In the parking lot of the railway station we all squeezed into the cab of a pickup truck. The son took the driver’s seat and mentioned offhandedly that he first needed to go to a shopping mall. I was too distracted to protest. We drove past the expressway on-ramp and were immediately mired in traffic. What should have been an hour-and-a-half drive ended up taking nearly four hours. I had no previous idea about the detox schedule at the monastery, but upon arriving I learned that the delay had caused me to miss that day’s treatment. The news frightened me. I contemplated going home and returning the following day. Pain was what I feared, and without any kind of treatment I was sure the night would be excruciating. But it was too late to turn back. I knew that if I went home and spread out the mat and arranged the layout and lit the lamp, I would never leave my apartment again.
The monastery’s reception area was a mango orchard, the ground graveled to keep down the dust. Next to an outdoor shrine under a banyan tree was a doorway into the registration office, but the only things office-like inside were a couple of desks and filing cabinets. The space looked like a typical room in a Thai Buddhist monastery, its walls covered with religious posters and laminated portraits of unsmiling elderly monks. Although the windows were open to the outside air, the surrounding trees kept the office cool, quiet, and dark.
A Westerner with a German accent and attired in the toga-like robe of a Theravada Buddhist monk introduced himself and began checking me in. Phra Hans (phra is the Thai honorific for religious figures, both mortal and immortal) copied down information from my passport and explained the rules. I had to sign a commitment to stay a minimum of seven days. The treatment was free but donations were welcome. There were no phone calls or visitors permitted during the first five days while I was undergoing detox. Each day began at 4:30 A.M. and lights were turned out at 9:30 P.M. Before taking the herbal cure I had to take a Buddhist vow to renounce all drug use. And then the most important rule: The cure was a onetime thing. If I left the wat after treatment and had a relapse—breaking my Buddhist vow in the process—I was not going to be allowed back in for another try. There were no second chances at Wat Tham Krabok. Period.
I gave up my passport and valuables—my wallet and mobile phone—to be locked away in the monastery safe. Jewelry wasn’t allowed inside the detox facility, but I was allowed to keep the Ganesha amulet that I was wearing on a silver chain around my neck. Money wasn’t allowed inside either. I traded about forty dollars’ worth of Thai baht for Wat Tham Krabok scrip—banknotes crudely printed on colored paper—to pay for meals and snacks. I signed a release form and the agreement to stay at least seven days.
Next, I met the monk who supervised the detox facility, which turned out to be a fenced-in section within the much larger monastery grounds. Phra Art was a Thai of about thirty who as a civilian had been a roadie for a rock band. Like nearly all of the monks at the monastery, he first came to Wat Tham Krabok with an addiction—which in Art’s case was alcoholism. Later I learned that a small percentage of addicts who took the cure, including a handful of Westerners, were ordained as monks or became nuns after treatment so they could prolong their sanctuary at the wat indefinitely.
Art looked through the toiletries that I had brought along, making sure the mouthwash was nonalcoholic (an unofficial Wat Tham Krabok website had explained in detail what was allowed), that the tube of toothpaste was new, and that other toiletries were still sealed. Then he watched as I undressed and changed into the detox facility’s uniform, a baggy, pajama-like outfit based on clothing traditionally worn by farmers in Thailand’s north. The shirt was collarless, and in place of buttons there were cloth ties that hung down the front like shoestrings. The knee-length pants were kept up by a drawstring, and were so baggy that I initially mistook them for a laundry bag and tried to put my civilian clothes into them. Both shirt and pants were made of a stiff synthetic that would dry quickly, and were dyed the same bright maroon color. On the back of the shirt were stenciled markings that any Thai would recognize as belonging to the monastery. In fact, the whole outfit was so bright and unusual that anybody wearing it outside the monastery would stand out like an escaped convict.
My shoes were traded for a pair of flip-flops that were waiting for me on a concrete slab outside the back door as I left the office and was guided to an open-air pavilion known in Thai as a sala. There, I stepped out of my flip-flops and climbed a low flight of stairs up into the pavilion. Inside, the polished wooden floor of the structure was bare except for an altar crowded with Buddhas. I sat before the altar, taking care to point the soles of my feet away from it, and waited for the monk who was supposed to come and read me my vow. Outside, the waning sunlight barely penetrated the tall mango trees. Inside, the sala was darkening, the ceiling fans were motionless, and mosquitoes buzzed my ears.
From my raised position I saw a van arrive and discharge a large, working-class Thai family made up of parents and small children, and accompanying a man in his early twenties whose limp and bruises told of a recent beating. I watched them all go into the registration office. About twenty minutes later, the man—not much more than a kid really—emerged from the office wearing a maroon uniform, and joined me in the pavilion. A second Thai man, about the same age and class as the first and also wearing the detox center uniform, was then escorted into the sala by a young monk. The second man needed help lowering himself to the floor, and once he was sitting he began nodding off. I wondered what drug he was on.
An old Thai monk wearing a faded brown robe entered the pavilion and wordlessly seated himself between the altar of Buddhas and the three of us uniformed addicts as we held our hands before us in a prayer-like gesture of respect known in Thai as the wai. The monk was fat and in his fifties—or perhaps he was a decade older or a decade younger. Buddhist monks in Thailand seem ageless, their lack of hair and eyebrows making their faces look smooth and enigmatic. It is amazing how much effect eyebrows have on the overall looks of a person: Shave them off and it’s as though the eyes are looking through a featureless mask. Theravada Buddhist monks adhere to a precept that forbids them from physically touching women, and purposely making themselves ugly is a way for them to avoid temptation.
The monk who would give the vow did not introduce himself. Instead he briefly looked at a book and then began to recite, and we addicts repeated what he said in unison. The vows were in formal Thai combined with Pali, an Indian language that is to Theravada Buddhism what Latin is to Catholicism. I repeated the vows as best I could, only fully comprehending what was probably the most important passage: a long list of drugs and my promise never to touch them. My own personal poison—yah fin in Thai—was on the list, but I also renounced many others, including ecstasy, ketamine, and at least two types of amphetamine. While reciting, the monk used the street names for these drugs, and a combination of my ignorance of Thai slang and modern narcotics in general meant that I had never heard of some of the drugs that I was swearing off.
Once the vows were said, Art, the supervising monk, met me at the foot of the stairs of the pavilion and led me to the gate of the detox facility. “Did you understand it?” he asked in Thai, referring to the vow I had just taken.
“Not everything but I got the gist of it,” I replied.
“Don’t break your vow or something bad will happen to you,” Art said with a smile to soften any confrontation in the threat. If I hadn’t been in Thailand so long I might have read his smile as an indication that he didn’t take what he was saying too seriously. Days later I heard Art say the same thing in English to a newly arrived Western addict. There was no smile that time. Thais who are around Westerners for any length of time soon realize that the elaborate social ballet that Thais perform in hopes of avoiding conflict is wasted on these outlanders.
Of course, I took my vow seriously. I was here to do everything I was told to do. I would happily jump through whatever hoops they could produce, if only they could get me off opium without the soul-wrenching pain.
> The gate into the detox facility was closed and locked behind me. Neither the gate nor the wall around the facility were imposing; they were more a psychological barrier than a physical one. Later I saw that the wall didn’t even go all the way around the compound. Not that it mattered. Run and I wouldn’t get too far while wearing that distinctive uniform. The residents of the area would immediately call the police just as they would had they seen a prison escapee. But again, running away was the last thing I wanted to do.
As Art was leading me to the foreign men’s dormitory where I would be staying, he asked what I had come to cure. His reaction to my answer would be a recurring theme during my stay. The detox facility of Wat Tham Krabok may have been founded to treat opium addicts, but it had been a long, long time since anyone here had seen one. “Most of the Thais are here because of meth,” Art explained. “The Westerners come for all sorts of reasons.”
On the short walk to the dorm we passed a picnic table occupied by an elderly olive-skinned monk with an easy smile who was talking to three Thai women addicts. “This farang is addicted to opium,” Art said to the old monk as we walked by.
“Really?” the monk asked. He looked rather amazed.
“He speaks Thai,” Art said, nodding in my direction as we stopped to talk to the old monk.
“You’re addicted to opium?” the old monk asked me. When I answered yes, he smiled pityingly and said simply, “You are going to suffer.”
This was not what I wanted to hear. The women at the table—all of them in their twenties—looked me over and then asked the old monk, “What exactly is opium?”
“We used to help opium addicts here a long time ago. We don’t see them anymore. I’ve never seen a farang addicted to opium,” the old monk replied. Then he asked me, “How long have you been smoking?”
“Daily, about three months.”
“Oh, you’ll be all right,” the old monk said. “We used to get addicts who had been smoking opium daily for ten or twenty years. The local people used to complain that at night they could hear the addicts’ screams all the way into town.”
I must have looked shaken because the old monk repeated his assessment that I wouldn’t have too bad a time of it. He pointed out a nearby table with a large aluminum beverage dispenser and racks of plastic cups. A sign in Thai posted next to the table read: DRINK THIS MEDICINE TO IMPROVE THE BLOOD.
“Drink as much of that as you can,” the old monk said. “It’s made from nine bitter herbs. That medicine will make you recover quickly.”
I thanked the old monk and Art picked a cup from one of the racks and, twisting open the dispenser’s little spigot, filled the cup halfway before handing it to me. “Herb tea,” he said in English. I sipped at the tepid, burgundy colored concoction. It tasted ghastly. Art smiled and said in Thai, “Don’t sip. Drink it fast. It tastes better in the morning when it’s still hot.”
I drank the contents of the cup and then filled it again, gulping down a second dose. I would do whatever I had to do—anything to keep the symptoms of withdrawal at bay. I would have drunk the old monk’s urine if they’d told me it would lessen the pain. Fortunately for me, nobody was in the mood for pranks.
The dorm I would occupy was a room within a long, nondescript two-story building that from the outside looked like a typical administrative structure found in Thailand. It could have been part of a high school. The ground floor was divided into three rooms, one for women, another for foreign men, and a third room for monks. The women’s room housed both Thais and foreigners, apparently because there were so few women addicts at the wat. There were also two parallel buildings of nearly identical length, the far one being for male Thai addicts, and a building between the two that I at first thought was unoccupied. Later I found that the middle building’s sole occupants were two special cases lodged in separate locked rooms: an older Thai woman who was insane, and a young Thai man who was kept in chains after having punched out one of the monks.
Art led me into the foreign men’s dorm, a large room with a high ceiling supported by two pillars. Seven wooden bunks were arranged around the walls. Except for a small shelf unit next to each bed there was no furniture. Out back behind the building was an area for hanging laundry and stalls housing toilets and showers. Art let me choose one of the two empty bunks, and I began placing my belongings onto the shelf next to my bed. The room was deserted when we arrived and Art told me that everyone was at a small eatery that produced noodles and stir-fry to be consumed at picnic tables under an awning. I had noticed the eatery as we were walking to the dorm. To my eyes everything was very basic and even a tad grubby. It was typical rural Thailand.
As I was rigging a mosquito net above my bunk, a tall, dark-haired man with an accent that I recognized as Israeli walked in and greeted me. All men of a certain age in Israel are ex-military and David looked it. He also seemed completely healthy and fit—certainly not the type of character I had expected to find at a drug detox center. “There are no mosquitoes here,” David said after introducing himself.
“I’ll use it anyway,” I told him. “If there’s a single mosquito in the room, it’ll bite me.” In truth, since I first used a mosquito net in the Philippines at the age of eighteen, I’ve always felt more secure sleeping under one and will, even when the threat of being bitten by mosquitoes is negligible.
David shrugged. “Why are you here?” he asked. It was always the first question asked at the detox center, but I found that I wasn’t unhappy answering it. I felt a certain pride in the reactions I was getting—always surprise and, in the other addicts at least, a measure of admiration.
“Opium?” David smiled. “You mean …?” He did a little mime act that resembled an Indian smoking a chillum.
“Yes, I smoked it,” I replied.
“Wow! That’s the bomb!”
I laughed, not sure what to say next. I had spent the previous week trying to turn myself against opium, believing that this was the only way to psychologically break free of it. To find that I still had these feelings of opium pride was slightly disturbing.
Before I could ask, David said, “I smoked a pipe, too. A crack pipe.”
“That’s interesting,” I said, again at a loss for words. An Israeli crackhead? Surely that had to be as unusual as an American opium fiend. Maybe I wasn’t so special after all.
Outside it was already dark. To change the subject I asked if it was too late to get a meal. David explained that the eatery stayed open until about seven, but there was a canteen selling snacks and drinks that closed around nine. “Are you hungry?” he asked. “Come, I’ll show you.”
While I had no desire for food, I felt surprisingly calm for having passed eight hours without smoking. According to my body clock—which was now ruled by opium—dusk was the start of the day, and for the past month or so I had always begun rolling by sundown. Perhaps the change of scenery alone had helped distract me, but I knew that things would get bad later that night. This might be my last chance to eat a meal.
The eatery was informal. There were no menus; I just poked my head in the kitchen and asked the woman in charge if she had the ingredients to cook what I was hungry for. I ordered minced pork fried with basil, a reliable standard that most every Thai cook can do well. I prefer chicken, but in the provinces the cooks simply use a cleaver to randomly chop whole chickens into bite-size pieces—leaving plenty of splintered bones that guarantee a long, slow meal.
David directed me to one of the picnic tables and introduced me to Clark, a Thai American from New York City. Clark’s facial features made it obvious that his ancestors were of Chinese extraction. He was short and thin and wore thick glasses with unfashionable steel frames that made him look nerdish—but only if you didn’t notice the blue ink tattoos covering his arms and chest. “That’s a Russian mafia tattoo,” Clark said when he noticed me staring at an odd rendition of a cat smoking a pipe on his inner forearm. I didn’t ask why he might be sporting such a tattoo. Clark said he was tw
enty-seven but he could have passed for a teenager. He was friendly and talkative.
Clark’s heroin addiction had prompted his father, who was retired and living in Chiang Mai, to buy him a one-way ticket to Thailand so he could do the detox program at Wat Tham Krabok. “I’ve been in and out of rehab in the States. The last time was a place in New York. I finished rehab and got out on my girlfriend’s birthday. I was watching TV at her apartment while she went shopping for stuff for a party. Then I just got this idea to go out and score. Next thing I knew I woke up in the hospital. I overdosed and almost died.”
Clark laughed at his own story and then told another about when he realized he was hooked on heroin. “I was just snorting it at first. I didn’t think you could get hooked that way. One night I was out with my crew and I got picked up by the police for tagging a wall in Brooklyn. They put me in a holding cell with a bunch of other people and after a few hours I started sneezing and puking. I felt like shit. Then some Puerto Rican guy in the cell next to me says, ‘Hey, chino. Are you a junkie?’ And I’m like, ‘Yeah, I’m a junkie!’ He gave me a little piece of folded paper and inside was enough heroin for a couple of hits. In a minute I felt okay again.”
“How long have you been here?” I asked, wondering how much the withdrawal symptoms between opium and heroin differed.
“This is day four,” Clark said, picking tentatively at a plate of fried rice that had just been brought to him.
“You look pretty good for day four. I tried to stop a month ago and day three almost killed me.”
“Yeah? You should have seen me when I arrived. I took my last hit on the plane over from New York and I started freaking out in the taxi on the way from the Bangkok airport. They had to carry me in here. I barely even remember it. I got dual citizenship but the monks found my Thai passport first, so they put me in the dorm with all the Thais.”
Opium Fiend Page 30