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But there is a line to draw when Romans visit places other than Italy, and Greenwood should have been aware of that line. Maybe he was, but still decided that enough was enough and he was not going to take it this time.
Accompanied by his Thai girlfriend, the visitor made a big issue over being overcharged for a beer at a small bar. The 170 baht (US$4.40) he was charged is certainly double the retail cost, and well over 50 percent of any reasonable margin.
However, many bars and clubs make their money from such overpricing, and the practice has become more than a mere tradition – it is standard operating procedure. They charge whatever they want and don’t worry whether the customer ever comes back. Their goal is to get the money and move on to the next disenchanted client. They will just punch out the disgruntled drunk customer and move on, without worrying about the consequences.
Foreigners who visit and live in Thailand come in as many different shades as their local counterparts, and can’t always be judged as a group. But over the years Thai tourist havens, major facility operators and even the government, have thrown caution, reason and decency to the wind and allowed the overcharging of foreigners to continue, creating one displeased patron after another.
Foreigners are increasingly aware of this through word of mouth, and while Thailand still retains its attractiveness as the place to go, the Thais are doing themselves a disservice because of their apathy toward legitimate questions on overcharging and violence in general.
In 1999, Thailand’s Ministry of Public Health estimated the country’s alcoholism problem to be around 2 percent of the population. But other data, extrapolated from developed countries, estimated it at more like 6 percent.
The presence of alcohol, women, entertainment, music and generally non-interruptive police in Thailand has combined to maintain it as a tourist haven, despite the occasional misunderstandings and incidents like Greenwood discovered. But alcoholism is not a small issue in any country – it reflects frustrations and grievances and deep underlying social conflicts that often rise to the surface in the form of personal meetings tainted with mild or severe drunkenness.
According to a 2004 study by the U.S. Census Bureau, which listed and compared alcoholism in a number of countries, Thailand’s percentage was 5.4, versus 5.7 in the United States. Thailand’s 5.4 percent translates to 3.6 million people, certainly no small number in itself. The question arises as to the legitimacy of figures, however, given an obviously high exposure of various sectors of Thai society to alcohol abuse.
In a study called Patterns of Drinking in Thai Men, conducted by three researchers at Thailand’s Prince of Songkla University, married men made up a high percentage of men classified as alcoholics. Thai women also need to be studied, however, along with the entire field of alcoholism in the country.
The problem with such a serious effort, however, is that it runs against the country’s need to retain a favorable image at all costs. This leads to the dismissal of meaningful attempts to identify the causes of alcoholism on one hand, or to produce any public data related to it on the other. For example, even the casual observer will readily notice drunks, male and female, walking around many cities or villages, sitting at corners or arguing with one another at small restaurants. They are not all over the place, but the numbers are visible.
Causes include an unfortunate feudal-like division of not just society per se but of individual roles in the society, from the top down, from the patron to the patronized. Certainly some people exposed to such a social environment as they grow up become frustrated, eventually giving in to a personal vice like alcohol that makes the clock tick a bit more quietly.
While public information on alcoholism is still significantly absent in Thailand, the subject is treated in campaigns that recognize the Thai approach to life. For example, a recent Thai anti-alcohol advertisement showed a slovenly drunk Thai man wasting time, being hated by neighbors and family alike, then suddenly seeing the light, reforming and working to become a productive member of society. While light treatment like this may seem futile to more seasoned eyes, the approach might work in Thailand.
After all, drunk people ending up in brawls and fights is not what either tourists or locals want to see in their places of entertainment. As an ancient proverb goes, “When I drink, I get drunk. When I get drunk, I get mad. When I get mad, I fight."
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(Frank G. Anderson is the Thailand representative of American Citizens Abroad. He was a U.S. Peace Corps volunteer to Thailand from 1965-67, working in community development. A freelance writer and founder of northeast Thailand's first local English language newspaper, the Korat Post – www.thekoratpost.com -- he has spent over eight years in Thailand "embedded" with the local media. He has an MBA in information management and an associate degree in construction technology. ©Copyright Frank G. Anderson.)
