Camsterdam?

It’s too bad Cambodia has been caught up in conservative, mostly US-fueled, drug-war fervor since it’s easily the most tolerant, laid back society in Asia. It was only 20 years ago, before UNTAC came in to conduct Cambodia’s first post-KR elections and coincidentally tell the country it had to crack down on drugs, that you could buy a shopping bag of ganja at Russian Market in Phnom Penh for about a dollar. In talking to locals about cannabis who remember the times before prohibition, I’ve heard comments like, We used to smoke it when we couldn’t afford tobacco, or We used it to flavor our soup.

Back then I was able to toke up in almost all the bars I frequented in the capital. The police hardly ever came out at night and nobody ever seemed to care, though some people were definitely turned off by the sweet smell of pot smoke. That all changed a few years back when the police paid a visit to all the bars and told them that the evil weed would no longer be tolerated. Still, though you can get busted today for pot possession, though probably not for small amounts, it’s somehow okay to spike your pizzas with the stuff. We’ve even got our first happy pizza restaurant in Kampot - Happy Dreamily Pizza.

Use of recreational drugs is best left to individual choice. Everybody has a right, or should have the right, to choose their own poison. There’s no way to stop people from doing what they want in a free country, even just a nominally free place like Cambodia. Moreover, education works as well or better than prohibition in curtailing drug use. In a class I taught in a local university some nine years ago I led a discussion of drugs. The general attitude of the students was that drug dealers should be executed. They didn’t need threats of prosecution to keep them from using drugs, they were already fanatically against them, their education and upbringing was enough.

The only thing you accomplish by prohibition is to raise prices to very high levels and thus draw in criminal involvement and the violence that often goes with any trade in contraband.

In Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia and Vietnam drug dealers are killed. One of Taksin Shinawatra’s claims to fame when he first took office was his ordering Thai police to summarily execute lots of drug dealers and 2500 people were offed in short order. I had a conversation at that time with a Thai based expat visiting Cambodia. He was all in favor of that murderous rampage, talking about how bad yaba was, until I pointed out that without giving people the opportunity to defend themselves it was likely that at least 5% to 10% of that 2500 were guilty of only minor crimes or were innocent but had gotten their names on the hit list because someone in the police department didn’t like them.

In Singapore possession of as little as 15 grams of heroin or 200 grams of ganja is a mandatory death sentence. Not long ago a Singaporean couple returning from a trip to Australia were drug tested and wound up spending two years in the brink for smoking pot on their vacation; who knows, it could’ve been only a puff or two. Ganja, being oil based stays in your system for about 30 days. The hard drugs, on the other hand, are all water based so shoot up heroin, cocaine or meth on Friday night and you’re clean Monday morning when you get to work. Today every corporate job in America requires drug testing and the vast majority of positives are from pot.

The fundamental problem with state murder of people for small amounts of drugs is that drug laws are based on cultural bias and change with the times. It wasn’t that long ago  historically speaking - 1920 till 1933 - that marijuana was legal in America while alcohol was prohibited. There’d never be a disagreement on the legality of murder, robbery, extortion and such, but it takes a staggering amount of arrogance and hubris for Singapore and many other countries to kill someone over marijuana when it’s easily available and practically legal in other places in the world.

If you want to drink yourself to death in Singapore, or merely imbibe till it destroys your family life, you’re perfectly welcome to it, though it’ll cost a bit since taxes there are really high. When backers of drug prohibition are asked why alcohol is legal and ganja is not, though by any scientific, existential, non-emotional standard alcohol is much worse, they often respond by saying, We already have one bad drug, we don’t need another. They should be honest and finish their statement by saying; besides I like a cold beer on a hot afternoon, I like a glass of wine after dinner, I like a shot of brandy before hitting the sack. If I like it, it’s okay, if I don’t, you go to jail or get offed.

Now that squeaky-clean Singapore is promoting casino gambling (Have you noticed they don’t call it gambling anymore, it’s now gaming. You know, it’s just a game, just for fun.) you can blow your life savings and your family’s future, but that’s okay because it brings tourism and makes lots of money for the state.

If you want to stuff your face to the point where you can barely walk and your life has been shortened by decades, all assisted by constant TV advertising encouraging you to do just that, then no problem, knock yourself out, it’s your life, after all. But if you take one puff of the evil weed, you’re a scourge to society and must pay dearly for your dastardly, miscreant behavior.

The other point prohibitionists like to make, which is not born out by the statistics is that a lot more people will do drugs if they are legal or more easily obtainable. Holland provides the best example. Fewer young people smoke pot there where it’s virtually legal, than in America where nearly a million people are languishing in prison over non-violent marijuana related offenses.

Portugal also provides a good example since in 2001 all drugs, not just cannabis, were decriminalized. Portugal now has some of the lowest percentages of drug use in Europe, when for instance it once had the highest percentage of heroin users. Today, a smaller percentage of people in the country have an experience with ganja than those who’ve used cocaine in America. Ten percent have tried cannabis there compared to nearly 40% in America.

Around 40 years ago Tricky Dick Nixon was shown a government report that suggested ganja should be decriminalized since its effects were essentially benign. Instead he did the opposite and began America’s War on Drugs. He could clearly see that the majority of people opposed to the Vietnam war were tokers so he rightly figured he could use drug laws to suppress the anti-war movement.

His ‘War’ has done nothing to suppress drug use, but has served to disrupt and/or destroy millions of people’s lives and helped to create a massive industrial prison system. Now that many of America’s prisons are corporate owned, there’s profit to be made from incarcerating lots of non conformists as well as common criminals.

Changes, though are afoot. Bolivians have elected a former coca farmer as president, and Latin American countries as a whole are rethinking the ‘Drug War’ military response to what is essentially a public health problem. They suffer far more from drug war mania than the US, the world’s biggest user country. The drug cartels have millions, even hundreds of millions of dollars at their disposal to bribe and/or threaten police and public officials. It is an especially difficult situation for smaller countries but even Mexico, a large middle income country has seen 50,000 drug war related deaths since the current president started his ‘crackdown’ on the drug trade six years ago. The cartels have a gruesome cant; in the latest example nearly fifty headless, handless, footless bodies - hard to identify that way - were dumped in a prominent urban place. As a result the Latin’s feel they have to find a different path.

Changes are also afoot in the US. Polls in some states are showing majorities in favor of legalizing and regulating cannabis. When you subtract the cost of apprehending, adjudicating and incarcerating large numbers of pot users from public budgets and then add the tax take from legalizing it, it should be a no brainer; still, regressive, narrow-minded, idiocy dies hard. The movement to decriminalize pot began in 1973 in Oregon, when possession of less than an ounce - 28 grams - was turned into a violation similar to a traffic ticket with a $50 fine. About 16 states have since followed suit.

About the same number now permit medical marijuana. In Oregon, one of the first states to allow it, the change was propelled by the experience of a conservative constituent of a conservative Republican rural state legislator. This woman had suffered for a long time from glaucoma. She was scheduled for an operation on a Monday, but having heard of pot’s healing qualities thought it wouldn’t hurt to give it a try. She started smoking on Friday evening, kept it up all weekend and went into the hospital for a pre-op checkup on Monday. The doctor looked at her eyes and proclaimed that they were fine and she needed no operation. After she related her experience to her state legislator, he became an advocate and the die was cast. It isn’t a miracle cure for all types of glaucoma, but a couple of joints in place of an eye operation… also a no brainer.

Just recently - mid-May 2012 - a New York judge wrote an op-ed in the New York Times urging the state legislature to legalize medical marijuana. He’d been undergoing chemotherapy for cancer and try as he might to find a legal drug to combat the nausea and lack of appetite that goes with chemo treatment, nothing but smoking pot worked. He broke the law in order to receive proper treatment, this doubtless after putting lots of people away for marijuana related offenses. Meanwhile the federal government has classified pot as a class A drug with no medical uses and Obama’s justice department has been going after medical marijuana dispensaries, which are legal under state law, with a vengeance. This from a president who admitted smoking, and inhaling, as a youth… effing hypocrite.

The one good aspect of prohibiting pot is the healthy distrust of government it engenders. With all the dire warnings you’ve been taught about the descent into perdition that comes with the first puff, you’re expecting far more impact than pot delivers. Even if you don’t like the feeling and have no intention of smoking again, the one thing you come away from the experience with it is that it’s essentially harmless and all that you’ve been told about it by the establishment is bullshit and hype.

A major lie foisted on the public by the anti-drug establishment is that smoking pot is dangerous to your health, equal to tobacco. While smoking anything can cause irritation, coughing and other respiratory problems, there’s nothing in ganja smoke that can develop into cancer or other diseases. Back in the 80’s I knew a guy who was doing marijuana research. They had gathered together a group of guys, gave them as much pot as they wanted and told them to smoke themselves out. After a couple of months they became afraid and called off the study because the subjects’ respiratory systems were becoming congested with cannabis tars. Two months later they were completely clean with no permanent damage. That’s in contrast to tobacco which permanently scars the small passages, the cilia, in the lungs.

Also, it’s not possible to OD on pot. According to America’s Drug Enforcement Administration you would have to smoke about 700 kilos in 15 minutes to OD… even my son who’s a legendary wake and baker can’t do that.

What about the hard drugs: heroin, cocaine, meth? For sure you can OD on them, but that’s partly a result of prohibition, since you never know the potency of what you’re getting on the street. All three will make you look wrinkled, washed out and old before your time if you let them control your life. At the same time you could use all three and continue to carry on a reasonably normal life if prohibition didn’t make them so expensive you were required you to steal and rob to get your fix. If you have a life, feel good about yourself, you can experiment without ever becoming addicted.

A relative who’s never been part of the hip scene asked me why people do heroin. The answer is simple: No matter how stressed, depressed, unhappy or sick you are in mind and/or body; no matter that you consider yourself a worthless turd and have no hope for a better future, when you shoot up you’re on top of the world. Nothing can hurt you or phase you. Morphine which has one tenth the potency of heroin, is one of the best medicinal painkillers because no matter how banged up or diseased you are, with sufficient morphine in your system you can handle any contingency.

A guy I met traveling related an experience he’d had with opium, which is one tenth the potency of morphine. Before he and a friend settled in to smoke in comfortable chairs he’d put an Eagles tape on his cassette player. Unfortunately, it was on continuous loop so they wound up having to listen to the whole album 7 or 8 times before either one could bring himself to rise up and change the tape. The Eagles!! You just feel sooo mellow and relaxed, nothing can bother you. With all the crazy shit happening in the world and the grave hardship so many people face in their daily lives, why not let them enjoy a little escape sometimes? Could it be worse than alcohol? At least guys wouldn’t be beating their wives around when on opium.

Cocaine, meth, whatever, nothing works better or causes less harm to society than education about drugs and dealing with each of them truthfully and intelligently. Cambodia, however, pushed by the international community is going at the problem in a harsh and unforgiving manner. Recently three teenage girls caught with 6 yaba pills between them were each given two years behind bars. Is that fair, does it make sense?

Cambodia is a relaxed and easygoing place, that’s one of the things we expats like most about the place. Entertainment is one of the country’s best bets for economic growth. Why not take a ‘happy-pizza’ attitude towards life and let people be themselves, make their own decisions and choose their own poison. It’s the adult way to do things.

I’m 70 years old. Is somebody going to tell me what’s good for me and what’s bad for me, what I’m supposed to like and what I’m not supposed to like?

Stan Kahn

No-Sin-Tax Nation

A friend of mine recently came back from a short holiday in Singapore. He said it cost him $12 for a glass of draft beer. He’s not the type to frequent luxury digs so I assume that price is not unusual. It was six dollars when I was there twenty years ago. Why is going out on the town, drinking a few beers and having some fun reserved only for the well-heeled? Why is that most common of pastimes made off-limits to Average Joe.

An Aussie friend said a bottle of Stoly vodka, which costs seven bucks here goes for forty there. Bailey’s is twelve dollars here, seventy five there. Beer is equally outrageously priced there though I don’t remember the numbers. The only break you get is on wine which Australia produces a lot of. That seems totally unfair to me. Why should a product which would ordinarily be within reach of nearly everybody be priced so only the upper classes can afford it? Personally, I much prefer beer, but sometimes I like a little taste of spirits or liquors so I would resent being excluded from that simple pleasure.

We know why developed country governments love sin taxes, they always need money and there aren’t many people to object since they can claim they’re doing people a favor by forcing them to cut back on things that aren’t good for them. However, moderate drinking is not a health problem, in fact, studies have shown that two-beers-a day imbibers live longer than non-drinkers. A few beers after dinner can help a person relax after a stressful day, relieve the pressure, take the hard edge off of sometimes difficult life circumstances. Why should that relief be reserved for the wealthy? The additional stress from not having access to drink may be worse for a person’s health than the alcohol itself. In moderation, of course.

In Cambodia there are no rules about who can enter a bar, if you want to bring your two-year-old kid with you, you can. Is there something inherently evil about people drinking, joking, having a good time that a child shouldn’t see? Okay, I can understand why you wouldn’t want to bring a little kid to a strip joint, but to a place where friends gather could never be a problem. After all, they see the same friends drinking together at parties in their homes.

Yet in America it’s a terrible transgression to allow a 20-year-old to see the nefarious act of people drinking together. In Western society drinking is a widely advertised, commonplace activity. All that’s accomplished by arbitrarily restricting access is to reinforce the forbidden fruit syndrome. The more you’re told you can’t have it because it’s not good for you while ‘adults’ – those over 21 – are doing it all around you, the more you want it, and when you do manage to obtain it, the more you tend to binge and overdo it. Mostly I’m speaking of America, European attitudes are far more reasonable and relaxed.

There’s no minimum age for purchasing alcoholic beverages here, if you want to send your kid down to the local store to buy beer for you, you can. In most American states there are restrictions on who can sell alcohol and where. In Oregon, for instance, beer and wine can be sold at markets, but only with a special permit. Spirits, however, are only sold at state franchised liquor stores. Oregon even makes a distinction between taverns which can only sell beer and wine and bars which can sell everything. All that trouble to try to influence people’s behavior, but does it work?

Well, for sure, the average Singaporean isn’t going to go out to a bar for a few beers if it costs a day’s wages, but they may buy their beer in a market and drink at home, though it still costs a lot in relative terms. And that’s one point I’m making: many people will sacrifice to obtain those beers. It isn’t necessarily an addiction, but if it makes you feel good and helps you get through the day, you’ll give up a lot to have those few brews. Beer and wine are still reasonably priced in most parts of America, so people there aren’t deprived of that age-old pastime.

In addition to all types of commercial alcoholic beverages being cheap and easily available here, locals also have access to very low cost local drinks. Homemade non-commercially packaged palm wine is very potent – 40 or 50% alcohol – and very cheap. About 8 years ago a bar girl I knew brought back to the bar a 330ml coke can which had been refilled with palm wine that cost 500 riels or 12 cents. Today I think it costs double that; still a small amount of money to get pretty loaded.

So the question is, Do Khmers drink more because it’s so accessible? Does alcohol cause excessive disruption to social life because it’s so cheap? How does the impact of alcohol on Cambodian life compare to same on American life? Well, there certainly are plentiful stories of drunken Khmers causing altercations and disruptions but as far as I can tell, no more than the states. The only caveat is that many problems related to alcohol that do arise here stem from things like uneducated peasantry getting out of line or lax enforcement of drunk driving laws and just in general because of being a poor developing country and nothing to do with easy access.

Cheap alcohol is an aid to tourism since it allows many restaurants and bars to charge as little as a dollar for a local beer and even less in happy hour. Alcohol has its downsides, as all we drinkers know, but it’s only education that can make a difference there, besides as adults we ought to be able to make our own decisions in that matter.

Tobacco taxes are also very low or nonexistent here. Better quality locally produced cigs cost an average of 50 cents, imported brands a dollar, the down-and-dirty rough-cut local brands cost as little as ten cents. In the markets you can buy tobacco in bulk for a price that’s practically negligible. Compared to most American states where cigarettes go for upwards of $5 a pack, Australia, $14, some Scandinavian countries as much as $20, you can smoke as much as you want here without ever having to consider the cost.

Tobacco isn’t the same as alcohol because, contrary to alcohol which, in spite of its many and obvious drawbacks, has redeeming qualities, tobacco has none. That is a personal feeling backed up by 28 years hooked on tobacco. There are smokers who say they feel relaxed and derive pleasure from smoking. I scoff, but who am I to question their feelings? Nonetheless, almost everybody agrees that it’s a nasty habit, and that includes the vast majority of smokers, who wish they could quit.

Kissing a smoker reminds me of ashtrays, the smoke is not only foul smelling but causes cancer in non-smokers who are exposed to it – 3000 Americans a year die from diseases caused by second-hand smoke; they are mostly people who work in bars, the last place in America where tobacco smoke is still somewhat tolerated. There’s something about tobacco that’s intrinsically carcinogenic. You can get cancer just as easily from chewing it as smoking it. I also read recently that the way it is commercially grown; that is, doused with loads of poisonous chemicals – pesticides and herbicides - increases its carcinogenic properties.

Thus, in some ways, tobacco sin taxes are justified because the nasty shit really is bad for you, but those taxes are still discriminatory since they only impact the lower classes. Besides tobacco is addictive, as a result many people literally can’t stop regardless of the drain on their budget. I know people who say it’s easier to kick heroin then nicotine. One thing that facilitates that addiction is that nicotine is added to cigs to help get you hooked and used to a high dose.

I started at 12. My first drag came from a giant novelty cigar. It was the size of a foot long sausage. Okay, that was almost 60 years ago so I don’t want to exaggerate, but anyway it was far bigger than a typical cigar. Needless to say I didn’t get very far. I quickly started coughing, felt dizzy and turned ashen white. It didn’t take long after that though before I was smoking a pack a day of non-filter cigarettes - when I could rustle up the 25 cents they cost.

I had coughing fits as early as 15. I’d be vegging out sitting in front of the boob tube smoking one after another and just be hacking my brains out. I actually quit for a year during teen times. Not long after I started back up I was out playing soccer in gym class. I’d played before quite easily and I loved the sport but after smoking I was so out of breath I realized I was either going to play sports or smoke cigs but not both. Since I knew how hard it would be for me to quit smoking at that point I said goodbye to sports.

In the fifties nearly 70% of Americans smoked. Tobacco advertising was everywhere. The Camel TV ad claimed that 9 out of 10 doctors preferred their brand. Edward R. Murrow always had a lit cigarette going during his newscasts. Smoking made you feel big and grown up. Several times I’ve heard people suggest that people back then didn’t understand how bad they were, but we teens referred to cigarettes as coffin nails so we knew exactly what we were getting into.

I finally quit at 40 using the total immersion or overdoing it method. A lot of the years I smoked it was cheap, harsh roll-your-owns and I had reached a point where I was coughing nearly all the time. I sounded so bad my friends were afraid for me. I had quit several times early on but always gone back, but in the last half of my time smoking the only occasions when I didn’t smoke was when I was so sick I couldn’t possibly take another drag. As a result of that understanding I purposely made myself sick by immersing myself in it. I starting smoking one after another of cheap roll-your-own tobacco. When I ran out of fresh tobacco, I started rolling up buts, all the while coughing my brains out. I even got to the point of rolling up buts of buts before I was so ill the thought of taking another puff became inconceivable. It took several days to recover. I haven’t taken a single hit since then except when I’ve been tricked into it by dragging on a European style joint. Every time I do, at least partly because I take it in deeply not realizing it has tobacco in it, I’m full on into a coughing fit.

I tolerate tobacco smoke in bars and restaurants, though I despise it like most ex-smokers, because this is Cambodia where we don’t make a fuss about those things. For sure there’s no smoking here in buses and schools, etc., but otherwise it’s your life and everybody’s entitled to their own poison. I did it to lots of others over the years, so I can hardly complain. Anyway a little second-hand tobacco smoke here and there isn’t going to kill me.

I know people who don’t smoke when they are back in the West because it costs so much, but get right into when they come here, so high taxes do have a point. But if a person can take it or leave it based on cost then they probably aren’t the type to be uncontrollably addicted and they probably won’t smoke long enough or consistently enough to develop a disease.

To me one of the worst aspects of smoking is the slavenly hold the evil tobacco companies have over you. They’ve got you by the short hairs and you can’t do a damn thing about it. You keep feeding their overflowing coffers though you hate yourself for doing it.

In my opinion if you really want to smoke you should smoke clean unadulterated tobacco and roll you own. You may feel kindly towards nicotine, but you sure don’t need to inhale all the other toxic chemicals that commercial tobacco is laced with. If you are rolling your own, you can’t smoke as many or as often, because you have to sit down for a minute or two to roll one up. Commercial cigarettes, with the ease of popping one in your mouth and the extra nicotine they are fortified with will also cause you to smoke a lot more than you would with clean roll-your-own tobacco. The tobacco that you can buy in bulk at local markets here was probably grown with agricultural chemicals but I doubt extremely much if any other chemicals were added to it. If you smoke a small or moderate amount of clean tobacco, you probably won’t get cancer, at least your chances are far diminished.

Meanwhile it’s a pleasure to be in a place where you can make your own choices and aren’t discriminated against because you don’t have a lot of money. They’ll probably get around to sin taxes eventually, but for now you’re home free here to indulge to your heart’s content.