Almost every traveler to Thailand grows enamored of the kingdom. Looking at the diversity of Bangkok, which trumps Los Angeles, shows many have chosen to stay.
Down alleys lined with fish-smoke spewing food-stalls, European expats in Indian-made suits chew the kebab in African Muslim restaurants while chattering on their mobile phones in Thai.
More “Blade Runner” than any Neo-Tokyo.
While there in January, I met some resident foreigners staying for another reason. They were prisoners in a system famous for making HBO’s “Oz” look like the Emerald City. They were prisoners of war, locked up as trophies in the U.S. funded global crackdown on narcotics.
Drug dealers. So who cares?
I didn’t know what to expect at Bang Kwang, the most notorious of Thai prisons. I had snapped a rib my second day off the plane, and decided to “take it easy” for two days before attacking northern Thailand by motorcycle. Having exhausted attractions both sublime and profane on prior visits, I opted for some reality-tourism. Awake with the sun, I somehow made it to the river in time to catch a ferry north and an hour out of the blue-silver diesel cloud of the city.
Bang Kwang is also called “Big Tiger” by Thais because the hulking structure swallows people up. Getting into the prison was simple enough. It only required writing down the name of the prisoner I wanted to visit and then repeating “I’m sorry” while being yelled at by Thai officials and guards for 30 minutes.
After passing through innumerable gates, doors and portcullises, I found myself in a lush gardened visitors area. A verdant torment for those looking out from the inside.
Some abuse later I found myself not quite face-to-face with a smiling Canadian man excited to have a visitor.
“Mr. R” got busted for holding black tar in Chiang Mai, a popular distribution point in the central highlands. With no real evidence against him and naive of the quality of Thai justice, he plead innocent to the charges. Big mistake. Although it is possible to plea, there is no such thing as an innocent verdict in Thai court.
Had he declared guilt, he would have been hit with the average sentence – 30 to 50 years. Under prisoner exchange treaties, he’d probably be home and paroled by now. Instead, by virtue of his claim to innocence, Mr. R was in for life.
With a life sentence, his children were swallowed up by the State when his wife abandoned them back in Canada, after he had been in for more than a year. That was four years ago.
He won’t see them again.
His only sanity comes from assumed optimism. He is trying to get his case heard by Thailand’s Supreme Court, which could essentially issue him a ticket home by reducing his sentence to less than life. The Court might hear his case in another three years.
More than a prisoner of his crime, Mr. R is a prisoner of out-of-touch U.S. foreign policy. Large cash grants are handed out to countries deemed “tough on drugs,” such as the $43 million George W. Bush gave to the Taliban in May 2001. So lucrative are drug busts, that Thai police receive cash bounties for arrests. And more than a few innocent travelers have been framed to produce results.
This, in a country with an ancient tradition of smoking opium for medicinal purposes. However, pressure from the U.S. is such that last year the kingdom waged a bloody 10-month campaign and killed 3,000 people “suspected” of being involved in the drug trade.
Mr. R’s story is not unique. There must be a better way to address the problem of drug addiction.
Kenneth Todd Ruiz, a senior journalism major, is editor in chief of the Campus Times. He can be reached by e-mail at kruiz@ulv.edu.
