New opiates museum in heart of Golden Triangle

SOP RUAK, Thailand — A British clipper ship hauls bales of opium to emaciated Chinese addicts as sailors belt out rollicking sea chanteys. "What a Wonderful World," croons Louis Armstrong among stark images of movie stars, musicians and other celebrities cut down by drugs in the prime of life.

These multimedia tableaux form part of a harrowing and ultimately moving museum set in the very heart of the Golden Triangle, origin of more than half the world's heroin and a haven for traffickers.

Although somewhat incongruous in its setting of lush, mist-streaked forests, and yet to officially open, it already is attracting thousands of schoolchildren, along with Thai and foreign tourists, to this Mekong River village where the frontiers of Thailand, Myanmar and Laos converge.

Paveena Viriyaprapaikit, the project's director, hopes the $10 million steel-and-concrete Hall of Opium also will become a center for research into opiates and inspire young people to fight Thailand's growing drug problem.

Visitors enter through a 150-yard tunnel, its dim lighting, eerie music and bas-reliefs of wraithlike figures evoking both suffering and easing of pain, as well as the Triangle's danger and mystery.

The exhibits end with a Hall of Reflection, a sunlit room of Zen-like simplicity inscribed with sayings in praise of moderation and humanity's striving for good. "Our greatest glory is not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall," reads one from Confucius.

In between, the story of opiates' origins, trade and use is told in vivid-set pieces, video, photographs and written commentary.

The first written mention of opium, the museum's historical section notes, is found in Sumerian texts going back 5,000 years. The Egyptians indulged in it for pleasure, and some ancient Romans used toxic doses to poison their enemies. The moguls of India fed it to their war elephants to calm them in battle.

Before anesthesia and aspirin, produced in 1900, opium and morphine relieved the physical agonies and minor pains of millions, even though the drugs were sometimes misused. A 19th-century U.S. advertisement praises an opium-based "Mrs. Winslow's soothing syrup for children teething" while makers of a morphine mixture advised wives to keep wayward husbands at home by stirring it into their coffee.

The cargo hold of an 18th-century British ship carrying opium, an early 20th-century opium den in Thailand and scenes from the Opium Wars of the 1840s in China are carefully reconstructed. More recent times furnish exhibits of how smugglers stuff drugs into teddy bears, soak shirts in heroin or swallow drug-packed condoms.

"We tried to present a fair picture of opium, both its advantages for humans and its dangers. That was difficult. Usually, it's so demonized," said U.S. researcher Charles Mehl, who led a team of prominent Thai academics.

Perhaps most searing is a long, narrowing passage representing the descent from initial euphoria of drug users to great suffering and lost talent. Rock king Elvis Presley, comedian Lenny Bruce and soccer star Diego Maradona are among those whose photos hang in a Gallery of Victims.

"Any musician who says he is playing better on tea, the needle, or when he is juiced, is a plain straight liar," reads a quote under the photo of jazz great Charlie Parker, dead at 35 from heroin abuse.

In one display, visitors are drawn to the exquisitely beautiful face of Ju Jia smiling from a wall. As Armstrong sings about the joys of living, the haunting face suddenly appears again, a caption noting that the budding Chinese actress died from a drug overdose at 28.