Sihanoukville buying Ecstasy

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Sihanoukville buying Ecstasy

Southeast Asia Globe is member-supported publication featuring in-depth journalism that promotes a more informed, inclusive and sustainable future. Members work with our team to shape our editorial direction and hold us accountable. Be a part of the story. Subscribe today! You can read the first part here. Each day it gets harder to hoist herself up to the entrance, a glassless window punched in the outer wall. Many meth addicts in SIhanoukville are now squatting in construction sites. Photo: Andrew Haffner. Rough and ready as her place is, Sreymau has neither a plan nor the choice to move, even after the baby comes. And her name is not the only part of her story as hazy as smoke. Perched above the greasy puddles of the garbage dump, Sreymau certainly qualifies. After years of ice addiction, say the aid workers that check in on her, Sreymau often thinks and acts as a child might. Use of the drug has exploded in recent years across the region, driven by international criminal groups making a killing from selling to people like Sreymau. Though details of her descent are unsteady, social workers have drawn a rough sketch as bleak as it is blurry. Raised in a Phnom Penh household by a mother in the sex trade, Sreymau left for Sihanoukville between seven and nine years ago. Pausing, Sreymau asks co-director Maggie Eno how old her daughter is now. Eight, she responds. Her daughter is eight. Sreymau has lived in Sihanoukville for seven years. Or maybe not. The group works mostly with youth but sometimes with adults with children. Sreymau said she quit meth after becoming pregnant, but like addicts anywhere, those in Sihanoukville eke out chaotic, turbulent lifestyles marred by a spiralling decline of body and mind. The latter, we see first-hand. She had not, in fact, managed to kick the meth habit for the baby. But after years of breakneck Chinese real estate investment, the city is being transformed economically and demographically. Much of the new Chinese population is highly transient, coming to town for work or leisure and returning home — sometimes quite abruptly, as was the case when the Cambodian government banned online gambling and prompted an exodus of short-term foreign residents. Despite that, the influx of foreign capital has sent land prices and living costs alike soaring, pushing already-vulnerable communities to the edge. But much of the once-affordable housing has been priced out of reach or levelled in the construction overhaul. Sreymau has had no such luck. When she lost that home, she had to improvise, even scavenge — moving to her current abode after the demolition of the first abandoned building in which she squatted. The construction boom is an inescapable part of life in Sihanoukville. The concrete shells of towers rise floor after bare concrete floor, skeletons wrapped in often-ragged green netting and spindly scaffolding. The streets below have been rutted by the tyres of more cars, more trucks, more equipment. Flooding has increased as runoff patterns have been altered by tons of new concrete construction. A viral video shared last summer showed a flowing river of rubbish after heavy rains, but even normal afternoon rainfall is enough to turn entire streets into ponds. Brightly hued billboards advertise dice games, karaoke nights and swimming pools shimmering with promise under the tropical sun. Many of the billboards have been battered by the elements, bleached by that same sun. They stand in front of construction sites overgrown with weeds and strewn with refuse, advertising a future that looks very different than the present. Whereas before addicts often lived in standard — if simple — housing, they are now scattered across poorer parts of the city. Some cluster wherever they can find whatever cheap housing remains, others aim for abandoned buildings or put up shacks or tents on the beach. Her scaffolding has two wooden platforms suspended over a concrete floor. The air is hot and still, and the putrid smell of rubbish wafts through when the wind changes. Aside from that, her kitchen is limited — one of its only other features is a cloud of fruit flies hanging over a plate of dragonfruit on a table. Eno and her coworkers say the price of meth in Sihanoukville seems to be increasing along with goods and services. The transnational market for meth includes production labs in Myanmar, money and muscle from crime syndicates based in Thailand, Hong Kong and Macau, and consumers living everywhere from bustling megacities to rural hamlets. Young Cambodians are most likely to use drugs, and are also the ones most targeted by traffickers importing meth from Laos and China. While the youngest and poorest drug users sometimes sniff glue, the majority of those admitted are meth users, with 15, cases in out of 15, admissions. Heroin users, the second biggest category, amounted to just cases. As part of its repertoire of anti-drugs measures, Cambodia in the past relied on forcing drug users into treatment centres as part of compulsory rehab programmes. Those centres were locally infamous and drew international attention after a investigation and report by Human Rights Watch, a US-based non-governmental organisation, that alleged abuses ranging from severe beatings to gang rape by centre guards. With UNODC help, Cambodia aims to build a more humane, community-based treatment system, with the Ministry of Health saying it has tabs on around such centres across the country. The compulsory centres are still in use, having sunk out of the eye of public notoriety. Even while the number of centres has gone up, so has demand — spurred in part by an anti-drugs campaign launched in at the behest of Prime Minister Hun Sen. Drugs-related arrests that year topped out at almost 17,, a big jump from the roughly 10, collared by police in The number edged down last year, though the renewed anti-drugs vigour and the apparent determination to arrest users, rather than just traffickers has more than doubled the number of patients sent to state-run drug rehabilitation facilities. In , about 3, people were sent to centres. A year later, that number jumped to over 8,, according to the Ministry of Social Affairs. While authorities have discussed the need for more robust drug treatment, much of the long-term support for users comes from civil society rather than the state. Sithat Sem is a drug project manager for Friends International FI , a non-governmental organisation in Phnom Penh that provides social services to children and families in the metro region and beyond. Though he now mostly works to prevent HIV infections caused by injecting drugs, he has come across all sorts of cases during his work with the vulnerable on the streets of the capital, where FI provided addiction-related services to more than people. Sem describes how low-income people migrate from the provinces for work but lack a strong social support network in the city, leaving them isolated and exposed more fully to the stresses of life in the big city. Many of the people he assists have jobs, some as day labourers, but others in the rough and haphazard rubbish scavenging trade, in which workers comb through rancid garbage piles looking for scrap and recyclables to sell. Everybody is wary of the police. When people are arrested for drug use, Sem said, they get the option of going to rehab instead of prison. He supports giving that choice, but believes that more needs to be done to build a rapport between addict and cop. To be successful in controlling substance abuse, he continued, that would have to change. For many other meth addicts in Sihanoukville, life takes on a harsher tone. Eventually she stopped by the tree and dropped her pants, squatting to urinate as young men with fishing rods picked their way around her to the water. The social workers glanced back at the woman. Senior social worker Sun Kosal said the woman had originally come to Sihanoukville from a different province to earn a living. Now, she works in the sex trade at the docks, catering to Khmer and Chinese clients. To pass the time, she likes to draw in her notepad, using one of the many pens bristling from a cup on a small stand. Sometimes she sketches people. Other times, she draws houses. She had nothing to show us when we visited her. She chips into the budget by making shopping errands for friends, a way to bring in a few riel. Mostly, she spends a lot of time on her own, with thoughts turned lately to the baby growing in her womb. Little reunions of mother and daughter are few and far between. But when Sreymau dreams of the future, her little girl has rejoined the family and is in school, right along with the imminent new arrival. No longer is everyone packed into a stifling ruin, dystopia replaced by a quiet house on a small patch of land. Somewhere she can call home. She brushes away notions of buying a clean, well-lit place to live. By Anton L. Everything else About Us Podcast. Careers Contributors Customer Support. Sihanoukville has been utterly transformed by foreign investment, filling the streets with garbage and leaving many vulnerable communities priced out of affordable housing. Photos: Andrew Haffner. 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