Chasing the Dragon
Into the Heart of the Golden Triangle
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- 105,00 kr
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- 105,00 kr
Utgivarens beskrivning
Chasing the Dragon is the story of a Boston Herald reporter's journey into Burma/Myanmar to interview the mysterious drug lord, Khun Sa.
The features desk of an American newspaper may seem an unlikely launchpad for a journey into one of the world's most remote and dangerous regions, but for journalist Christopher Cox, it was where the story began. It would end nearly three years later in the almost inaccessible mountain fastnesses of Shan State, Burma, as Cox brought off a journalistic coup even hard-bitten foreign correspondents might envy: a rare personal audience with General Khun Sa, the man U.S. law enforcement dubbed "The Prince of Death," the man thought to control a third of the world's supply of heroin. Accompanied by an obsessed Vietnam vet who had given up everything in his single-minded search for American POWs left behind in Southeast Asia and an eccentric expat with close personal ties to the general, Cox was going to cross forbidden borders to enter a region long off-limits to Westerners. And armed with little more than a backpack stuffed with vodka, porno tapes, and cigarettes, he was going to succeed. His journey would take him deep into the Golden Triangle, a shadowy zone of banditry, drug smuggling, and the ghost armies of past wars. He would begin in the red-light district of Bangkok, with its sex bars and soaring HIV rates, then head up into northern borderlands newly discovers by package-tour groups, and finally cross a jungled no-man's-land into the world of the Shan, where tough tribesmen trade opium and precious gemstones for the arms they need to fight the Burmese.
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Perhaps 60% of the heroin in the U.S. originates in the Golden Triangle, where Laos, Thailand and Burma (Myanmar) meet. But when Boston Herald reporter Cox went to Southeast Asia in 1994, his aim was to enter Shan State in eastern Burma, a section run by warlord Khun Sa, depicted by the DEA as the evil demon of the heroin trade. Cox was accompanied by his friend Jay Sullivan, a veteran obsessed with finding American POWs and MIAs in the region and aided by an American wheeler-dealer whom Khun Sa trusted. Cox portrays Burma, a brutal police state, as eager to share in drug profits. Thailand has converted itself into a vast bordello, where the number of HIV and AIDS patients may soon reach two million. Khun Sa, according to Cox, sought to make Shan State an independent nation and to phase out heroin production, but the world would not help. Edgy and told with dark humor, Cox's report is richly informative. Illustrations not seen by PW.