevention communication team which had earlier met with village leaders, hung up loudspeakers, and video-taped village activities which they now show at the church.

The Thai-Worldview Drug Prevention Communication Project is a joint venture between the Thai government and NGOs. It attempts to address the drug problem in northern Thailand and empower traditional hill people to improve their lives through community communication programmes.

At 5 a.m. the next day, the village is woken up by blaring loudspeakers. They boom messages in the Hmong language across the jungle, about drugs, HIV, health and the environment.

In the afternoon a shy old man brings out his kan, a bamboo wind instrument which resembles the bagpipes. Slowly he begins to play and dance, swaying and diving in the Catholic Church before the spell-bound villagers. Everything is recorded by the team.

A few minutes later the audio-tape is rewound and the sound of the kan drifts out through the loudspeakers across the village. It is the first time the villagers have ever heard a recording of their own music. Next it is the turn of the village story teller.

In the evening, barefoot villagers in hand-embroidered traditional costumes with babies sleeping on their backs, gather together in the church again. They watch and discuss a video about Mae Sa Mai -- a story of rise and fall and the gradual return to sanity of a traditional community poisoned by heroin.

Mae Sa Mai was one of the first Hmong villages to achieve the dream of economic development. It flourished rapidly after becoming the target area for an early development project in the highlands in the late 1980s.

At the peak of Mae Sa Mai's prosperity there were more than fifty pick-up trucks in the village. Many of the villagers bought televisions, ghetto blasters and other consumer goods previously only found in the cities.

Then heroin was introduced through family members from other villages. It spread. The dream became a nightmare. Even the pick- up trucks that used to transport agricultural produce to the markets were sold.

"After two years everything was gone to pay for heroin. It was so bad that when you hung your clothes out to dry in the sun they would be stolen," Walait Worakul says.

A group of young people banded together to tackle the problem. They formed a village defence group to work in cooperation with the police against the traffickers and organised awareness programmes.

Today life in Mae Sa Mai is returning to normal, though heroin abuse continues.

The villagers are silent as the video comes to and end. Then they start to openly discuss the heroin problem in their village. "Could it happen here?" "What can be done?" are some of the questions posed.

When the time comes for the team to leave the village, Thai- Worldview project field coordinator Chaiya Assawapisanboon is optimistic. "Most of the people in Meeju are still new addicts. they still have their pick-up trucks," he says.

"We will continue to work here, and we will see if they still have these pick-ups in a year or two, or if they are all sold for heroin."(END/IPS/AP-IP-HE/PL/CPG/96)

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