Smoke if you got em'

It’s a beautiful day in the neighborhood – an average morning finds us(natalie, Boonlien, Jidapa, sometimes Sirachai, and myself) at the 7 eleven, or simply ‘seven’ as the Thais refer to it. We’re picking up coffee/tea on the way into the factory. Tea(Chaa), when bought on the street is served in a plastic bag with a straw, which one quickly realizes cannot be put down with out spilling all of its contents; an ingenious marketing ploy to say the least. It’s a product that you literally cannot let go of, forced to hang onto the bagged beverage until you either finish it or get sick of having the precipitation of it contents drip onto your slacks, and you throw it away. Anyway, at the ‘Seven,’ (where they serve their beverages in the same plastic cups we have at home) we idle in the parking lot as I observe two men dressed in khaki guard uniforms. This is a typical site in Rayong. There are many industrial sites in the Eastern Seaboard accompanied by numerous checkpoints with guard posts; so uniformed guards seem to be everywhere on and off duty. These particular guards were spending their break sitting in the ‘Seven’ parking lot determined to either get their day started or bring it to an end by sharing a total of five 30oz bottles of Beer Chang and a pack of smokes. Note: it is not yet seven a.m. Not that this occurrence is unique to Thailand. I can account for a few occurrences on certain US collegiate campuses where Beer and Donuts were the breakfast of choice. And here I blame them less, as anything that promises to be cold and liquid is welcome refreshment regardless of alcohol content or time of day.
What I can’t understand is how in this muggy atmosphere one can do most of their breathing through a cigarette. I’m one of those who are thankful Bangkok has begun enforcing non-smoking in many establishments. But this claim doesn't make it certain, and in observing the packs of cigarettes for sale here, I realize how much of a puss the Surgeon General is. The warning labels on Thai cigarettes suffer no fools. They don’t merely suggest in an unobtrusive way that smoking is bad for one’s health, oh no…brands, such as 'Krong Thip,' 'Saifon falling rain' and my favorite, 'U.S. no. 1' go the extra mile and depict actual photos of people suffering from different smoking related ailments. Color photographs grace each pack depicting in gritty detail, cancer-ridden mouths of decaying gums and teeth, an emaciated man with a tracheotomy hooked up to a respirator or a dude puffing away with an Auschwitz esque mural of stacked skulls behind him. My personal favorite is the picture of the upper torso of a cadaver with its chest splayed open, a set of black lungs exposed for the entire nicotine-addicted world to see. And yet a deterrent they are not. Living in the world long enough, one comes to understand that warnings of premature death rarely faze anyone. Why should the Thais be any different? People here not only tote a pack of cigarettes with them, but their own cellophane wrapped pictures of cancerous death – like family photos in a wallet. You only live life once, right – who’d want to miss out on that?
Okay – tune in next time as I discuss the forced labor camps in Myanmar!