“Getting to like chili peppers is like playing with fire,” Dr. Rozin said. “Humans tend to put themselves voluntarily in situations which their body tells them to avoid—but humans tend to get pleasures out of these things, such as eating chili peppers or going on roller coaster rides. We are the only species that enjoys such things. No one has ever found an animal that likes to frighten itself.”
It’s Not Whisky
The first thing you have to know about Thai whisky is that it isn’t whisky. When I moved to Thailand and was offered the local brew by Thai friends, I declined—no offense, please— explaining that I’d quit drinking bourbon whisky years earlier because the older I got, its strength went one way and I went the other, so I found it wise to drink something else. Also, when it came to Scotch whisky—sorry, but I always thought it tasted like iodine smelled. I was, I said, a beer and wine person now.
My friends reassured me. They said Thai whisky is not like whisky in the West and, before I could say no, a tot was splashed into a glass over ice and soda water was added with a squeeze of fresh lime. Politely, I took a sip. Hey! It didn’t taste like whisky at all. It was mild and sweet and, I discovered as the meal progressed, it also was the perfect drink to accompany the fiery Thai cuisine.
So, if it isn’t whisky, what is it? The dictionary says whisky’s an alcoholic liquor distilled from the fermented mash of grain, barley for Scotch and in the making of bourbon, maize. Thai whisky—much of it, anyway—is made from sugar cane molasses and rice, or merely molasses, giving it the body and flavor of, well, rum. And those made only with molasses, without any grain at all, are rum. No Thai whisky, I learned, was made from rice or any other grain exclusively.
“I don’t think the Thais even have a word for ‘rum’,” said D. Kanchanalakshana, who followed his father into the Thai whisky business and now is the deputy director of production at the company that makes the Kingdom’s most popular brand, Mekhong. “Anything brown, they called it ‘whisky’. That was true a long time ago when the first western whiskys were imported, and it’s true now.”
I learned there were other differences, as well. Thai whisky can be aged—something that’s done in the West to true whiskys, bettering its value and, most insist, its taste—but it rarely is. Mekhong Superior, available in a limited number of locations, is aged five years, for instance, but the government requires only thirty days. The bottling date can be read on the backside of the label by looking through the glass. Ahhhh! March. That was a very good month!
Young, old...it matters not. Thai whisky is as much a part of Thai culture as sanuk and mai pen rai . Throughout the Kingdom, no matter what the occasion, and perhaps especially when there is no “occasion” at all, the tall, round and short, flat bottles are brought out, even at Buddhist ordination ceremonies and funerals.
Thanit Thamsukati, a former Bangkok Post reporter who now works for the company that makes Mekhong as well as two other “whiskys,” Hongthong and Saengsong, began to sing soon after we met. It was a popular Thai ditty about whisky, he said, where the drinker got so happy he fell into the well. A perfect Thai lyric theme, I thought. This was, after all the Land of Smiles. Where I came from, the United States, where whisky’s praises are also sung, I don’t think anyone ever fell into a well. Usually it was into a depression or a fight or divorce.
No one is certain when alcohol was first consumed in what is now Thailand, but likely it was, as in most places, for centuries a domestic activity. Even today in many villages illegal (untaxed) home brews are fermented and distilled from corn and rice, playing a considerable role in an individual’s or village’s social life. No northern Thai hill tribe “bride price” paid for the groom, for example, would not include some homegrown brew along with the silver and a hog or two.
Most Thai whisky now is sold under a system of concessions that dates back more than 150 years, when the kingdom created cash-producing monopolies not only in alcoholic spirits, but opium, gambling, and the lottery. (The lottery is still operated by the government.) The most recent concession—currently pumping more than US$440 million into government coffers annually—ended in 1999, and new companies entered the field when the bidding resumed for subsequent contracts, although the usual names prevailed. In recent years, the government’s willingness to open the market also saw several privately owned companies emerge. The Saengsong, Chao Praya, V.O., and Black Cat labels, for instance, captured about ten percent of the market.
One of them, Black Cat, initially was known as Maeo Dam, Thai for “black cat,” and it sold modestly, then two years ago it was oddly relaunched in its English translation in a television campaign directed at the Thai market. The award-winning commercial told a story—that no foreigner could hope to understand—about a village loan shark. The villager in debt was not making his payments and the godfather wondered how he could afford to drink whisky if he was as impoverished as he claimed. The answer, of course, was Black Cat. The whisky was that cheap!
Not all Thai whisky is drunk by Thais, just most of it. While there are longtime foreign residents living in Thailand who have developed a preference for the light, sweet taste, and a number of visitors give it a try in the same way they order Thai food and a local beer, almost all of the locally produced whisky is drunk by Thais.
The three-dollar-a-liter cost is the main reason. Before the economic bubble burst in 1997, Thailand was the largest market in the world for Johnny Walker black label whisky, one of the world’s most expensive and prestigious spirits—and that’s in volume, not per capita. But even those impressive sales were dwarfed by the local whiskys, seventy percent of it “white” (colorless) and sold in the rural areas, with caramel coloring added to the remaining thirty percent largely for urban sales.
(All producers boast that virtually all ingredients are locally sourced. Mekhong, for instance, adds a few Chinese herbs and spices to the mix for flavoring—thus qualifying the product for the name “liqueur”—but says that 99.9 percent of the blend is river water, sugar cane molasses and sticky rice. Broken rice is used by some producers because its cheaper and there’s more surface to which the mold can attach during fermentation, and sticky rice is used rather than another kind because of its high starch content, which means there’ll be more sugar in the finished product.)
There’s also more booze for the buck, said Mekhong’s Khun Thanit. The alcohol content was lower than in western whiskys, thirty five percent in the colored brew, twenty eight percent in the colorless, versus forty two percent in Scotch, “but if you have to choose between a bottle of Mekhong and four small beers that’ll cost about the same, you go for the whisky.” It’s more social, too. Traditionally, one person buys the whisky and shares it with friends, and a bottle can last all evening or afternooon. Four beers are bought individually, thus the bonding ritual is gone and so is the beer, in twenty minutes.
“Chok dee krup (or kaa)!” is the standard toast, meaning good luck. And the whisky is always sipped. Good whisky is never, ever gulped, even when it’s rum.
Life is Cheap, Mai Pen Rai
Piss in a Cup
My thirty-year-old son was visiting from the United States. It was Friday night and we planned to leave Bangkok in the morning by train to go to the rice-growing village near the Cambodian border where I was to be married on Monday. My son, Nick, is a Mormon, so he doesn’t drink, but I had some business to do with the owner of the Q Bar, one of the city’s most popular upscale nightclubs, so that was our evening destination.
Nick drank a Coke and I had a Heineken and it was about ten o’clock when we decided to leave. I opened the door and there, to my great surprise, stood a wall of Bangkok cops. I thought that there’d been a fight or perhaps even a shooting outside that we hadn’t heard. I excused myself politely and made to walk around the boys in brown and the officer nearest to me held up his hand in a manner that made it clear I wasn’t leaving. It was then that I noticed a table had been set up nearby and that on it were some paper cups.
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br /> “Uh, Nick,” I said, “you’re about to be told to piss in a cup. It’s part of the country’s anti-drug campaign. Everybody in the bar will now be tested for drugs. The cops will take us, one at a time, into the toilet and watch us as we give them a urine sample. They will then pour it into that flask of blue liquid on the table and if it turns purple, we’re going to miss the train.”
This sort of thing had been going on for some time as a part of the new prime minister’s crusade to make Thailand drug-free, a key part of what he called his “New Social Order.” Cops had been raiding bars for several months, conducting on-the-spot tests for two of the city’s favored drugs, amphetamines—called yaa baa, or “crazy medicine”—and ecstasy. Arrests had been few, but the inconvenience to the bars and their customers had been enormous; if the place had a good crowd, as the Q Bar did on weekends, it might be dawn before the last patron was released. I was glad we were first in line.
Nick and I did as we were told and then watched a cop pour the samples one at a time into the flask and stir it around. The color didn’t change and we were told we could depart. We stood around for a few minutes to watch. The cop emptied the flask following each test, poured in more of the blue liquid without any attempt to clean the flask, added the next poor soul’s urine, and swirled it around with the same swizzle stick that he’d used in ours. What if we’d tested positive? (A reaction that was known to be caused by numerous legal pharmaceuticals, such as anti-histamines.) Would the same unwashed flask and stirrer continue to be used, and contaminate the next sample?
It wasn’t a question that I felt compelled to ask and we walked home and the next morning we made our scheduled eight-hour train ride upcountry and on Monday, the first day of January, 2003, I was married.
Exactly one month later, the prime minister got serious and took his “War on Drugs” nationwide, promising a country the size of France with a population of more than sixty million that it would be completely drug-free in three months. (Don’t laugh. The same guy once said he’d end Bangkok’s traffic problems in six months. He was serving in another prime minister’s cabinet, five years earlier.) Lists of suspected drug users and dealers were compiled in every province at the Interior Minister’s order. Provincial governors and police were told that those who failed to eliminate a prescribed percentage of the names from their blacklists would be fired. In two months, the body count surpassed two thousand and the newspapers were accusing the cops of “extra-judicial killings.”
The police denied the charge and said the dealers were killing each other in battles over territory and to eliminate people who might snitch to the cops. The Interior Minister said that he didn’t like the use of the word “killed,” asking media to say “expired.” After that, the government continued to announce figures for suspects arrested—a figure reported to be over ninety thousand—but stopped releasing the number of deaths. At the end of the ninety days, when the Prime Minister declared his mission accomplished and now reported a body count of 1,612, the actual number was thought to be more than two thousand three hundred. By year’s end, the official number of dead dropped to 1,320, only fifty-seven of them reportedly killed by police.
The U.S. State Department, Amnesty International, the United Nations, national and international NGOs criticized Thailand harshly and in the first report by Thailand’s own National Human Rights Commission, created by a progressive new constitution, lamented what it called (quoting The Nation of August 6, 2004) “the drastic deterioration of civil liberties and the ever-growing, intertwined powers of the state and groups with vested interests.” The government was accused of fomenting a “culture of authoritarianism,” saying it had “committed gross human rights violations, particularly with its brutal war on drugs, in its quest to promote state power.”
The government’s response was to blame the commission for its “disservice” to the country, saying that its report had (now quoting Kavi Chongkittavorn, The Nation’s editor, August 9) “undermined the country’s international standing.” As for all those killed in the War on Drugs, the government ordered the police to conduct an investigation, giving them a month deadline. A year later, no report had been submitted.
Drugs have played a major role in Thailand’s history and its government. For centuries, the monarchy held a monopoly on the sale of opium (along with gambling, alcohol, and a national lottery) and not until 1954 was the residue of the poppy plant and its byproduct heroin outlawed, by which time the police themselves figured prominently in the trade. As chronicled in David K. Wyatt’s authoritative Thailand: A Short History (1984) and quoting a columnist who wrote under the name Chang Noi in The Nation (Jan. 20, 2003), the Golden Triangle was developing into the world’s primary area of production when the chief of the national police, General Phao Siriyanon, used his men to “move the goods from the Triangle to the world market. Police escorts met the convoys at the Burmese border and took them to Chiang Mai or Lampang. From there the goods traveled to Bangkok by train or plane. The marine police then guarded their transfer to freighters in the Gulf.
“In 1955 the police made a record capture of twenty [metric] tons of opium, and Phao himself collected a massive reward on behalf of an informer. When asked to display the haul, Phao said it had been thrown in the sea. The public disbelief almost undid him. On another occasion, a seized cache of high-grade opium turned out to be low-grade mud.”
It wasn’t until the 1990s—with the infusion of tens of millions of dollars from the United States, police and army raids on opium farms in the north coordinated by the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency, and a royally supported crop substitution program—that the plant was marginalized as a source of income for mainly hill tribe minorities who had used opium for millennia not only as a cash crop but as their primary medicine.
About the same time, amphetamines swept across Thailand like a monsoon rain, quickly becoming the national buzz of choice. Simply and cheaply produced primarily in China and Burma, it found a market in Thailand that ranged from poor truck drivers and construction workers to rich university students. This was followed by ecstacy and, to a lesser degree, cocaine and LSD and ketamine, the last one easily manufactured, with ingredients purchased at the neighborhood pharmacy, by anyone with access to a microwave oven. This is what led to Thailand’s “piss in a cup” campaign.
According to Father Joe Maier, an American Catholic priest who worked with the poor in the Bangkok slums for more than thirty years, the War on Drugs was a complete and utter failure.
All it did, he said, was make the dealers smarter and quadruple the price of yaa baa, which drove those who could no longer afford it to seek other chemical highs—among them smoking powdered Tylenol and mosquito coil. Father Joe, whose Human Development Foundation administers Bangkok’s most modern AIDS hospice, also points to the damage done by the government’s refusal to introduce a needle exchange program for intravenous drug users, many of whom end up in his and the government’s care.
Marijuana, generally known in Thailand by its Hindi term, ganja, has a more benign history, although it was from the 1960s onwards a cash crop grown by the Thai “mafia” for export largely to Europe and North America; one of the favored smokes in the U.S. at that time was a stem of sticky flowers and buds, tightly tied around a sliver of bamboo and called Thai Stick. It was also commonly grown as an herb used in household and commercial cooking, along with basil, chilis and lemongrass, especially in Thailand’s rural eastern seaboard and poor northeast. Long after its cultivation and sale were made illegal, if you were a known customer in many small restaurants, you could have it added to your curry or soup at no extra cost.
Although such open use was curtailed and traffic of all illegal drugs was driven further underground by 2004, drug use continued in much the same way it did in hundreds of countries around the world, most remarkably in the United States, the world’s largest market. With the yaa baa factories getting support from the Myanmar (Burma) government and huge profits to be made e
ither selling the stuff in Thailand or moving it through the Land of Smiles for export elsewhere. Although millions of pills were confiscated and more alleged dealers were shot while resisting arrest, and over sixty percent of court cases involved drugs, the traffic seemed little affected.
How did the average, non-drug using Thai citizen feel about all this? Mai pen rai seemed to be the phrase of the day: never mind, the recently deceased and those incarcerated in jails—built to hold about ninety thousand (now housing over two hundred and fifty thousand)—were a scourge, and Thailand was improved by their removal from the streets or life. NGOs, academics, and some of the media continued to grumble about the damage to human rights and the justice system, but few others seemed much to care.
At the same time, with the royal family’s financial support, a five thousand-six hundred-square-meter museum called the Hall of Opium opened in Golden Triangle Park in Chiang Saen, where the Mekong River separates Thailand from Laos and Myanmar. The aim, quoting the museum brochure, was “to further educate the public at large on the serious effects narcotics pose to the national economy and society as well as to the people’s physical and mental well-being.”
What once had been considered medicinal, or recreational, and a cash crop for an ethnic minority, was now simultaneously regarded as a threat to the nation’s health and, according to the Bangkok Post, “a world-class [tourist] attraction.”
Violence
Thais are non-confrontational, they are a people of accommodation, gentleness and peace. Thailand is the Land of Smiles, a place of harmony and courtesy where showing anger is a major taboo and the cool heart ( jai yen) is sought and praised. Thailand is where no matter what happens, you say, “Mai pen rai .” Never mind. Que sera, sera . Water off my back. And get on with your life.
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