TUESDAY 22 | Adolf Hitler ingested it daily in a cocktail of more than 80 drugs, turning him from an egomaniac into a sadistic mass murderer. Timothy Leary, Allen Ginsberg and the Beatles warned against it during the late ’60s as flower power gave way to rampant consumerism. And in 2003 the US Air Force was forced to defend its use after two pilots under its influence dropped a bomb near Kandahar in Afghanistan that killed four Canadian soldiers. Methamphetamine – known variously on the streets as speed, meth, crystal meth, ice, shards, shabu, glass, jib, crank, batu, tweak, rock and tina – is today considered by many to rank among the world’s most dangerous drugs. And where heroin was once the most profitable narcotic produced in the remote labs of the Golden Triangle, where the borders of Burma, Thailand and Laos collide, a complex sequence of political events has spurred the rise of what is now a multibillion-dollar meth industry here in Southeast Asia (worth $8.5bn last year, according to the UN’s Office on Drugs and Crime). Two very different documentaries, Hitler’s Drug and Asia’s Speed Trap, investigate.
WHO: Meth heads and tweakers
WHAT: Hitler’s Drug and Asia’s Speed Trap screenings
WHERE: Meta House, #37 Sothearos Blvd.
WHEN: 7pm July 22
WHY: The real Breaking Bad