Every expatriate in Asia has known this guy. He is the one that cultivates a patch of marijuana in the hills near Lake Biwa. He smuggles condom-wrapped ecstasy tablets up his ass from Ko Samui. He buys magic mushrooms in a Cambodian bar for resale in Singapore, or horse-trades cheap methamphetamine in a Seoul nightclub. And now and then you hear of these guys getting busted, and later you wonder what ever happened to them.

While teaching English in Seoul in 1994, Cullen Thomas made a plan to visit a remote mountain village in Luzon, buy bricks of hash on the cheap, mail them to himself in Seoul, and to sell them to the expat crowd. The first brick arrived safely, and he was a 23-year-old cosmopolitan outlaw: “Like many of the other foreigners, I fooled myself into thinking that I could operate alongside Korean society and yet not have to answer to it.” He signed for the second brick poste restante, and was quickly surrounded by drug agents.

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Copyright © James Card.