Lost in Ecstasy

Though much has passed since China's downfall to opium in the mid-eighteen hundreds, today Cambodia faces a similar problem with drugs such as ecstasy and meth. As in the case of China with Britain, Cambodia's drug problem was instigated by Vietnamese drug traffickers, traders from the outside looking to make money. In this however, it is not a case of one country trying to make up for debts to another. It is purely personal. When supply of resources (sources of safrole oil) ran low in Vietnam, traffickers searched for a cost effective solution and found it in the forests of the Cardamom Mountains in western Cambodia. When the traffickers came hiring, poor cambodians jumped at the chance for money even if it meant hard manual labor - most often they were not told what the end product the the safrole oil would be. This again, is different from the situation between China and Britain, because the dealers of opium within China were knowingly doing something illegal. It is similar though in that ecstatsy and harvest of safrole oil are illegal in Cambodia, as was opium in China. Workers for the makeshift forest factories are paid $25 per month, a small amount considering that a single liter of the oil goes for $2000 outside of the country. This same liter produces almost 7,000 tablets of ecstasy which can be sold for up to $200,000. Evidently, this is a profitable business for the middlemen further down the line, but for the most part, cambodians do not gain much from the exchange. In fact, there are numerous side effects to this business that are not for the benefit of the country. There are the obvious problems of deforestation (since the oil comes from the Mreah Prew Phnom tree), as well as poaching, pollution, danger to dwindling species that live in the forests, and even problems of drug addiction amongst cambodians.
Generally, the entire situation is similar to Britain's exploitation of the chinese through opium - one party using another to make money, reaping all sorts of added benefits, causing the other to deteriorate in the face of addiction. This is truly happening in Cambodia where rehabilitaton centers have noted that since 2004 (around the time when evidence of safrole oil harvesting was first found) need for their services has greatly increased. The centers have found themselves out of their depth, unprepared for this growing problem. Prior to the entry of traffickers in Cambodia, this was not a prevalent issue, but now it is steadily growing into a "drug epidemic." Measures are, of course, being taken by the government to shut down the factories that produce the drugs, but the work is hard and not always successful. As in China's case, this shows that the government does not always have the upper hand. In then end, it is unlikely that the situation in Cambodia will escalate to the point of war that it did in China - Vietnam has not the influence nor the reason that Britain did, and so will most likely not wage war on Cambodia. Hopefully, the Cambodian government will find a more effective and peaceful way to deal with this problem on the rise.