Hot Pink Speed in Myanmar

Patrick Winn Takes Us Into A "Shadow Land" To Follow Candy-Colored Meth

Patrick Winn is a friend and fellow journalist who has been chronicling the crazy world of crime in Southeast Asia, an issue that is growing in importance but isn’t nearly covered enough. He has done vital work about the shady drug warlords that have emerged amid the bloody battlefields of Myanmar, including in his ground-breaking new book Narcotopia: In Search of the Asian Drug Cartel that Survived the CIA. He also wrote a fantastic first book Hello, Shadowlands that takes you from dog thieves in the swamplands of Vietnam to jihadists bombing red light areas in Thailand’s deep south.

In this excerpt from “Hello Shadowlands,” he takes us over a chaotic border into Myanmar and a group of guys getting high on meth. Syndicates in Myanmar churn out billions of pink speed pills per year, making them one of the top-selling illegal products on earth, and they use them to bankroll veritable states with their own armies, national anthems, highways, electrical grids and hospitals.

Patrick has a riveting writing style dear to the heart of CrashOut of emersive reporting and colorful honest detail; our “narco journalism” isn’t only about gangsters, it’s foreign reporting with a different view of the planet, perhaps a little darker but also searching for humanity and hope. IG

By Patrick Winn

The town of Myitkyina is the last outpost before Myanmar disintegrates into its chaotic frontier. When the British Empire laid railroad tracks throughout this territory – which was then called Burma – its sinews of steel reached these foothills but went no further.

This town now functions as the government’s northernmost terminal station. Beyond it lie hilltops ruled by guerrillas and armed clans.

Just a few miles from the town’s decrepit railway station, inside the attic of a wooden home, a ritual is set to commence. The windows have been shuttered, nosy kids ordered to scram. Sunday morning sunshine seeps through cracks in the blinds, casting blades of warm light on the floor planks. The room is otherwise dim.

Leading this ritual is Zau Ring, sitting in the lotus position. He is 40 or so, a tad gaunt, clad in a beige sarong and an unbuttoned plaid shirt. I’m crouching nearby, watching him work.

Zau Ring slides a hand into his sarong and fishes a foreign object out of his underwear. It looks like a lumpy wad of electrical tape, roughly the size of his palm. But when Zau Ring peels away the layers of tape, he reveals a ziplock baggie concealed within.

He squeezes open the baggie’s plastic mouth. Out pour two dozen methamphetamine tablets, which rattle across the floorboards. Each pill is as pink as Barbie’s Corvette.

All hard drugs evoke a certain counterculture. Opium conjures old-world mystique. Cocaine screams fast-money excess. Meth, in the West at least, is seen as a gutter drug: a tooth-rotting, low-life disgrace. But what I am about to witness will play out more like a sacrament than some dirty fix.

Zau Ring has an array of paraphernalia at his feet: strips of aluminum foil, colorful bendy straws, one roll of electrical tape, a half-empty bottle of water. From these household items, he begins to assemble a funny-looking hookah.

With a lit cigarette, he burns a circular hole into the side of the water bottle. Into this orifice he inserts a foot-long length of piping. It’s made from interlocked plastic drinking straws. This is the hookah’s hose. He applies some tape to seal up leaks, gives it a test suck and the contraption bubbles into life.

Strangely, a strong aroma permeates the room before the hookah has been lit. This is the signature scent of Myanmar speed tablets – a chemical sweetness that smells exactly like vanilla cake frosting. The pills reek even before they are put to flame.

The smell is derived from some mysterious additive favored by meth chemists – the legions of drug lab mixologists, operating in those lawless hills beyond the tracks.

Perhaps this is a fluke of their recipe. Maybe it’s a marketing strategy to render meth pills more candy-like. Regardless, it’s so aromatic that addicts such as Zau Ring won’t carry meth pills in public without triple-wrapping their baggies in tape. That scent is a dead giveaway. You can smell this stuff across a large room, especially an airless attic.

Outside the attic’s entrance, Zau Ring and I hear loud creaking – the sound of a wooden staircase bending under the weight of grown men. Our heads jerk towards the doorway as three figures approach.

But it’s just Gideon, the home’s owner, followed by two anemic-looking younger guys.

‘You startled me, Gideon,’ I say. ‘I keep worrying your wife and kids will barge in.’

‘Relax,’ he says. ‘They’re at church already. Can’t you hear?’

Indeed, for the past ten minutes, Zau Ring’s prep work has been set to a soothing soundtrack: harmonious choir singing. The attic overlooks the courtyard of a Baptist church next door. The voices, high-pitched and adolescent, carry easily through the attic’s thin walls.

These are Myitkyina’s churchgoing hours. An ideal time to sneak away and sin in peace.

I’m relieved that Gideon has returned to the room. He’s like a brotherly confidant, the only friend I’ve got in this town. Zau Ring and these other men? To me, they’re total strangers.

Gideon is in his late thirties with raven-black hair styled into an Elvis swoosh. Like most guys around here, he almost exclusively wears flip-flops and sarongs. Up top, however, he favors Magnum PI-style flamboyant shirts: lots of button-ups with floral patterns and fleurs-de-lis. They’re always partially undone to reveal his hairless chest, which is smooth as a mango.

I prefer to keep Gideon close. Here, in Myanmar’s far north, survival hinges on knowing the dos and don’ts. Whom to flatter. What laws you can safely ignore. Which officials to bribe. When to shut up. Where to smoke meth without getting caught.

Gideon, a Myitkyina native, is my guide to this world. He’s helping me navigate this thicket of unwritten codes. It’s a vital skill. Doubly vital considering our plans for the next few weeks. It will involve consorting with quite a few lawbreakers, starting with the men in this attic.

Gideon corralled them here at my request. Actually, I just requested one guy, any user willing to show off his stash and chat about the local drug scene. Gideon, with his heavy appetite for mischief, was more than happy to oblige. He even offered up his own attic, assuring me that the cops would never think of raiding his home.

Only Zau Ring was invited this morning. But soon after he arrived, Gideon’s phone started chirping. A few of Zau Ring’s pals had caught word of our little drug scrum and they were already loitering outside, desperate to join. Gideon obliged, ducking out of the room so he could unlock his front gate and discreetly guide them up to this hideaway.

Now he’s back and we’re all here. Both of the newcomers are far more conspicuous than Zau Ring. One is shirtless, his back and arms inked up with crudely-drawn tattoos. The other is wraith-like, tall and painfully slender, a lichen-esque goatee clinging to his chin.

As soon as they mount the stairs, the two newcomers spot the pink meth. Like ants to sugar, they scuttle over and kneel by Zau Ring’s feet, inspecting and sniffing at the pills arrayed on the floor. Zau Ring swats them away.

They back off and assume sitting positions on the floor, encircling the meth hookah like it’s some sort of altar.

‘So,’ I ask, ‘how do you guys know each other?’

Long pause.

‘We’re all mechanics,’ says the tatted-up guy. Head downcast, he fidgets with his toes. ‘I do air-conditioners.’

‘I work on generators,’ murmurs the goateed man, the youngest of the three.

‘Generators?’ I say. ‘Well, you must get a lot of work.’

Myanmar’s state-run electrical grid is so glitchy that shops and homes require diesel generators to power through daily blackouts. They’re noisy machines, big as refrigerators, and they’re always breaking down.

‘Yeah, sure,’ he says in a pained murmur. ‘Very busy.’

This is like chatting up guys in a long bathroom line. Their minds are consumed by the looming promise of physical relief. No one here seems keen on small talk with a foreigner – some weirdo who apparently traveled to the far edge of Myanmar to watch strangers get high.

‘Almost done here,’ Zau Ring says, tinkering with his hookah, giving it one final quality inspection. ‘Let’s not waste any more time.’

At last, the ritual begins. Zau Ring picks up a long strip of foil and pinches it into a silvery canoe. He takes one of the pills – about the size of a baby aspirin – and drops it into the foil. Then he lovingly treats the underside of the strip with candle flame.

Heat makes the little pill dance. It shimmies on the bed of aluminum, charring at the edges, liquefying and quickly losing its shape. All the while, white vapor rises from the foil.

Zau Ring holds the foil beneath an air valve carved into the water-bottle hookah. When he sucks on the hookah’s hose, the meth smoke is hoovered into the apparatus, where it mixes with burbling water. This softens the acrid notes that would otherwise sting the throat.

Zau Ring holds the smoke inside his lungs for a beat. Then he releases twin torrents from his nostrils. So this thing actually works. A few more rounds and the pill is a blackened squirt on the foil.

One pill leads to another. And another. The other men have their turn. Gideon is standing in the corner, grinning, meth clouds swirling at his legs. I’m stationed closer to the hookah, entranced by the rite, trying to catch whiffs. You’d think these pills would smell like burnt Oreos when cooked. But the smoke is nearly scentless.

The smokers’ malaise has lifted. They sit with upright spines. I attempt another question. At the first syllable, their heads swivel towards me in unison like startled owls.

‘So tell me,’ I say. ‘What’s so great about meth?’

The answers come quick and loud. They speak all at once, six eyes laser-locked on mine. Gideon gestures for them to keep their voices down but it’s no use. I can hardly keep track of who’s saying what.

‘This stuff gives you incredible alertness. You become so focused you forget to eat and ...’

‘... yeah, it’s like you can achieve anything. You’re not sleepy nor drunk nor hungry nor fatigued and you just go and go and go ...’

‘... so it’s like our medicine, right? As we say, use a bit and it’s medicine, use a lot and it’s poison. But it’s really hard to moderate ...’

‘... true, like, once I scored ten pills and said, “I’ll just use one per day for ten days” but then I smoked all ten pills in one morning ...’

‘... which is how you ruin your body. Smoke too much and you’ll stay awake for three days, dim-witted and para- noid, flying into a rage at some small remark ...’

‘... and that’s the real problem with ya ma. You always think one more pill will bring perfect bliss. But it never comes. It’s always one more pill away ...’

‘... but it’s worth it, just to feel that power. Like no one can stand in your way. Like no one can take you down.’

Ya ma. That’s what they call these pills in Myanmar. Translation: horse pills. If swallowed or smoked, the pills bring stallion-esque intensity to any task: sex, plowing rice fields, partying, assembling sneakers in a factory, shooting the shit in some dusty attic.

This drug scene is steeped in slang. In neighboring Thailand, a prime consumer of Myanmar’s meth, these tablets are known by a more sinister name: ya ba: madness pills. That’s the term preferred by police across Southeast Asia.

But Zau Ring and his crew are not tilting towards face-chewing insanity – the sort of crazed behavior caricatured in anti-drug propaganda. They seem no more psychotic than a few grad students snorting powder-blue rails of Adderall off a physics textbook. (Still, if Adderall is Bombay Sapphire, this is bathtub gin: noxious, strong stuff riddled with adulterants.)

As the men tell it, meth positively dazzles. Euphoria? That doesn’t quite capture it. It’s more like sublime confidence. Your ego is electrified. Your enemies seem small. Your day crackles with brilliant potential.

On meth, you are essential. You matter. You are in control.

What better drug to transfix the inhabitants of Myanmar’s borderlands? They are remote hill dwellers neglected by the government, bullied by warlords, forgotten by the world.

Top Photo by Mark Oltmanns, 2016

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