BANGKOK: The three girls, recent college drop-outs, watch television for hours, their eyes blood shot, their clothes non-existent. They sit nude in their small one bedroom flat, needles, powder and drugs all strewn together with bowls of aging food lying on the table in front of them. A knock on the door and the girls come back to attention, they grab the nearest sheets and cover their bodies, as the eldest, 20-year-old “Martina” walks slowly to the door, stepping over broken glass. She opens the door to find a man standing with a paper bag in his hand. He quickly enters, as one of the other girls immediately heads to the bedroom, dropping her towel as she goes. The man follows. 30 minutes later he leaves. The bag remains. “This is how we get our fix,” the 19-year-old girl who went into the room tells Bikyamasr.com, her eyes watery with evidence of tears. But she doesn't linger too long, grabbing the bag and emptying its contents on the table. Each girl grabs a white pill and plops back down on their small sofa, the television still blaring. “We have nothing else to do right now. We are addicts and this is how we get our money or drugs,” Martina admits. She says the three of them have been selling sex for drugs for almost one year now, and have little other recourse. “We've all been kicked out of our homes and nobody wants to help us,” she says. “So we use what we can to get our next high and we don't care. It's only two or three men each so it isn't horrible,” she claims. The girls' day is almost an unending course of heroin, methamphetamine and horse tranquilizers, which their “clients” deliver upon each visit. The youngest, an 18-year-old girl, believes the world is out to get them and hasn't left the flat in five months. “I don't want to go out there. People are trying to kill us,” she believes. Their lives have become a mix of drugs and sex work, and for them, they have little hope for assistance or a return to society. Their arms are bruised and Martina sports a blackened eye she says is the result of one of the men. “He wants bondage and wants to hit me while we have sex. We need the drugs and he pays the best, so I let him,” she admits. Social worker Pham Tinaratvi told Bikyamasr.com that these girls have been to their clinic on at least four occasions in the past month for health check-ups. “We test them for diseases, HIV and others to make sure they are safe. For now they are, but what we really want is to remove them from this situation that is devastating their lives,” she said. But the clinic in Bangkok is unable to force them into treatment and until they are ready to make that step, the spiral of drugs continues. “It is very sad. I have seen so many people in this country fall victim to addiction and it pains me everytime when we try to talk to them and help them and they say no,” she argued. For now, these girls are on their own, facing the realities that drug use and addiction can have. Tinaratvi hopes that in the near future, they will wake up and realize what they are losing. “It is one of those things that when I first walked into their flat and saw how they were living, naked and high all the time, I wanted to scream, but I know that I cannot alienate them if I want them to get better and learn about what they are doing to themselves,” the social worker added. “Right now, they are so far gone in the drugs that it is impossible to change them, but we have good programs in Thailand to help girls like them and one day they will come to our clinic and want help. Until then, we wait,” she continued. For the girls, now half-alive in their high, together strewn across the floor of their flat, this downward spiral continues to take its toll. With no end in sight. ** The Needle is a Bikyamasr.com series looking at drug addiction across the world.
