- Opiated Thai Sticks: Myth or Truth? -

[prune]

Smoked a lot of Thai during the 70's in the NYC/nj area, it didn't come from the "City" though, it came from the "Fort" in duffle bags. Prices were high but reasonable at $10-25 a stick. It was the first really sticky weed we saw, maybe this started the Opium stories.
Did anyone else get the "Buddha" sticks that came towards the end of the 70's? They were about twice the size and retailed at $35 a pop.

 

[Donald Mallard]

can the folks talking of this early water post up what it actually is ,


from my research i found a whole bunch of chemicals are used to transform opium to morphine and then to heroin ,
the concoction used to transform morphine to heroin would strip cannabis of oils and resins and actually make them less desirable from what i can tell ,, here is a list of them ..

• Acetic anhydride
• Chloroform
• Sodium carbonate
• Alcohol
• Ether
• Hydrochloric acid

doesnt sound like water to me by any means , where is this early water in the above mix of chemicals .. ???

 

[troutman]

^^^^ Heroin hydrochloride the form normally used is water soluble and soaking buds in it could get them coated with it.

 

[therevverend]

I called up another buddy of mine, another guy who spent 10 years dealing countless pounds of Thai cannabis. They'd get it right off the boat, (or the plane) still sealed in it's shipping package. Confirming it wasn't fucked with after it came to the states. He confirmed that some of the Thai Sticks he smoked were contaminated with opiates. He said you could tell from the taste, the look, and the way it felt in the lungs. He described it as 'expando', hitting your lungs hard and making you cough. The taste on your tongue was different from cannabis. And it looked different, you could tell it had been fucked with.

can the folks talking of this early water post up what it actually is

In my limited understanding opium is water-soluble. When they're removing the plant matter and impurities they're dissolving the stuff in water and straining shit out. I think they also mess with the PH, changing it from a acid to a base. At some point the opium is strained or sieved or something and there's leftover water. Maybe collected through evaporation? The water is a weak opiate solution, probably containing some of the weaker opiates, codeine for instance. This is the stuff they'd dip the sticks they'd collected for export. Stick it in the water for a short time, then let it dry, then pack it. In this way it wouldn't be so strong people would be overdosing or puking their guts out. Unless they smoked a lot, combined it with other drugs, or had allergies...

It actually makes sense, Donald, that you didn't encounter the stuff when you were in Thailand. You were getting goodies directly from the farmers and locals, not the Triads or whoever the big money exporters were. They weren't doing this shit on the farms or in the fields. They'd have a place they'd bring their bulk amounts of cannabis and opium to. They'd refine the opium and pack the cannabis and heroin to shipment for export out of the country. Not import back into the countryside where it came from.

I don't have a horse in this race, I wasn't there, but enough of my old friends have casually talked about it over the years that I assume it happened. Some of their family ended up heroin addicts and I get the feeling the opiated sticks may have started them on that path. So they don't like talking about it that much and don't like going deep into detail.

I like to be skeptical of stuff, get to the bottom of these sort of stories and while I'm 99% certain I'm not 100%, I'd like to find written records. 1st hand accounts are good but it's been 40 years. Memories change. Something like government records saying this cannabis tested positive for this. It's hard as hell to find press clippings or any details from straight society about Thai Stick, let alone the opiated kind. I wonder if High Times had pictures and articles about opiated Thai sticks. Or something in their price directory. We've got cannabis contaminated with something but we don't have lab evidence of what. This is why my friend's story about going to the doctor is important, it confirms the stuff was indeed an opiate. I wonder if there are medical records or testing about opiates in imported cannabis.

I found more about PCP/embalming fluid. A lot of people think that it's actually PCP, that embalming fluid doesn't get you high, it's a myth, etc. I knew a guy when I was a foolish teenager, an older ghetto black guy that ripped me off over a couple ounces. He worked at a funeral home. I remember him talking about stealing the embalming fluid but I was young and I didn't understand. Here's a science paper about 'Smoking wet', embalming fluid and PCP on cigarettes used to roll joints.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3568288/

Nasty as fuck. These are hospital records of people who's lungs were damaged by the stuff.

Here's a video the Jamaican government put out, a warning about embalming fluid on cannabis. Notice the guy in the comments section, arguing that it's really PCP. PCP has become very rare, I'd think formaldehyde is much more common and much easier to obtain.

 

[@hempy]

It was not that common to see opiumated Thai sticks or hash and the older members that experienced the 70s and early 80s would remember how the streets were a flood with opium and heroin.

You could smell and taste the difference from regular Thai sticks but people selling it told you what it was and they had opiumated or regular.


Thinking about it decades later smoking laced cannabis was possibly not the smartest thing we did.

 

[Stocktont]

It was not that common to see opiumated Thai sticks or hash and the older members that experienced the 70s and early 80s would remember how the streets were a flood with opium and heroin.

You could smell and taste the difference from regular Thai sticks but people selling it told you what it was and they had opiumated or regular.


Thinking about it decades later smoking laced cannabis was possibly not the smartest thing we did.

[FONT=Helvetica, sans-serif]How did the “opiumated” hash look like and how did you smoke it @Hempy? Same with the thai that you saw “opiumated”, how did it look and how did you smoke it? Any particulars about it compared to regular sticks and hash?[/FONT]

 

[mexcurandero420]

Ever seen opium smoked?

They have to force it to vaporize with a strong flame.

Doesn't sound like smoking a joint at all. It would go out, no?

 

[Cvh]

Following the post below (from another thread) the water is completely boiled off in the opium process.

During which step are the Thai Sticks then supposedly dipped? Before the re-heating and boiling off? Or are the sticks steamed during the boiling off?

Which step in the process is this 'early water'?

(Here is also the link to the PDF mentioned by Raho in the quote below:
https://www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles1/Digitization/141189NCJRS.pdf )

Processing opium (from the PDF govt report I linked earlier):

COOKING OPIUM (page 12)

Before opium is smoked, it is usually cooked. Uncooked opium contains moisture, vegetable matter and other impurities which detract from a smooth-smoking product. The raw opium which is collected from the opium poppy pod is placed in an open cooking pot of boiling water where the sticky glob of opium alkaloids quickly dissolve. The soil, twigs, plant scrapings, etc. remain undissolved. The solution is strained through cheesecloth to remove these impurities. The clear brown liquid, sometimes called "liquid opium," is actually opium in solution. This liquid is then re-heated over a low flame until the water turns to steam and is driven off into the air. When the water has evaporated. a thick paste remains. This paste is called "prepared opium," "cooked opium," or "smoking opium" and itis dried in the sun until it has a putty-like consistency. The net weight of the cooked opium is generally about twenty percent lighter than the original raw opium. Likewise, cooked opium is also more pure than in its original, raw form.
Cooked opium is suitable for smoking or eating by opium users. Traditionally there is only one group of opium poppy farmers, the Hmong, who prefer to not cook their opium before smoking. Most other ethnic groups, including Chinese opium addicts, prefer smoking cooked opium.
If the opium is to be sold to traders for use in morphineorheroinlaboratories,itisnotnecessaryto cook it first. The laboratory operators generally use 55-gallon oil drums or huge cooking vats to cook the raw opium before beginning the morphine extraction process (described in the next chapter).

EXTRACTION OF MORPHINE FROM OPIUM (page 13-14)

Raw or cooked opium contains more than 35 different alkaloids, including morphine, which accounts for approximately ten percent of the total raw opium weight. Heroin manufacturers must first extract the morphine from the opium, before converting the morphine to heroin. The extraction is a simple process, requiring only a few chemicals and a supply of water. Morphine is usually extracted from opium in small clandestine "laboratories" which are typically set up near the opium poppy fields. Since the morphine base is about one-tenth the weight and volume of raw opium, it is desirable to reduce the opium to morphine before transporting the product from the field to a heroin laboratory.
The process of extracting morphine from opium involves dissolving opium in hot water, adding lime to precipitate non-morphine alkaloids and then adding ammonium chloride to precipitate morphine from the solution. An empty oil drum and some cooking pots are needed.
Following is a step-by-step description of morphine extraction in a typical Southeast Asian laboratory:
1. An empty 55-gallon oil drum is placed on bricks about a foot above the ground and a fire is built under the drum. Thirty gallons of water are added to the drum and brought to a boil. Ten to fifteen kilograms of raw opium are added to the boiling water.
2. With stirring, the raw opium eventually dissolves in the boiling water, while soil, leaves, twigs, and other non-soluble materia1s float in the solution. Most of these materials are scooped out of the clear brown "liquid opium" solution.
3. Slaked lime (calcium hydroxide) or more often a readily available chemical fertilizer with a high content of lime is added to the solution. The lime will convert the water insoluble morphine into the water soluble calcium morphenate. The other opium alkaloids do not react with the lime to form calcium salts. Codeine is an opium alkaloid which is slighty water soluble and which will be carried over with the calcium morphenate in the liquid. For the most part, the other alkaloids will become a part of the "sluge."
4. As the solution cools, the morphine solution is scooped from the drum and poured through a filter of some kind. Burlap rice sacks are often used as filters and can then be squeezed in a press to remove most of the solution from the wet sacks. The solution is then poured into largecookingpotsandre-heated,butnotboiled.
5. Ammonium chloride is added to the heated calcium morphenate solution to adjust the alkalinity to a pH of8 to 9, and the solution is then allowed to cool. Within one or two hours, the morphine base and the unreacted codeine base precipitate out of the solution and settle to the bottom of the cooking pot.
6. The solution is then poured off through cloth fllters. Any solid morphine base chunks in the solution will remain on the cloth. The morphine base is reploved from both the cooking pot and from the filter cloths, wrapped and squeezed in cloth, and then dried in the sun. When dry, the crude morphine base is a coffeecolored powder.
7. This "crude" morphine base, commonly known by the Chinese term pi-tzu in Southeast Asia, may be further purified by its dissolution in hydrochloric acid, adding activated charcoal, re-heating and filtering. The solution is filtered several times, and the morphine (morphine hydrochloride) is then dried in the sun. (See Figure 8.)
8. Morphine hydrochloride (tainted with codeine hydrochloride) is usually pressed into small brick-sized blocks in a press and wrapped in paper or cloth. Themost common block size is 2 inches by 4 inches by 5 inches weighing about 1.3 kilograms. The bricks are dried for transport to heroin processing laborabories.
Approximately 13 kilograms of opium, from one hectare of opium poppies, are needed to produce each morphine block of this size. The morphine blocks are then bundled and packed for transport to heroin laboratories by human couriers or by pack animals. Pack mules are able to carry lOO-kilogram payloads over 200 miles of rugged mountain trails in less than three weeks.

 

[Asiatica]

Sorry didnt mean to post.

 

[hyposomniac]

I don't think anyone mentioned Nepalese temple hash.. wasn't that supposed to be opiated as well..
My friend brought some home from Amsterdam in the 90s and I got proper fucked off it. I could see garbled music exiting the radio.
A decade later I smoked some actual opium, and thought, no way that hash had opium.

 

[musigny23]

I called up another buddy of mine, another guy who spent 10 years dealing countless pounds of Thai cannabis. They'd get it right off the boat, (or the plane) still sealed in it's shipping package. Confirming it wasn't fucked with after it came to the states. He confirmed that some of the Thai Sticks he smoked were contaminated with opiates. He said you could tell from the taste, the look, and the way it felt in the lungs. He described it as 'expando', hitting your lungs hard and making you cough. The taste on your tongue was different from cannabis. And it looked different, you could tell it had been fucked with.

This account doesn't "confirm" anything. I was around and involved back then too. Every point of "proof" here isn't proof of anything other than that Thai strains were very unique and different from Mexican and Columbians that Americans were used to. Plus they were cured in a very distinct way.

There was absolutely no reason Thai village farmers would want to "fuck with" or "contaminate" their product. Thais are hard workers and the basic production of the sticks and curing them was enough work, they would have no motivation to do more work to perform some sort of infusion using something that would need to come from a distant different place and increase costs.

Quality and batches varied but generally at it's best it was just plain strong. It was a different tasting cannabis, not a different taste from cannabis.

As I've pointed out in other posts, if opiates were present in sticks, that would have been very obvious and in some very not good ways. Opiates and cannabinoids do not compliment each other. If you know them both, you know there is no reason to combine them.

 

[Hammerhead]

If shady people where growing hemp than packaged it like sticks I could see adding opium to try and make it a product that would sale.. There's a reason people do stuff like this. If its good Thai adding opium would turn it to crap for most plus your market just dropped by 90% since most didn't use opium. If I was given it back than I wouldn't have smoked it.

 

[Dr. Purpur]

I was in the pot business starting in about 1973. The opiated sticks were gone by around 1975. He wouldnt have seen them in1978.

There is an old pot documentary I saw years ago, that showed them processing the sticks in the left over waste water from the heroin process. The pictures were black and white

 

[mexcurandero420]

I was in the pot business starting in about 1973. The opiated sticks were gone by around 1975. He wouldnt have seen them in1978.

There is an old pot documentary I saw years ago, that showed them processing the sticks in the left over waste water from the heroin process. The pictures were black and white

Do you still know the title of this pot documentary?

 

[Donald Mallard]

I was in the pot business starting in about 1973. The opiated sticks were gone by around 1975. He wouldnt have seen them in1978.

There is an old pot documentary I saw years ago, that showed them processing the sticks in the left over waste water from the heroin process. The pictures were black and white

why would they only do them 2 years i wonder ,


you do realize that the opium fields were not anywhere near where they grew the thai sticks ,
and the people involved are quite different tribes , who dont really do business with one another ,

there was no one making heroin where the thai sticks were grown. so no early water to dip sticks in and wayy to far to transport either to each other ..



also sam skunkman was there and he reports the thais saying they never did it and it was just a story to sell more weed , likely made up by westerners,

no one was exporting opium laced thai sticks or any with some early water treatment ,
if you cant believe the guys who were there and saw it and have first hand experience i dont know what u can believe ,

a dealer that sold you something and asked for more money due to his story ?

you know drug dealers tell stories to make their product seem more attractive and to profit off it right??

they still do it today , nothing has changed ...

 

[ahortator]

I was born in those years you were smoking Thai Sticks. So I can say nothing. I can only repeat as a parrot what I have read from others who were smoking such weed in those golden years for good ganja.

Thai Stick - the true story

Okay everywhere I go on the web these days I see all these stories about the legendary Thai Stick from the 70's. I also see Seedbanks getting in on the act and purporting to sell the real strain that was used to make Thai stick.

My research and personal experience indicates that they are all simply making up a whole lot of rubbish.

I live in NZ which was the transit point for Thai Stick all over the world. I was there in the 70's and hooked into the Thai Stick distribution network run by Marty Johnstone and Terry Clarke.

Thai stick was known as "Buddha Stick" and as far as I know it was the Mr. Asia syndicate that coined the phrase. From memory this is actually explained in the out of print book about Terry Clarke. Anyway I have read some seedbank breeders from the 70's claiming all sorts of rubbish about "Buddha Sticks" coming from India which is rubbish. Buddha sticks have always referred to nothing but genuine Thai Stick and the "Elephant Stick" was a cheap Indian knockoff of the real Thai Stick.

Thai stick was the trippiest, most potent weed on the planet. End of story. Anybody who actually tried the real thing will tell you that and they will just laugh at you when you start going on about "White Widow" or some other fancy Dutch strain. The weed coming out of South East Asia at that time was stronger than anything that is around these days. As well as Thai Stick there was also "tripping weed" coming out of Sumatra and Vietnam that .... well you really have to try it to understand. The high is more like an acid trip than a weed experience.

Many people in later years have claimed that Thai Stick was so strong because it was dipped in opium, heroin water or hash oil. This sounds quite reasonable until you look at how much Thai Stick the Mr Asia syndicate was actually moving around the world. Dipping 500,000 sticks at a time is a pretty expensive way to do business. The book on Terry Clarke goes into quite a bit of detail about every shipment and it doesn't mention dipping the sticks in anything. Why would they even bother? They were already moving the strongest weed anyway that was selling faster than they could supply it? Still maybe they did dip it because when the weed dried up (Thailand couldn't grow enough of it fast enough to keep up with demand) the syndicate became the biggest Pacific rim heroin smuggler in the world.

It is generally accepted that the true Thai Stick strain is now extinct. The Mr Asia syndicate was buying all that could be produced and it is said that they were the ones who introduced Pakistani indica genetics to the growers. It was said that real Thai Stick took nine months to grow and mature so they crossed it with hash plant to get two or even three crops per season instead of one. I have no idea if that is true but something certainly did happen that killed Thai Stick stone dead. We started getting inferior sticks that were made up to look like the originals but the weed was different. Less potent, green instead of brown and a totally different taste and effect.

Contrary to popular belief, smokers did not embrace the new Dutch weed or believe it was more potent. That is just good marketing by the Dutch. The hippies complained loud and long about the new "chem schwag" that was replacing their beloved sun ripened golden sweet and spicey strains. We just got sick of complaining in the end.

For the record, the real Thai Stick came from Udon in East Thailand and I have never seen any Thai seeds in seedbanks that originated from this province.

Here are links to the original story of Thai Stick:

https://g-word.blogspot.com/2004/12/brigadoon.html
https://www.nzlistener.co.nz/issue/...l;jsessionid=D86A9A335502E09B7A70E4D421455740
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marty_Johnstone
https://www.nationmaster.com/encyclopedia/Thai-stick

The last link states that Thai Stick declined in popularity when stronger local weed came on the market. This is rubbish. I was there at the time in the middle of it all. Thai Stick never declined in popularity at all. It simply dried up and you couldn't get it anymore and everybody still wanted to get it and they still want to get it thirty years later. It was the fact that you couldn't get Thai Stick any longer that actually started the weed revolution. People all over the world suddenly started seeking out Asian and Columbian strains and growing them because they missed the Thai weed.

As a side note... after the Mr asia syndicate started falling apart the Australian Police busted one of the biggest commercial cannabis growing operations of all time (outside Mexico and Columbia). A huge Queensland syndicate was growing hundreds of acres (the police suppressed a lot of information at the time) of Thai weed right in the middle of the Queensland sugar cane belt. Many of the plants were reported to be 18ft high upwards. This stuff was almost as strong as original Thai Stick which sort of kills the dipped in opium theory. Not long after that NZ and Aussie were flooded with weed from Sumatra in Indonesia, apparently also grown by a huge syndicate. Once again that was killer weed far stronger than any Dutch strain I've ever tried.

In the last few years the rumours are that Papau New Guinea now has the killer weed. They call it 'Niugini gold' ....

If anybody could actually get their hands on some then we may find out that it is the new Thai Stick?

Now if anybody has any Niugini Gold seeds.... please PM me immediately ....

m0ng00se

https://webcache.googleusercontent.....php?f=12&t=976 sumatran trippin weed&ct=clnk

 

[therevverend]

Thais are hard workers

your market just dropped by 90% since most didn't use opium. If I was given it back than I wouldn't have smoked it.

Ha ha is there a moral argument here, Thai Sticks are Good, the people that made Thai sticks are Good, and we are Good, and opium is bad so they and we would never do such a thing? Even if a dirty guy in a trenchcoat put some opium on some pot we're too Good to want to use it? Bullshit.

. Opiates and cannabinoids do not compliment each other. If you know them both, you know there is no reason to combine them.

What an odd thing to say. Every time I've ever been on opiates, after surgery, I crave absolutely, love a bong hit and it takes away all the pain. If you take a couple vicodin and take bong hits, or put opium on top of a bowl of good cannabis and smoke it you get really high and feel great. Since the opiate relaxes the tension the psychedelic creates. When I got back from the dentist with a bottle of opiates after I got my wisdom teeth pulled I couldn't wait to take bong hits. Even though I knew better I took them too soon, before the stitches healed. it made me cough and now I have a pocket behind one of my teeth from where the stitches ripped from coughing too hard. I felt great and obviously wasn't feeling pain because I didn't care that my stitches tore. Many years ago on the night of the meteor shower I smoked opium and pot while frying my balls off on mushrooms and I lay on my back in an alpine meadow full of the scent blooming lupine on top of a mountain watching a meteor shower and it was something I'll always remember I saw the stars and the meteors and then I saw Arabic and Chinese script writing endlessly across the heavens and the mountains it was one of the most beautiful things I've ever seen. And I'd do it again.

It was a different tasting cannabis, not a different taste from cannabis.

A second fallacy here, besides the 'Thais are good' fallacy, is that people in the 70s were so naive they didn't know what good pot was. They smoked Thai sticks and got so high they thought 'this couldn't be pot'. Not a good argument. My friends who experienced opiated Thai sticks have grown for 50 years. The best cannabis I've ever smoked. They've seen more pot then most of you. If they say the stuff looked adulterated, smelled and burnt differently then cannabis then it did. They saw thousands of Thai sticks, The people who remember the opiated Thai sticks were not naive smokers. The high from the opiated stick is obviously different from un-opiated.

 

[mexcurandero420]

[YOUTUBEIF]EQOi4-27EL4[/YOUTUBEIF]

 

[musigny23]

I was in the pot business starting in about 1973. The opiated sticks were gone by around 1975. He wouldnt have seen them in1978.

There is an old pot documentary I saw years ago, that showed them processing the sticks in the left over waste water from the heroin process. The pictures were black and white

I arrived in California in 1978. I was on the east coast prior to that. Never saw them either place because they weren't real.

This process, taking dried weed on sticks and doing what? Soaking them in "waste water"? In bundles? Individually? And then dry them out again? And what concentration of opiate is in this water?
Have you ever taken dry pot and soaked it in water and dried again? It does not improve it. This sounds like taking a conclusion and working backward to find a plausible explanation, which some may well accept, unless you really think about it.

How do you know your alleged documentary photos weren't staged to play on the myth?

Besides, no one has yet addressed that if this was real, there would have been a lot of real world effects that would be much more pronounced than a more relaxing high. New users of opium tend to get nausea and often have a vomiting spell. A ton of so called "opiated" Thai sticks floating around would have caused that reaction from a good number of kids smoking them. Plus the chronic stoners who were smoking regularly would have quickly gotten way too much opiate in them compared to how much they could handle.
And soon physical addiction would have become a big problem. It would have made the news. A lot of potheads would have not wanted them once those aspects were widely known.

Then there is no way Law Enforcement would not have gotten wind of it. They would not have waved it off, especially if rich white college kids were developing opiate addiction shortly after a load of sticks arrived.

Where are the test results of busted sticks showing positive for opiates? That would have happened at least once. If the DEA could have proven sticks contained opiates, they for sure would have added that charge to the busts. And put out public service announcement warnings. Those were opportunities they would not have wasted.

 

[musigny23]

Ha ha is there a moral argument here, Thai Sticks are Good, the people that made Thai sticks are Good, and we are Good, and opium is bad so they and we would never do such a thing? Even if a dirty guy in a trenchcoat put some opium on some pot we're too Good to want to use it? Bullshit.


What an odd thing to say. Every time I've ever been on opiates, after surgery, I crave absolutely, love a bong hit and it takes away all the pain. If you take a couple vicodin and take bong hits, or put opium on top of a bowl of good cannabis and smoke it you get really high and feel great. Since the opiate relaxes the tension the psychedelic creates. When I got back from the dentist with a bottle of opiates after I got my wisdom teeth pulled I couldn't wait to take bong hits. Even though I knew better I took them too soon, before the stitches healed. it made me cough and now I have a pocket behind one of my teeth from where the stitches ripped from coughing too hard. I felt great and obviously wasn't feeling pain because I didn't care that my stitches tore. Many years ago on the night of the meteor shower I smoked opium and pot while frying my balls off on mushrooms and I lay on my back in an alpine meadow full of the scent blooming lupine on top of a mountain watching a meteor shower and it was something I'll always remember I saw the stars and the meteors and then I saw Arabic and Chinese script writing endlessly across the heavens and the mountains it was one of the most beautiful things I've ever seen. And I'd do it again.



A second fallacy here, besides the 'Thais are good' fallacy, is that people in the 70s were so naive they didn't know what good pot was. They smoked Thai sticks and got so high they thought 'this couldn't be pot'. Not a good argument. My friends who experienced opiated Thai sticks have grown for 50 years. The best cannabis I've ever smoked. They've seen more pot then most of you. If they say the stuff looked adulterated, smelled and burnt differently then cannabis then it did. They saw thousands of Thai sticks, The people who remember the opiated Thai sticks were not naive smokers. The high from the opiated stick is obviously different from un-opiated.

No there is not that moral argument being made there. It's a practical argument, stated plainly.

What's odd is for you say you needed pot "to take away the pain" while on a painkiller. Huh? You may feel it's odd to say cannabis and opium aren't terribly complementary but in my experiences of smoking real opium in Thailand and having known many heroin addicts, you're the exception. The addicts I knew generally had zero interest in smoking pot.

Maybe you missed that I was around in the 70s too. There are no fallacies in what I said. Your misreading and saying so doesn't make it so. I speak from just as much, and maybe more first hand lived experience than your friends. I was in the biz too. I handled many batches of sticks over many years and many other things too. You haven't provided any clear and convincing proof that opiated Thai sticks were anything more than an American stoner fallacy