Every alley in Bangkok has a resident fleet of motorcycle taxis, and every one of the drivers can procure ya baa (methamphetamine).
They are just the sort of people Thailand can least afford to lose.For now, ya baa cases are swamping the courts and the prisons.
The innovative drugs lords of Myanmar began churning out ya baa in the early 1990s to supplement their sales of heroin.
Even after six months of treatment, some 50% will relapse, says Kittipong Sanichwankul, a psychiatrist at the hospital.People like Dr Kittipong see only a small proportion of ya baa users.
It has drafted a new law to divert ya baa addicts from the courts and prisons into rehabilitation programmes.
Until then, Thailand had served more as a staging post than a market for drug-smugglers, because relatively few Thais use heroin.But Thais lap up ya baa, and countries such as America are less bothered by it than by traditional hard drugs.
Others in the team play up business contacts in Myanmar.But such schmoozing will be hard to keep up if the yaa baa flow continues to make headlines.
Although this report is just the commission's first word on the subject (more formal provisional findings are due to be published in the summer), it suggests that the watchdog is leaning heavily towards breaking up BAA.
On June 8th BAA anyway said it had ended formal talks with the Goldman consortium.Why does Ferrovial want BAA, owner, among others, of London's Heathrow, Gatwick and Stansted airports?
But traffic to China fell by 0.7%, allowing enough of a gap for BAA to trot out the capacity argument.
BAA drove another nail into the long-term prospects of the Kentish grey heron on Monday morning with the latest contribution to the national debate over airport capacity.
