Story here.
Exerpts: **"Fifteen-year-old Wanchai Nuantasiri is one of more than a dozen drug addicts kneeling in a row, vomiting violently into the gutter.
"Monks in dark brown robes stand behind the sick, rubbing their backs encouragingly, while onlookers dance and clap cheerfully to an incessant drum beat.
"This bizarre scene, set amid spectacular golden Buddhas and rocky mountains in the heart of Thailand, has been a daily ritual at Thamkrabok Monastery since 1959, when its monks and nuns first helped opium users beat their addictions.
"British musician Pete Doherty helped raise the temple’s profile when he became a patient in 2004, despite the fact that he could not handle the challenging detox programme and escaped after just three days.
“The vomiting, compulsory for the first five days of the programme, is induced by a thick herbal potion made from an ancient secret recipe, known only to the abbot and the head pharmacist at the temple.”**
These days, the local addicts are mostly on speed. Cheap amphetamines manufactured in Burma have largely replaced opium and heroin. It’s caused quite a problem, too. A good friend of mine is a fellow American who has lived in the heart of the Northeast for almost 20 years. He says he has seen nothing rip apart the social fabric in small villages up there like amphetamines have. Speed used to be called ya ma (horse medicine), but the authorities decided that might actually have been an appealing name – make you strong as a horse so you can work all day – so they launched a campaign to call it ya ba (crazy medicine) instead. And it worked, it’s been popularly known ever since as ya ba. Too bad so many people still use it.