Sao Sony, 16, stares ahead with glazed eyes as he talks about his escape from life as a methamphetamine-addicted child laborer on a commercial farm.
He remembers scores of friends and colleagues he left behind and says he is lucky. He believes he escaped the new Killing Fields as Cambodia, freshly emerged from civil war, finds itself caught once more in a different sort of regional conflict that seems equally beyond its control.
And this war against methamphetamines is one experts warn has the potential to overshadow even the Khmer Rouge regime in its destructive scale and toll.
At his farm in remote Phnom Proek district, a former Khmer Rouge stronghold on the Thai-Cambodia border, Sony says, all the male workers smoked the drug they call by its Thai name of "yaba."
He first tried it at age 12, when friends took turns waving a lighter under tablets on foil or in bottles and then sucked the milky smoke into their lungs through a straw. Yet others swallowed the purple or orange tablets whole, so the effects would be milder but last longer.
A few had already picked up the new fashion from Thailand of mixing it with their blood and injecting it into each other's veins with a shared syringe.
"I think about the drug every day, and I want it, but it has been one year without it now and I think I am normal," Sony says. "Most workers on the farms used it, especially the ones who work at night.
"At 14, 15 and 16 they usually start to use methamphetamines. It helped me work long hours. I felt strong, not sleepy, but I also became very thin."
Around 100km to the east on the other side of the farm belt from Phnom Proek, it is late at night in the tiny village of Toul in Sampov Loun district, and knots of youths are pacing up and down the main dirt road, wild eyed, teeth grinding. Yaba is here, too.
"I'd say about 80 percent of people under 40 in Toul use [yaba], and maybe around 40 percent of these are teenagers and younger," says a user known as Korea, aged 26, a laborer. "It helps you work. It makes you feel stronger and fresher."
Both Sony and Korea say it was at the farms that they were introduced to the drug. The massive industrial farms on the Thai border cover hundreds of square kilometers and were created just a few years ago when Cambodia's long civil war ended, freeing up huge tracts of land.
The land was handed out as a reward to former Khmer Rouge defectors, government officials and wealthy landowners to grow commodity crops such as soybean and corn.
Laborers come from all over the country to earn the precious hard cash that is so difficult to come by in Cambodia's largely subsistence farming economy.
After months of working long hours and using yaba to keep them going, many return home to their villages, helping to accelerate the spread of the drug throughout the country.
A lack of education about the dangers of the drug and the ease of access to the drug as it enters over porous borders with Thailand, Myanmar and Laos have also been factors.
With the average wages on the farms being just US$1.25 for a 14- to 18-hour day, rumors are rife that a handful of owners are supplying the drug to ensure hard work and loyalty from their laborers.
Deputy police chief of Sampov Loen, Chan Dara, says his station has brought farm owners in for collective "education" sessions to warn them about what will happen if they find proof this practice is occurring.
At best, the farm belt is an example of what could happen to Cambodia if yaba spreads further without controls.
What everyone agrees on is that Cambodia is a front line that has been breached and the yaba problem is growing faster here than perhaps any other country in the world.
The US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) first reported a massive increase in methamphetamine abuse in Cambodia in 2000. With 60 per cent of its population aged under 25 and the majority employed in labor intensive jobs requiring long hours and paying little money, methamphetamines -- which produce a feeling of euphoria, hyperactivity and dull pain and fatigue and sell for as little as US$1.25 per tablet -- quickly gained popularity.
Now, in the wake of Thailand's crackdown on drugs, Cambodia has become the new market with little or no resistance from the country's poor social, legal, judicial and health infrastructure.
Initially the drug of choice for sex workers and laborers, it has quickly spread to the upper echelons and emerged as a popular party drug for the country's growing middle class of disco hopping youth.
"I would call it catastrophic," says Graham Shaw of Phnom Penh's UN Office on Drugs and Crime. "Yaba will potentially claim more Cambodian lives than the Khmer Rouge. It is potentially worse than a war."
The more insidious effects of the drug such as the spread of HIV/AIDS, or engaging in unsafe sex while under its heady influence may not be fully felt for years, warns Shaw.
Also of concern is the cost to society through lost lives, illness and financial factors such as the laundering of illicit and untaxed revenue reaped from a drug-fueled black market.
"Cambodia is at about the same point Thailand was five years ago, but the trend has been much more rapid in Cambodia," Shaw says.
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