In 1988, I lived on the backpackery Khaosan Road, Bangkok, in a hotel which offered heroin on room service. It went like this: in the morning, you padded down the teakwood stairs to the little kitchen and you asked the pretty Thai girl for breakfast – scrambled eggs, bacon, ‘extras’. Ten minutes later the same sweet girl would arrive in your room and graciously set down your tray, with scrambled eggs, orange juice – plus two straws of China White heroin, neatly paired on a saucer.
The police would do a token raid and arrest some poor Euro-American guest and give him ten years
After that you spent the rest of the day smoking your heroin, eating tiny bananas, and lying in a hammock, chatting with all the zoned-out Italians in the hotel (young Italians in the late 1980s loved heroin). The next day you did the same, then the next. My friend and I meant to spend only a couple of weeks in that guest house. We ended up living there for three months.
During that time, we learned the backstory: heroin was absolutely illegal, but the hotel was paying off the local corrupt coppers. Every so often a farang would overdose and die in his room, and his corpse would be left in the middle of the street to be carried away, then the police would do a token raid and arrest some poor Euro-American guest and give him ten years in the ‘Bangkok Hilton’ (this nearly happened to us). But then life languidly carried on – scrambled eggs, extras, etc.
This remarkably stupid, exhilaratingly mad experience set me up for a long life of continued experimentation with drugs. Recently, for a memoir I am writing, I sat down and worked out a list of all the substances I have deliberately ingested to alter my mental state. Here it is (though I might have missed a few, what with being on drugs): valium, marijuana, LSD, codeine, dihydrocodeine, perfume, temazepam, morphine sulphate, hashish, hash oil, opium, amphetamine sulphate, captagon, pure liquid cacao, Xanax, dexedrine, Gee’s Linctus (cough syrup), nitrous oxide, DMT, ephedrine, amyl nitrate, tramadol, heroin, cocaine, nutmeg, morning glory seeds, ecstasy, tobacco, alcohol, qat, freebase cocaine, psilocybin mushrooms, Tippex (for younger readers, that’s typewriter correction fluid), ayahuasca, cinnamon, crack.
It’s quite a list of psychogenic pleasures, it is also a poignant list of things I no longer do (apart from booze), As happens to most drug abusers, in the end this insanity caught up with me, and about 20 years ago I stopped it all – because it was killing me. Despite going relatively sober, I have remained resolutely libertarian about drugs. From all that experience, I know drugs can be horribly dangerous, I also know drugs can sometimes be fun, wild, even life-changing.
I’ve always agreed with T.S. Eliot who famously said, ‘humankind cannot bear very much reality’. There is something about the human condition which means we will always seek to alter it psychologically. We’ve been fermenting beer since at least 10,000 BC. So what’s the point in trying to stop it? Let the state – I long believed – carefully sell mind-bending substances, and let the nation, rather than villainous dealers, benefit from the taxes.
However, over the last year, months, even weeks, I have done a complete volte face. Why? Because I have been to modern urban America, I’ve been to Texas and the rest. I have seen what the latest synthetic opioids, like fentanyl, or its even worse non-opioid successor, tranq, are doing to Americans. I have driven through a relatively small city in Kentucky and spent 20 minutes trying not to run over the stumbling shuddering fent addicts with their pants round their knees. I’ve also heard personal stories of what fentanyl and tranq can do, how quickly they destroy ordinary lives. I’ve also seen the stats: 110,000 Americans died of a drug overdose last year, and the situation is getting worse.
These new drugs are too dangerous and too addictive. It used to be a ludicrous exaggeration peddled by the authorities that one toke, puff, or pill can get you hooked for life; with these new narcotics it is largely true, and the addiction that ensues is hideously strong because any withdrawal, any attempt to stop taking the drugs, is harrowingly painful. It is also true that a tiny amount can kill, and yet people will take the risk, because the high is intense. For that reason, dealers are now lacing other drugs – coke, ketamine, ecstasy, weed – with fentanyl, so the stoners think ‘Wow that was good,’ and they return to the same dealer (unless they die).
What, then, can we do? If legalisation is increasingly impossible, and if these drugs are spreading from north America, as it seems we are running out of options. First, and most optimistically, we could charge Big Pharma with the task of creating even better drugs, with better highs, just as addictive but entirely harmless. The idea would be to displace fentanyl with a superior yet cheaper offering (taxed, regulated and widely dispensed).
This might sound mad, but then the only other option is possibly madder, and certainly crueller. I’m talking about the Singapore method. Hang the dealers, jail the users, enforce laws that are so draconian no one ever bothers, as it is not worth the risk. This method has a major downside: starting from here we’d have to execute a whole lot of dealers and build hundreds of new prisons for users until we have rinsed drugs out of society. The method also has an upside: it works. There is virtually no drug abuse in Singapore.
Which of the options we should choose, I do not know. I’d prefer the first, but perhaps it is utopian. Either way, we can no longer ignore this 21st century drug problem. Even my crazy younger self, living in that mad hotel in Bangkok, would probably see the sense of this. As long as I could speak to him before breakfast.
Comments