Just Say No

Oscar Rhea: High in Huế

A warning to potheads

(This is an exert from a memoir called Unenlightened Wandering Ass, which I wrote four years ago while I was romping through Vietnam. When you pronounce the title properly, it rhymes.😉)

I’m in Huế, an ancient urban jungle, made infamous in America after the city became the epicenter of the 1968 Tet offensive. Today the guerilla warfare is gone, and the American soldiers have been replaced by traveling gawkers, tourists looking to glimpse what’s left of the Imperial City after the bombs fell from the B-52s.

The sun is rising over a dreary rectangular tenement as I sip my first coffee. Cheap and distasteful, but it serves its purpose — both the tenement and the coffee. The city is quiet; before the car horns, the clanking pots, and the portable speakers on the back of passing scooters.

“Yo bro! You want some of this?”

A group of teenagers squats on a picnic blanket thrown over the sidewalk, where a blown-glass bong the size of a toddler is whispering smoke into the morning. I recognize the sweet stink of cannabis, and I know that this isn’t one of the oregano-heavy imitations the ne’er-do-wells slip into cigarette packs to sell to tourists drunk enough to trust them.

I’ve only had two genuine joints since I last set foot on Canadian soil, where an ounce of marijuana is as legal as bushel of apples. Unfortunately, I have a big day of pretending to be a writer ahead of me, so I turn down this teenager’s generous offer. I can see myself in their eyes: just another greying-haired square. A few moments later I hear the cartoonish gurgle of a long and lovely bong hit.

Despite being a banned substance, marijuana and her sister narcotics are everywhere. Sitting here, sipping this tepid bean water, I am within five hundred meters of Mary Jane, nitrous oxide, cocaine, psilocybin mushrooms, acid, heroin, and fentanyl. Of all the Vietnamese cities I’ve so far explored, Huế abounds with these poisonous pleasures. I have yet to stroll a street for more than five minutes without a man on motorbike signaling me with two fingers to his lips.

“Marijuana?” he asks.

“Tôi không mua, cảm ơn.” Translated literally these magic words mean ‘I no buy, thank you.’ Actual meaning: ‘Please fuck off.’

“Okay Coca? Mmm? Mushroom mushroom? You want pussy?”

“Tôi không mua, cảm ơn.”

“Blowjob?”

Magic words don’t always work.

I’m a man who has loved marijuana all his adult life. Still, I don’t recommend smoking pot in this country.

Marijuana is illegal in Vietnam, as it is in many of the realms on our unenlightened earth. Very few tourists are shackled before a firing squad for possessing a gram of pot, but it remains an unsettling theoretical possibility. The thought that I might be idling in some low lit saloon, enjoying a few puffs on a mild pipe, when the yellow star Gestapo barges in hauls me away for questioning under buzzing fluorescent lights is enough to keep me cautious.

A five-hundred-thousand dong note is often akin to a Get-Out-Of-Jail-Free card, but a strange feeling creeps in once you’ve bribed too many police officers. It’s like a stain on a still-life. Too many smudges on a Monet, and the waterlilies are no longer lovely.

Besides the criminality, most of the pot on offer for tourists is ineffective donkey nonsense; utter horseshit; leaves of ass.

If you say yes to these back alley retailers, then my Mere Reader you are a moron. A plastic bag of smoke purchased on the street is usually manure brown, and so dry that it disintegrates with the slightest touch. It smells like the rosemary jar at the back of your mother’s spice drawer, and smoking it is less likely to produce surreal elation than drowsiness and disappointment.

Street weed in Huế is not the stuff of existential insights.

If you are simply dying to shoot heroin away from home, then you’re much better off flying to a liberal drug haven, a Switzerland or perhaps a Portugal. But unless you’re Charlie Parker, suffering under the weight of the state suppression of your immense talent — and you’re not — why the hell are you chasing heroin?

Another taste of my travel:

A fun article from Aaron Paulson about one of my favourite cities: