Speed Demons

By Karl Taro Greenfeld

Jacky talks about killing him, slitting his throat from 3 till 9 and hanging him upside down so the blood drains out of him the way it ran from the baby pigs they used to slaughter in her village before a funeral feast. He deserves it, really, she says, for his freeloading, for his hanging around, for how he just stands there, spindly legged and narrow chested and pimple faced with his big yearning eyes, begging for another hit.

She has run out of methamphetamine, what the Thais call yaba (mad medicine), and she has become irritable and potentially violent. Jacky's cheeks are sunken, her skin pockmarked and her hair an unruly explosion of varying strands of red and brown. She is tall and skinny, and her arms and legs extend out from her narrow torso with its slightly protuberant belly like the appendages of a spider shortchanged on legs.

Sitting on the blue vinyl flooring of her Bangkok hut, Jacky leans her bare back against the plank wall, her dragon tattoos glistening with sweat as she trims her fingernails with a straight razor. It has been two days--no, three--without sleep, sitting in this hut and smoking the little pink speed tablets from sheets of tinfoil stripped from Krong Tip cigarette packets. Now, as the flushes of artificial energy recede and the realization surfaces that there's no more money anywhere in her hut, Jacky is crashing hard, and she hates everyone and everything. Especially Bing. She hates that sponging little punk for all the tablets he smoked a few hours ago--tablets she could be smoking right now. Back then, she had a dozen tablets packed into a plastic soda straw stuffed down her black wire-frame bra. The hut was alive with the chatter of half a dozen speed addicts, all pulling apart their Krong Tip packs and sucking in meth smoke through metal pipes. Now that the pills are gone, the fun is gone. And Bing, of course, he's long gone.

This slum doesn't have a name. The 5,000 residents call it Ban Chua Gan, which translates roughly as Do It Yourself Happy Homes. The expanse of jerry-built wood-frame huts with corrugated steel roofs sprawls in a murky bog in Bangkok's Sukhumvit district, in the shadow of 40-story office buildings and glass-plated corporate towers. The inhabitants migrated here about a decade ago from villages all around Thailand. Jacky came from Nakon Nayok, a province near Bangkok's Don Muang airport, seeking financial redemption in the Asian economic miracle. And for a while in the mid-'90s, conditions in this slum actually improved. Some of the huts had plumbing installed. Even the shabbiest shanties were wired for electricity. The main alleyways were paved. That was when Thailand's development and construction boom required the labor of every able-bodied person. There were shopping malls to be built, housing estates to be constructed, highways to be paved.

Around the same time, mad medicine began making its way into Do It Yourself Happy Homes. It had originally been the drug of choice for long-haul truck and bus drivers, but during the go-go '90s, it evolved into the working man's and woman's preferred intoxicant, gradually becoming more popular among Thailand's underclass than heroin and eventually replacing that opiate as the leading drug produced in the notorious Golden Triangle--the world's most prolific opium-producing region--where Myanmar (Burma), Thailand and Laos come together. While methamphetamines had previously been sold either in powdered or crystalline form, new labs in Burma, northern Thailand and China commoditized the methamphetamine business by pressing little tablets of the substance that now retail for about 50 baht ($1.20) each. At first only bar girls like Jacky smoked it. Then some of the younger guys who hung out with the girls tried it. Soon a few of the housewives began smoking, and finally some of the dads would take a hit or two when they were out of corn whiskey. Now it has reached the point that on weekend nights, it's hard to find anyone in the slum who isn't smoking the mad medicine.

When the yaba runs out after much of the slum's population has been up for two days bingeing, many of the inhabitants feel a bit like Jacky, cooped up in her squalid little hut, her mouth turned down into a scowl and her eyes squinted and empty and mean. She looks as if she wants something. And if she thinks you have what she wants, look out. She slices at her cuticles with the straight razor. And curses Bing.

But then Bing comes around the corner between two shanties and down the narrow dirt path to Jacky's hut. He stands looking lost and confused, as usual. Jacky pretends he's not there. She sighs, looking at her nails, and stage whispers to me that she hates him.

Bing, his long black hair half-tied into a ponytail, stands next to a cinder-block wall rubbing his eyes. Above his head, a thick trail of red army ants runs between a crack in the wall and a smashed piece of pineapple. He reaches into his pocket and pulls out a tissue in which he has wrapped four doa (bodies, slang for speed tablets). Jacky stops doing her nails, smiles and invites Bing back into her hut, asking sweetly, "Oh, Bing, where have you been?"

This mad medicine is the same drug that's called shabu in Japan and Indonesia, batu in the Philippines and bingdu in China. While it has taken scientists years to figure out the clinical pharmacology and neurological impact of ecstasy and other designer drugs, methamphetamines are blunt pharmaceutical instruments. The drug encourages the brain to flood the synapses with the neurotransmitter dopamine--the substance your body uses to reward itself when you, say, complete a difficult assignment at the office or finish a vigorous workout. And when the brain is awash in dopamine, the whole cardiovascular system goes into sympathetic overdrive, increasing your heart rate, pulse and even your respiration. You become, after that first hit of speed, gloriously, brilliantly, vigorously awake. Your horizon of aspiration expands outward, just as in your mind's eye your capacity for taking effective action to achieve your new, optimistic goals has also grown exponentially. Then, eventually, maybe in an hour, maybe in a day, maybe in a year, you run out of speed. And you crash.

In country after country throughout Asia, meth use skyrocketed during the '90s. And with the crash of the region's high-flying economies, the drug's use has surged again. The base of the drug--ephedrine--was actually first synthesized in Asia: a team of Japanese scientists derived it from the Chinese mao herb in 1892. Unlike ecstasy, which requires sophisticated chemical and pharmaceutical knowledge to manufacture, or heroin, whose base product, the poppy plant, is a vulnerable crop, ephedrine can be refined fairly easily into meth. This makes meth labs an attractive family business for industrious Asians, who set them up in converted bathrooms, farmhouses or even on the family hearth.

There is something familiar to me about Jacky and her little hut and her desperate yearning for more speed and even for the exhilaration and intoxication she feels when she's on the pipe. Because I've been there. Not in this exact room or with these people. But I've been on speed.

During the early '90s, I went through a period when I was smoking shabu with a group of friends in Tokyo. I inhaled the smoke from smoothed-out tinfoil sheets folded in two, holding a lighter beneath the foil so that the shards of shabu liquefied, turning to a thick, pungent, milky vapor. The smoke tasted like a mixture of turpentine and model glue; to this day I can't smell paint thinner without thinking of smoking speed.

The drug was euphorically powerful, convincing us that we were capable of anything. And in many ways we were. We were all young, promising, on the verge of exciting careers in glamorous fields. There was Trey, an American magazine writer, like me, in his 20s; Hiroko, a Japanese woman in her 30s who worked for a Tokyo women's magazine; Delphine, an aspiring French model; and Miki, an A. and R. man for a Japanese record label. When we would sit down together in my Nishi Azabu apartment to smoke the drug, our talk turned to grandiose plans and surefire schemes. I spoke of articles I would write. Delphine talked about landing a job doing a Dior lingerie catalog. Miki raved about a promising noise band he had just signed. Sometimes the dealer, a lanky fellow named Haru, would hang around and smoke with us, and we would be convinced that his future was surely just as bright as all of ours. There was no limit to what we could do, especially if we put our speed-driven minds to work.

It's always that way in the beginning: all promise and potential fun. The drug is like a companion telling you that you're good enough, handsome enough and smart enough, banishing all the little insecurities to your subconscious, liberating you from self doubts yet making you feel totally and completely alive.

I don't know that it helped me write better; I don't believe meth really helps you in any way at all. But in those months, it became arguably the most important activity in my life. Certainly it was the most fun. And I looked forward to Haru's coming over with another $150 baggie of shabu, the drug resembling a little oily lump of glass. Then we would smoke, at first only on weekends. But soon we began to do it on weekdays whenever I had a free evening. At first only with my friends. Then sometimes I smoked alone. Then mostly alone.

The teens and twentysomethings in Ban Chua Gan also like to smoke yaba, but they look down on 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'll buy a couple of tablets from Bing's mother, who deals. But they tell you they're different from Bing and the hard-core users. "For one thing," Big alibis, "Bing hasn't left the 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. This weekend, like most weekends, he'll be racing his bike with the other guys from the neighborhood, down at Bangkok's superslum Klong Toey. That's why tonight, a few days before the race, he is working on his bike, removing a few links of the engine chain to lower the gear ratio and give the bike a little more pop off the line. He kneels down with a lighted candle next to him, his hands greasy and black as he works to reattach the chain to the gear sprockets. Around him a few teenage boys and girls are gathered, smoking cigarettes, some squatting on the balls of their feet, their intent faces peering down at scattered engine parts. The sound is the clatter of adolescent boys. Whether the vehicle in question is a '65 Mustang or a '99 Honda GSR motorcycle, the posturing of the too cool motorhead trying to goose a few more horsepower out of his engine while at the same time look bitchin' in front of a crowd of slightly younger female spectators is identical whether in Bakersfield or Bangkok.

The slang for smoking speed in Thai is keng rot, literally racing, the same words used to describe the weekend motorcycle rallying. The bikers' lives revolve around these two forms of keng rot. They look forward all week to racing their bikes against other gangs from other neighborhoods. And while they profess to have nothing but disgust for the slum's hard-core addicts, by 4 a.m. that night 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 out. Big shrugs, waving away the illogic of his statement, the drug's powerful reach pulling him away from the need to make sense. He says whatever he wants now, and he resents being questioned. "What do you want from me? I'm just trying to have fun."

In Jacky's hut, Bing and a few bar girls are seated with their legs folded under, taking hits from the sheets of tinfoil. As Jacky applies a thick layer of foundation makeup to her face and dabs on retouching cream and then a coating of powder, she talks about how tonight she has to find a foreign customer so she can get the money to visit her children out in Nakon Nayok. Her two daughters and son live with her uncle. Jacky sees them once a month, and she talks about how she likes to bring them new clothes and cook for them. When she talks about her kids, her almond-shaped eyes widen. "I used to dream of opening a small shop, like a gift shop or a 7-Eleven. Then I could take care of my children and make money. I used to dream about it all the time, and I even believed it was possible, that it was just barely out of reach."

Jacky was a motorbike messenger, shuttling packages back and forth throughout Bangkok's busy Chitlom district until she was laid off after the 1997 devaluation of the baht. "Now I don't think about the gift shop anymore. Smoking yaba pushes thoughts about my children to the back of my mind. It's good for that. Smoking means you don't have to think about the hard times." Bing nods his head, agreeing: "When I smoke, it makes everything seem a little better. I mean, look at this place--how can I stop?"

Bing's mother Yee slips off her sandals as she steps into the hut, clutching her 14-month-old baby. She sits down next to her son, and while the baby scrambles to crawl from her lap, she begins pulling the paper backing from a piece of tinfoil, readying the foil for a smoke. Her hands are a whir of finger-flashing activity--assembling and disassembling a lighter, unclogging the pipe, unwrapping the tablets, straightening the foil, lighting the speed and then taking the hit. She exhales finally, blowing smoke just above her baby's face. Bing asks his mother for a hit. She shakes her head. She doesn't give discounts or freebies, not even to her own son.

I ask Yee if she ever tells Bing he should stop smoking yaba. "I tell him he shouldn't do so much, that it's bad for him. But he doesn't listen."

Perhaps she lacks credibility, since she smokes herself?

"I don't smoke that much," she insists.

"She's right," Bing agrees. "Since she doesn't smoke that much, I should listen to her."

"And he's only 15 years old," Yee adds.

Bing reminds her he's 17.

"I don't know where the years go," Yee says, taking another hit.

For the countries on the front lines of the meth war, trying to address the crisis with tougher enforcement has had virtually no effect on curtailing the numbers of users or addicts. Asia has some of the toughest drug laws in the world. In Thailand, China, Taiwan and Indonesia, even a low-level drug-trafficking or -dealing conviction can mean a death sentence. Yet yaba is openly sold in Thailand's slums and proffered in Jakarta's nightclubs, and China's meth production continues to boom. Even Japan, renowned for its strict antidrug policies, has had little success in stemming speed abuse. Most likely, these countries and societies will have to write off vast swaths of their populations as drug casualties, like the American victims of the '80s crack epidemic.

Asia's medical and psychiatric infrastructure is already being overwhelmed by the number of meth abusers crashing and seeking help. But in most of the region, counseling facilities are scarce, and recovery is viewed as a matter of willpower and discipline rather than a tenuous and slow spiritual and psychological rebuilding process. Drug-treatment centers are usually run like a cross between boot camp and prison. Beds are scarce as addicts seek the meager resources available. In China, for example, the nearly 750 state-run rehab centers are filled to capacity; in Thailand the few recovery centers suffer from a chronic shortage of staff and beds. While the most powerful tools for fighting addiction in the West--12-step programs derived from Alcoholics Anonymous--are available in Asia, they are not widely disseminated and used.

What started out as a diversion for me and my Tokyo crowd degenerated in a few months into the chronic drug use of Jacky and her crowd. I began to smoke alone to begin my days. In the evening I'd take Valium or halcyon or cercine or any of a number of sedatives to help me calm down. When I stopped smoking for a few days just to see if I could, a profound depression would overcome me. Nothing seemed worthwhile. Nothing seemed fun. Every book was torturously slow. Every song was criminally banal. The sparkle and shine had been sucked out of life so completely that my world became a fluorescent-lighted, decolorized, saltpetered version of the planet I had known before. And my own prospects? Absolutely dismal. I would sit in that one-bedroom Nishi Azabu apartment and consider the sorry career I had embarked upon, these losers I associated with compounding the very long odds that I would ever amount to anything.

These feelings, about the world and my life, seemed absolutely real. I could not tell for a moment that this was a neurological reaction brought on by the withdrawal of the methamphetamine. My brain had stopped producing dopamine in normal amounts because it had come to rely upon the speed kicking in and running the show. Researchers now report that as much as 50% of the dopamine-producing cells in the brain can be damaged after prolonged exposure to relatively low levels of methamphetamine. In other words, the depression is a purely chemical state. Yet it feels for all the world like the result of empirical, clinical observation. And then, very logically, you realize there is one surefire solution, the only way to feel better: more speed.

I kept at that cycle for a few years and started taking drugs other than methamphetamine until I hit my own personal bottom. I spent six weeks in a drug-treatment center working out a plan for living that didn't require copious amounts of methamphetamines or tranquilizers. I left rehab five years ago. I haven't had another hit of shabu--or taken any drugs--since then. But I am lucky. Of that crowd who used to gather in my Tokyo apartment, I am the only one who has emerged clean and sober. Trey, my fellow magazine writer, never really tried to quit and now lives back at home with his aging parents. He is nearly 40, still takes speed--or Ritalin or cocaine or whichever uppers he can get his hands on--and hasn't had a job in years. Delphine gave up modeling after a few years and soon was accepting money to escort wealthy businessmen around Tokyo. She finally ended up working as a prostitute. Hiroko did stop taking drugs. But she has been in and out of psychiatric hospitals and currently believes drastic plastic surgery is the solution to her problems. Miki has been arrested in Japan and the U.S. on drug charges and is now out on parole and living in Tokyo. And Haru, the dealer, I hear he's dead.

Despite all I know about the drug, despite what I have seen, I am still tempted. The pull of the drug is tangible and real, almost like a gravitational force compelling me to want to use it again--to feel just once more the rush and excitement and the sense, even if it's illusory, that life does add up, that there is meaning and form to the passing of my days. Part of me still wants it.

At 2 A.M. on a Saturday, Big and his fellow bikers from Do It Yourself Happy Homes are preparing for a night of bike racing by smoking more yaba and, as if to get their 125-cc bikes in a parallel state of high-octane agitation, squirting STP performance goo from little plastic packets into their gas tanks. The bikes are tuned up, and the mufflers are loosened so that the engines revving at full throttle sound like a chain saw cutting bone: splintering, ear-shattering screeches that reverberate up and down the Sukhumvit streets. The bikers ride in a pack, cutting through alleys, running lights, skirting lines of stalled traffic, slipping past one another as they cut through the city smog. This is their night, the night they look forward to all week during mornings at school or dull afternoons pumping gas. And as they ride massed together, you can almost feel the surge of pride oozing out of them, intimidating other drivers to veer out of their way.

On Na Ranong avenue, next to the Klong Toey slum, they meet up with bikers from other slums. They have been holding these rallies for a decade, some of the kids first coming on the backs of their older brothers' bikes. Ken rot is a ritual by now, as ingrained in Thai culture as the speed they smoke to get up for the night of racing. The street is effectively closed off to non-motorcyclists and pedestrians. The bikers idle along the side of the road and then take off in twos and threes, popping wheelies, the usual motorcycle stunts. But souped up and fitted with performance struts and tires, these bikes accelerate at a terrifying rate, and that blast off the line makes for an unstable and dangerous ride if you're on the back of one of them. It is the internal-combustion equivalent of yaba: fast, fun, treacherous. And likely to result, eventually, in a fatal spill. But if you're young and Thai and loaded on mad medicine, you feel immortal, and it doesn't occur to you that this night of racing will ever, really, have to end.

There are still moments when even hard-core addicts like Jacky can recapture the shiny, bright exuberance of the first few times they tried speed. Tonight, as Jacky dances at Angel's bar with a Belgian who might take her back to his hotel room, she's thinking that she'll soon have enough money to visit her children, and it doesn't seem so bad. Life seems almost manageable. A few more customers, and maybe one will really fall for her and pay to move her to a better neighborhood, to rent a place where even her children could live. Maybe she could open that convenience store after all.

By the next afternoon, however, all the promise of the previous evening has escaped from the neighborhood like so much exhaled smoke. Jacky's customer lost interest and found another girl. Even the bike racing fell apart after the cops broke up the first few rallying points. And now, on a hazy, rainy Sunday, Jacky and a few of the girls are back in her hut. They're smoking, almost desperately uploading as much speed as possible to ward off this drab day and this squalid place.

Jacky pauses as she adjusts the flame on a lighter. "Why don't you smoke?" she asks me.

She tells me it would make her more comfortable if I would join her. I'm standing in the doorway to Jacky's hut. About me are flea-infested dogs and puddles of stagnant water several inches deep with garbage, and all around is the stench of smoldering trash. The horror of this daily existence is tangible. I don't like being in this place, and I find depressing the idea of living in a world that has places like this in it. And I know a hit of the mad medicine is the easiest way to make this all seem bearable. Taking a hit, I know, is a surefire way of feeling good. Right now. And I want it.

But I walk away. And while I hope Jacky and Bing and Big can one day do the same, I doubt they ever can. They have so little to walk toward.