14

Opium Tears

The sin does not originate in these mountains; they are merely the latest crucible for an ancient vice. For at least seven thousand years, mankind has relied on the juice of Papaver somniferum, the “sleep-bearing” opium poppy, to dull pain, to heal illness, and to lift the despair of unfulfilled dreams. In book 4 of Homer’s Odyssey, Helen of Troy mixed “mild magic of forgetfulness”—an opium anodyne—into the wine bowl. Hippocrates, the father of Western medicine, wrote of opium’s efficacy as a pain reliever, while Assyrian medical texts referred to the narcotic as “lion fat.” The plant, which originated in the mountains of the eastern Mediterranean, was carried to Asia after 700 A.D. by Arab traders. By the sixteenth century, opium had become a recreational drug. In the Far East, Dutch traders introduced the practice of smoking opium in a pipe, often mixed with imported tobacco. The British transformed opium into a global commodity during the last half of the eighteenth century. English merchants had wangled a trading concession at the lone open port of Canton (now Guangzhou) on the southern fringes of China’s Middle Kingdom, far removed from the Forbidden City. However, the coarse “barbarians” had few desirable goods, aside from fur pelts, tortoiseshell, and bêche-de-mer, to barter for Chinese silk, tea, spices, lacquerware, and export porcelain. Instead they paid in silver bullion.

The balance of trade only tilted in favor of the British following the introduction of Bengali opium. Although banned by the Manchu rulers, opium soon became the linchpin of the China trade. In 1773, the British shipped more than one thousand mango-wood chests, each containing seventy kilograms of opium, to Canton; by 1800, Chinese addicts consumed two thousand chests of the drug they called “foreign mud.” The opium was delivered by sleek clipper ships to a floating depot anchored off Lintin Island in the Pearl River estuary, then lightered by small craft up the treacherous river passage to Canton, where it was sold with the help of the conniving Co Hong merchants guild and corrupt mandarins all too willing to enslave their own people.

As drug imports exploded, profits poured into British coffers. The opium, cultivated in the Ganges River Valley and refined under a monopoly controlled by the British East India Company, eventually accounted for one-fifth of India’s revenues. American firms entered the China trade after the Treaty of Paris was signed in 1784 and prominent East Coast families soon grew rich smuggling the drug. The partners of Boston-based Russell & Company, the largest U.S. opium-trading firm of the “commission house” era, included Warren Delano, Jr., the grandfather of Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Robert Bennet Forbes, the famed Boston sea captain. (In an historical irony, U.S. Senator John Forbes Kerry, the Massachusetts Democrat who chaired the Senate Subcommittee on Narcotics and Terrorism and drew a hard line against heroin kingpins, counts Captain Forbes as an ancestor.)

By 1839, faced with two million addicts, the opium-related deaths of his three eldest sons, and a massive deficit that threatened his nation’s economy, Emperor Taukwang finally acted. He appointed a trusted aide, Lin Ze Xu, as imperial commissioner and ordered him to eliminate the opium trade. Lin traveled to Canton and, in a remarkable incident, confiscated more than twenty thousand chests of British and American opium. The one-million-kilo drug haul was dumped, along with salt and lime, into watery pits dug in the banks of the Pearl River. Lin then banished foreign merchants from Canton and Macau. Outraged at the temerity of the Chinese, the British soon dispatched gunboats and sank fleets of outmatched war junks. The Opium War ended in 1842 with the Treaty of Nanking, which forced the humiliated Chinese to pay twenty-one million dollars in damages, to surrender Hong Kong Island to the crown, and to open five ports to British residence and commerce.

Although the Chinese refused to sanction the trade, the opium problem soon worsened. A Second Opium War erupted in 1856 over the Chinese seizure of a British-registered vessel. Only in 1858, with the Treaty of Tientsen, which created ten additional “treaty ports,” did the vanquished Chinese legalize opium. Soon, local farmers, especially in the southern uplands of Szechuan and Yunnan Provinces, abandoned cereal crops and planted hundreds of square miles of poppies to feed the insatiable market. Many of the nomadic, persecuted tribes living in these mountains would take their newfound poppy-growing talents southward, to the Shan States of eastern Burma, the Plain of Jars in central Laos, and, by the turn of the century, Chiang Rai and Chiang Mai Provinces of northern Thailand.

But opium abuse was hardly confined to the Far East. Early in the sixteenth century, European chemists dissolved opium in alcohol to create a tincture, dubbed laudanum, that soon became a widely prescribed sedative. In an age of quack cures, laudanum proved genuinely efficacious in treating pain and gastrointestinal illnesses. (Even today, laudanum is prescribed for severe diarrhea, as is paregoric, a tincture of camphorated opium.) Laudanum also proved highly addictive. For decades, Robert Clive, the founder of British India, and William Wilberforce, the British statesman and abolitionist, resorted to opium infusions to treat their digestive complaints. Opium proved irresistible to the Romantics. The English writer Thomas De Quincey described the magic and the horror of “subtle and mighty opium” in his 1821 essay, “Confessions of an English Opium-Eater.” An opium anodyne painted the pleasures of Xanadu in Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s famous 1797 poem, “Kubla Khan.”

In 1805, a German pharmacist, Friedrich W.A. Sertürner, isolated the chief opium alkaloid—C17H19NO3—which he named morphine in honor of Morpheus, the Greek god of dreams. An important anaesthetic, morphine is also habit forming. Addiction rose in the wake of a mid-century American medical breakthrough, the hypodermic syringe. In the 1890s, German scientists looking for a nonaddictive morphine substitute concluded that synthesized diacetylmorphine—produced by boiling morphine and acetic anhydride—was a pain-killing panacea that could treat bronchitis, tuberculosis, and diarrhea. Bayer Company, the German pharmaceutical giant, began producing vast quantities of the drug in 1898. The company also coined a catchy brand name for synthesized diacetylmorphine: heroin. Of noble intentions and market-driven motives was born a global scourge.

Measures to control and contain opiates did not begin until 1906 when the British Parliament, bowing to a long campaign organized by outraged clergymen, agreed to phase out the opium trade to China, which then counted nearly fifteen million addicts. Three years later, United States President Theodore Roosevelt spearheaded the first International Opium Commission meeting in Shanghai. Acting out of high-minded self-interest, delegates vowed to adopt drastic measures against morphine (which they did not refine or sell), but to take a softer, gradual-suppression stance against opium (which they controlled through profitable state monopolies). At the International Conference on Opium convened at the Hague in 1912, signatory nations agreed to enact national laws controlling the manufacture, sale, and use of opiates, and to treat abuse as a penal offense. Two years later, Congress passed the Harrison Narcotics Act, America’s first federal laws against drugs.

Scant drug-control progress occurred in the Orient. When Sun Yat-sen overthrew the Manchu empire in 1911, much of China, including the poppy-growing heartland of Yunnan Province, fell under the domain of warlords. Nearly every colony in Southeast Asia enjoyed a financial bonanza from its state-licensed opium monopolies and smoking dens. In independent Siam, which legalized opium in 1851, opium taxes accounted for 20 percent of revenue by 1905. Although Burma had the region’s smallest opium monopoly, the British could never wean the nomadic hilltribes of Shan State, who grew opium as a tributary gift and as a cash crop to exchange for the goods of passing Panthay caravans. The Shan States Opium Act of 1923 did register growers and limit each addict to an annual supply of two visses—about seven pounds—but the writ of law carried little weight in the mountains beyond the Salween River. Not even World War II and the harsh Japanese occupation could break the mountain people from the drug habit. In The Hill Peoples of Burma, Frontier Areas director H. N. C. Stevenson noted that opium’s high price-to-weight ratio made it an ideal commodity in an undeveloped, underpopulated land: “Opium is one of the few products which has a very high value in relation to its weight and therefore can be exported by pack animals or coolies for great distances without any serious loss of profit.”

Still, opium remained a locally consumed vice. It was only with the dawn of the Cold War, which brought the Kuomintang from opium-soaked Yunnan to the Shan hills, that drug production grew to export levels. In the early 1960s, cynical or misguided Burmese policies, such as the trafficking privileges granted to KKY militias, also contributed to the drug explosion. And the ruinous agenda of General Ne Win, the military dictator who pushed Burma along the “Burmese Way to Socialism” after 1962, created an ideal climate for illegal, lucrative activity. Ne Win’s decisions to nationalize banks and businesses and to eliminate currency left an economic vacuum in Shan State that was soon occupied by opium. The drug became a cash crop for black-market goods throughout the borderlands. The drug was worth more than even cash—merchants refused to accept near-worthless Burmese kyat notes and took hilltribe opium as payment for rice, salt, and farming tools.

Opium gained another purpose during Ne Win’s misguided reign: the funding of ethnic revolutions. In Shan State, the rebel groups that formed in the early 1960s followed the same expedient, if morally dubious, route the KMT had blazed with the blessing of the CIA: drugs for weapons. “In the dragon’s-teeth soil of the Shan State,” opium expert Albert W. McCoy told me, “where poppy crops beget arms, there cannot be a realistic force without the control of drugs. You just don’t have the guns—and you have to have guns.”

General Khun Sa had learned the lesson well. He had established control of poppy-growing areas. Their opium had supplied him with thousands of firearms, and the weapons had given him wide-ranging power. When I had gone to see Donald F. Ferrarone, the director of the DEA in Thailand, he had laid out the scope of Khun Sa’s empire. The warlord controlled a swatch of Shan State that stretched nearly 250 miles, from the Sino-Burmese border in the north all the way south to Thailand. Khun Sa’s northern command procured raw opium in the poppy-saturated hills northeast of Lashio, then moved seven hundred to one-thousand-kilo shipments south in mule-train caravans under the heavy guard of the Mong Tai Army. In the mountains along the western bank of the Salween River—Ferrarone would not say exactly where—the loads were passed to central command. Security was extremely tight. Even so, the Burmese Army’s proxy force, the United Wa State Army, had recently ambushed a Khun Sa opium convoy; it had taken five hundred MTA soldiers to bail out the beleaguered caravan.

After running the lengthy, dangerous gantlet, the caravans arrived at Ho Mong, the southern command. In a “very clearly defined” area straddling the border, charged Ferrarone, the opium was converted to heroin in clandestine refineries controlled by Khun Sa. This precious, near-pure heroin No. 4 was reloaded onto pack mules, then smuggled through the Doi Larng Range and into northern Thailand, to Mae Hong Son, Chiang Mai, and Chiang Rai. Khun Sa’s routes through the borderlands were challenged constantly by rival groups such as the Wa, whose own heroin pipeline flowed south along the eastern bank of the Salween and whose gateways to the Thai frontier butted against those controlled by the MTA. There was an old Burmese saying: two buffalo cannot share one wallow. Confrontation was inevitable.

“You think of the United States and the drug violence that goes on,” Ferrarone had told me. “Well, that violence starts deep in one of the most xenophobic, unknown places in the world.”

*   *   *

Armed with the General’s blessing, we left Ho Mong in the early afternoon and drove north, toward the Salween River and the mountains bedecked with poppies. Our struggling Toyota fishtailed through the deep, choking dust blanketing the route that had been hacked from the dry forest. The road so stymied our progress that the driver finally stopped to take on a pair of Shan hitchhikers for ballast; they looked like Dust Bowl farmers, sitting in the rear of the truck bed to give us better traction. Out of the valley and into the hills, we drove for miles with no hint of habitation, save for swidden scars on distant, green mountain slopes. Cirrus clouds drifted on the eastern horizon. The only shaded, comfortable spot in a pickup truck on a logging road in Shan State was the cab, which had become Flynn’s domain. Consigned to the back, Sullivan, Sengjoe, and I did the only logical thing to avoid the rough ride and to jump clear in case of a rollover—we stood, clutching the roll bar, jungle cowboys bucking an untamed truck.

I rattled next to Sengjoe, admiring the indigo-colored tattoos, the jumble of cabalistic whorls and curlicues on his straining forearms. Among Shan men, the practice of tattooing was nearly universal. The skin designs weren’t for sentimental or aesthetic reasons, as they were in America. They indelibly preserved Shan culture and, more importantly, possessed powerful magic.

“The writing is from the Buddhist scriptures,” our guide shouted over the next hill assault. “We have them tattooed on our bodies so we preserve our scriptures and the Shan literature for centuries. Shan people believe some verses bring prosperity; the spirits cannot harm them. The tattoo protects you. It is a superstition.” For proof against guns and dah, some Shan elders even sewed talismans and precious stones inside knobs of flesh. Sengjoe had received his incantation in a painful session while still an adolescent in Keng Tung. He brandished his right arm. “It says, ‘The enlightened one. Buddha.’ These omens are good scripture that protect me against bad spirits.”

Well, I did have a golden tree frog indelibly inked onto my right hip, the legacy of a feature story I had once done on Rhode Island tattoo parlors. Perhaps I carried protection as well, although the Shan considered the frog a lowly creature.

“Does every Shan have tattoos as protection?” I asked.

“The General doesn’t believe in tattoos,” Sengjoe replied. “His body is unmarked.”

With a huge army at his beck and call, Khun Sa could afford to discount the spirits. We passed through a Shan logging hamlet, where unmilled trunks and rough planks of Burmese pine gave the warm air a soft, slightly astringent edge. The wood was bound for Ho Mong, to be sold as fuel or lumber. The teak had already been felled and trucked to Thailand.

“They’re not rich. They have only enough to feed their families,” Sengjoe said of the woodsmen.

The Shan, despite their natural wealth, seemed doomed to remain destitute victims. It had been that way under the Burmese, then the British, then the Burmese again. “We have a saying: the Burmese cut our teak, the Thai reap the profit, and the poor Shan are forced to replant,” Sengjoe sighed. “But they have us in a box. If we don’t let the Thai take the teak, they will cut our rations.”

Several more brutal miles, until a checkpoint and turnpike blocked our progress. In the shade of a simple log shelter, a sleepy Mong Tai Army soldier fumbled for his AK-47, saw farang, then smiled. No MTA officers, and perhaps even a chance to make a few baht. The guard held up a changeable hawk-eagle (Spizaetus cirrhatus) he had shot, a lifeless, magestic mass of golden-brown wings underscored with black- and white-banded feathers.

“The hawks are a big problem for young chickens,” Sengjoe said.

“Haa-sip.” The guard wanted fifty baht for the raptor. Flynn’s mood darkened.

“The General will not be happy when he finds out,” he said. “He doesn’t like for animals to be killed, or military bullets to be wasted. The bullets are for shooting Burmese, not birds.”

Twenty sinuous miles beyond Ho Mong, we let off our human ballast at a fork in the road in the middle of nowhere. The Shan passengers waved their thanks and began strolling north, toward the Salween, still a half day’s walk away. We turned eastward, continued climbing through open forest. The undergrowth had been put to the torch, to aid loggers, protect against wildfires, and eliminate ground cover for patrols of enemy scouts.

“Poppies grow best at least one thousand meters above sea level,” Sengjoe said. “Along this valley and twenty to thirty miles to the east, it is full of poppy fields. The harvest time here is about December and January. It’s too hot now. People have harvested their opium and it’s being stocked in the villages. There are a lot of tribal people—Akha, Pa-O, Lahu, Kokang—who are the main producers of opium,” he added. “The Shan don’t grow opium or know how to refine heroin but we get a bad name. The Shan only tax opium and heroin.”

A denuded hill stood in the distance, topped by trenches, bunkers, and hootches. It was another of the MTA outposts equipped with mortars, antiaircraft guns, and surface-to-air missiles that formed a defensive ring around Ho Mong. The General had acquired shoulder-held SAM-7s from the Khmer Rouge and Stingers from the Afghan mujahadeen. SLORC’s limited air force gave Ho Mong airspace a wide berth.

Without warning, our driver made a hard left turn and we tumbled down a track barely worthy of a bullock cart to Mae Ark, a Pa-O village at the heart of the global heroin epidemic. Several dozen raised, thatch-roofed houses straddled a ridge, affording the impoverished people of tiny Mae Ark a spectacular, million-dollar view: a long, forested valley with brown, spent poppy fields carved into the mountain slopes that ran northward as far as the eye could see.

“All their lives they have planted poppies,” Sengjoe said of the Pa-O, a Karen subgroup that coaxed a living from the mountains of southwestern Shan State. “They never knew other trades to make a living. For centuries these Pa-O people never possessed flat land or have proper paddy fields. They employ themselves in the slash-and-burn business. It hurts forestry, but having no other means of income they have to cut. They have to rely on poppy growing as well as other edibles, like maize and peanuts. They have relied on opium for many centuries. They are not rich. They have to strive every day just to produce one or two visses of opium for their livelihood.”

Papaver somniferum defies agricultural advances. Poppy cultivation remains a time-consuming gamble, opium extraction a tedious, manual exercise. To produce enough opium for just one viss requires the scoring and scraping of three thousand seedpods for their alkaloid-rich opium “tears.”

We climbed flimsy stairs to a raised porch built of bamboo joists overlaid with split-bamboo flooring, removed our shoes, dusted as much of the road as possible from our clothes, then ducked beneath the low eaves of the bushy, rice-straw roof. We had crossed the threshold to a world made of opium.

The poppy farmer rose from the groaning floor, a bolus of betel nut, lime, and tobacco bobbing in his left cheek, and greeted us amiably. Sengjoe relayed the man’s pitch:

“Do you want to see the opium?” asked Ar Lain Ta. “Do you wish to buy? We are willing to sell the opium. Do you want to have a look-see?”

“Do they take American Express?” Flynn cracked.

“We just want to take a look,” I interjected.

“I’m happy to show you,” said the farmer, “but if you want to buy.…”

“We’ll give a donation,” Flynn said, “but no buy.”

“Once you see it you’ll be very infatuated,” warned Ar Lain Ta with a sly smile. “You’ll be tempted to buy. Every person who comes to see the opium, they fall in love and just buy it.”

“We’ll fall in love with it and buy it,” chuckled Flynn, “but taking it back to America is the problem.”

Ar Lain Ta bade us to sit, then scuttled to a small bedroom separated from the main living area by a wall of teak boards. A half-dozen family members gawked in wonderment at the sweat-stained farang come to see the patriarch’s opium. In the dim light, I took inventory of this Pa-O household. A pile of thin rattan sleeping mats and rough woolen blankets. Two large cooking pots. A wooden hearth heaped with cooled ashes. Two large motor-oil jugs salvaged as water containers. Some plastic cups. An oil lantern. A caged warbler.

Ar Lain Ta returned with a folded banana leaf and a carefully wrapped, ivory-colored bundle. The package was a spongy, six-inch cube weighing about three and one-half pounds: one viss of raw opium. Enough weight to fetch the forty-five-year-old poppy farmer three thousand baht, about $120. Enough opium tears to quench thousands of junkie dreams, to foster even more nightmares. The farmer, dressed in a dark blue longyi, a Burmese-style sarong, and a soiled white tank top, sat cross-legged on the creaking floor. An indigo god danced on his muscular right bicep; further tattooed script raced down his forearm like a thick, dark vein. Ar Lain Ta wore a cheap plastic digital wristwatch. Why he needed to know the exact time, I could not fathom. The daily schedule in Mae Ark was constant, simple: Sunrise. Work. Eat. Sunset. Sleep.

“We live here since about eight years ago,” Ar Lain Ta began. “Before then, we lived on the west bank of the Salween. We come because the oppression of the Burmese force. We had been forced to work as unpaid labor all the time.”

The same old, untold story that never made it to the West. The Tatmadaw terrorized the frontier with its “Four Cuts Strategy,” denying food, money, intelligence, and recruits to the rebels. There was no policy to win over the hill people, only to seize their property and belongings and to treat them as chattel, to slave as road laborers, army porters, and human mine detectors. In Taunggyi and the surrounding areas of southern Shan State, thousands of men and women had been left destitute by extortion or press-ganged to work on a one-hundred-mile railroad extension from Aung Ban to Loi Kaw. To escape, countless families had fled to Thailand’s Mae Hong Son Province or across the Salween River to territory controlled by Khun Sa. This war zone, ironically, was considered safer and saner than the lands under the control of the official SLORC government.

“When the Burmese forced us to work, we did not have time enough to plant our crops,” said Ar Lain Ta. “So we come here to the east bank of the Salween and we have ample time to plant for ourselves. We feel more secure here. We have time to cultivate.”

Like numerous other ethnic-minority groups, the Pa-O had been at loggerheads with the Burmese for decades. In 1950, the late Pa-O leader, U Hla Pe, had formed a resistance group, the Pa-O People’s Liberation Organization, that battled the government in southern Shan State until a 1989 ceasefire.

From a plastic bag, Ar Lain Ta pulled a small green leaf, a few slices of betel nut, a pouch of slaked lime, and made himself another quid. “Why is opium so troublesome in your country?” he asked.

“They’re not open-minded,” Flynn said. “If we had you as president, there’d be no problem.”

“How long have you grown opium?” I asked.

“My ancestors have taught me only this cultivation,” Ar Lain Ta related. “It passes from one generation to another.” He paused to part the floor slats and spit the dark juice of his chaw. “This year is freak year. The rain is giving a lot of trouble, so I reap only about five visses for my family. In good weather conditions we can reap about seven to eight visses. This is a bad year.”

This farmer was not alone in his misfortune. The U.S. State Department estimated that opium production in Burma had fallen 21 percent from 1993, from the record-setting crop of 2,575 metric tons to 2,030 metric tons. Unfavorable weather conditions, not official antidrug efforts, were responsible for the decline.

“Last year we reaped about four thousand baht per viss, but this year, trade is not so good,” Ar Lain Ta said. “The opium is not as good. I get only about three thousand baht per viss. This is the lowest price. It is not enough money to feed my family, so I have to be hired as a farm helper in other seasons.”

The grinding poverty, the marginal existence that characterizes the peasant life, always seems to get lost in the grand talk of drug eradication. The conversations always center on putting the powerful druglords out of business, with little concern for weaning the poor farmers off opium and onto other marketable cash crops. Heroin undoubtedly destroys lives, but the Pa-O of Mae Ark would not have even this miserable existence without it.

The Sailor, a steady Boston user, held sympathy, not malice, in his heart for the men and women who nurtured his downfall. “I hear it’s pretty rough over there,” The Sailor had told me when I met him in a day shelter for addicted U.S. veterans. “Pretty political. People die every day behind all that shit. If you don’t do what you’re supposed to do exactly right down the line, you get killed. It’s a rough situation to be in. I wouldn’t want to be there. This country is good. It’s free here. You can get drugs, you can get methadone, you can get high for nothing here. Know what I mean?

“The middlemen, people from the processing point to the ones that bring it here, they get rich,” The Sailor added. “I don’t think the farmers get shit. I think they get nothing. They just make a living. It’s just like growing potatoes.”

Ar Lain Ta had no concept of heroin, no knowledge of the O.D.s and the criminal acts the drug left in its wake. He knew little of Khun Sa and the Shan cause. He did know that his family was safe from the Burmese and that he had the time to grow opium. And that perhaps a son might someday grow up and even become a soldier, just like the ones at the nearby MTA garrison.

“Poppies are the main crop that we produce,” the farmer said. “I don’t know about marijuana. I would like to learn how to plant marijuana, but I don’t think the authorities would let us grow marijuana. The situation is like this: the MTA organization doesn’t like us to plant poppies, but the MTA can’t feed us and our families. We are forty-eight families. They can’t feed us. So they just turn a blind eye on whatever we do. This is our last resort to make a living. If we had another substantial crop that could feed our families, we would abstain from planting poppies.”

“What would you grow?” I asked.

“I don’t have any knowledge about what would be the best crop to substitute,” Ar Lain Ta replied. “Mainly we plant poppies just to get enough money to buy rice. Our second crop is soybeans and the third crop is corn. But we would be very happy if we knew how to plant other substantial crops that could feed a family.”

“Who buys your visses?”

“There are many sorts of traders,” Ar Lain Ta replied. “Shan, Chinese. Everybody that comes, we just sell. Simple. When people come, the deal is done right away.”

Opium was a godsend to his village. Any other crop meant a long journey down the mountain to a market town, and always a risk of spoilage, of robbery, or of surplus. With opium, there were no such problems. The buyers were happy to come all the way to Mae Ark, to his simple home.

“Do you feel bad that so many heroin addicts result from the poppy you grow?” I asked.

“I never knew that it can be converted into other forms,” the farmer responded. “We only knew that it was opium throughout our life. We have never seen heroin in the first place. It is beyond our knowledge. I wish to know because my whole life I have been planting poppies to earn a living. I don’t know what effect it is having in the world. I know it is poison to my own people.

“There are no opium addicts in the village,” he added quickly. “I plant poppies, but I don’t use opium. I never smoke. But for medical purposes I have a little opium. At times we use the opium for a miracle cure. When we have a headache, we just scrape the skull with a knife and patch it up with some opium. When we have a stomachache, we just swallow a ball. It really heals. It works.”

He unfolded a banana leaf to reveal a sticky mass of gum, about one-tenth of a viss, the color of used motor oil, the consistency of tremulous marmalade. Fresh raw opium, direct from his fields.

“If you take a lump of it you’ll die right away,” he cautioned. “It’s very poisonous. But if you take a small amount, it will help cure the aches.”

Flynn stuck his little finger in the tar. Ar Lain Ta regarded the dollop on Flynn’s finger.

“If you want to have the experience…” he shrugged. “It will kick you for twenty-four hours. One full day.”

Ah, hell. My bowels were churning with bacteria. My Immodium was back in Ho Mong. I faced a twenty-mile drive, tennis in the evening, a meal of klong chicken or rehydrated beef stew, then another night of screwdrivers and Shan moonshine.

“Shit, I’m going to try some.”

I held out my hand and Flynn smeared half of his opium onto my little finger. Ar Lain Ta laughed at us, the two farang who knew nothing of poppies. “If you die,” the farmer said, “I won’t take any responsibility.”

His wife brought out dirty glasses of hot, clouded water. I rubbed the opium onto my teeth and gums, then sipped the foul, scalding liquid. “If you take several times you might get addicted,” Ar Lain Ta said.

“I’ll be back tomorrow,” I replied.

Nothing happened. No blissful jolt. No building waves of euphoria. Just a bitter, rootlike taste. I regarded the viss, oozing sap that would soon stain the paper wrapper the color of khaki.

“In my country, your viss would cost more than one million baht.”

Ar Lain Ta thoughtfully chewed betel. “There’s one thing I’m wondering,” he said. “If you can fetch one million baht out of a viss why don’t you people plant it yourselves? I’m willing to give you the seedlings.” We all had a good laugh, even Ar Lain Ta. Then the farmer grew serious.

“The American people have a means of living and they are so rich without planting poppies. This is a wonder for me. There must be suitable answer for this.”

“I am like a scribe,” I said, then made a writing motion. “I tell stories.”

“Do you have enough money to raise a family?” he asked. I considered my steep apartment rent, exorbitant car insurance, ludicrous cable-TV bills. All costly, complicated necessities of American life.

“No, not really.” Nothing a viss or two of heroin No. 4 couldn’t cure. From beneath the bamboo slats, a rooster crowed maniacally. I spilled the steaming contents of my glass through the floorboards and heard indignant clucking. The low roof pressed stale, hot air upon us. The other Pa-O sat and stared. Strange farang—to come so far, then not buy opium. To just talk of opium.

I fumbled in my knapsack, then produced a one hundred baht note. An offering to his family. I also gave Ar Lain Ta a black-ink Bic pen and a pack of Marlboro cigarettes.

“Our poison,” I said. “A famous cowboy cigarette.”

But Ar Lain Ta was far more interested in the cheap pen. He moved the stylus in tight circles on his arm, creating more dark magic. With seven mouths to feed and only five visses of opium, the poor farmer would need to summon prosperity and many good spirits to survive the year.

The return to Ho Mong: The truck like a sailboat on a wind-tossed sea, rising and dipping on mountain swells and troughs. The unmerciful afternoon sun an interrogator’s lamp. Dead teak leaves and pine needles blanketed in dust. My stomach pain … gone. Warm, comfortably numb on Pa-O opium. Good medicine. Better than Lomotil or Immodium. Tennis? Anyone? No tennis. The General called away to a meeting. Straighten up with a Shan shower, the cold water a baptism. Backpacker food for dinner, beef burgundy with near-rancid onion, Ken’s Italian dressing, ketchup. Chicken à la klong still better. No electricity tonight, only cheap Chinese candles. No nocturnal shitting. An opium miracle. Warm wax and sharp smoke and powdered Tang everywhere. A few screwdrivers, a shot of Sengjoe’s moonshine in the guest-house sitting room, then the bad news. The Salween River too far away, too close to the front lines. Too much danger. The General always said yes. Keeping face. And Sengjoe always at wit’s end to stretch the rules. The real, unspoken reason: Saturday was an unlucky day. Bad for travel. Bad for washing hair. Bad for everything. There were just two things to do at night in Ho Mong: get drunk and stay drunk. Another round of screwdrivers, another dead, empty soldier of Absolut. It was a race to see which we would exhaust first: vodka or baht. How long did we wish to stay? There was still plenty to see. Textile factory. Mushroom factory. Gem factory. Soldier factory. We would stay until Sunday, or until the Absolut and the Tang and the money disappeared.