Drugs while traveling - be very careful

Look, I'm not going to try to lecture anyone about what it is that they decide to do with their lives. If you want to do drugs I say do your thing - it's none of my business what you decide to put in your body. I am more of the "do no harm, live and let live" type of person.

However, it is very well-known that drugs are generally more available when you are traveling to developing countries and this is also a major reason why people decide to visit those places.

src

Some of the places I have visited they don't seem to be at all concerned with getting busted over this practice either. When I was in Koh Phang-ngan in Thailand, there were loads of fruit shake stands that advertised on really big boards that they were selling magic mushroom shakes there. You don't need to be a top member of CSI to figure out what is going on here.

When I was traveling through Central America I was offered cocaine and marijuana by people everywhere I went and this was sometimes just random strangers on the street. There seems to be no fear of police at all in these sorts of situations which suggests the obvious situation of the police being in on it and getting kickbacks.

When I spoke to a foreign guesthouse owner in Hanoi he said that they are told by the police that they can sell drugs (for a fee) but NEVER to Vietnamese people. They would have people smoking weed in plain sight in the middle of the bar and no one even tried to hide when the police would come by. Other than the staff, the Vietnamese population was not even allowed in the bar. It was a crazy scene.

Aside from the obvious dangers associated with doing drugs from an unknown source there are other dangers, such as the fact that most of these countries, despite the availability, actually have very stiff penalties for even simple possession.

src

There is a story of a friend of mine that was on the famous Koh Sahn Road in Bangkok and he was approached by someone in Gulliver's Travels bar asking if he wanted to buy some weed. My friend is an idiot and also a big fan of ganja, so he said yes. The price was right, the portion looked good, and everything seemed to be going according to plan. Upon leaving Gulliver's Travels, he was almost immediately apprehended by police and searched. They clearly had received a tip, presumably from the dealer himself, about the fact that he was now in possession of illegal drugs. They handcuffed him to a park fence and started to negotiate with him about how much he was willing to pay to get out of this situation.

They ended up almost cleaning out his bank account after they escorted him to an ATM, right in front of everyone, to have him prove that he didn't really have very much money in his account. That stupid mistake ended up costing him 20,000 Baht (around $500 at the time.) Of course this is a lot better than going to jail and fighting the charges which he would almost certainly lose anyway, but the fact of the matter was that there is a lot more money in setting up foreigners and scaring them into paying off the cops than there is in the actual sale of the drug itself.

In a rather funny twist, the cops actually gave him a few thousand of the balance back to him as they released him, because they felt bad for him.

For me, I am not really a fan of most drugs and stick to whisky and beer for the most part but i do realize that a lot of people do like this portion of traveling and I think that a really good idea would be to be very careful about where and how you acquire the drugs. I'm not going to try to tell you how to accomplish this because I don't actually know. I suppose if you are in a bar and people are openly smoking pot that it is probably a safe bet. Just don't assume that just because you are not in your home country that drugs are somehow legal and safe to acquire, because there is a really good chance that they are not.