this week on Vice Thomas heads to
Indonesia where they think smoking
doesn't cause cancer it cures
it and I travel from New York to Mexico
where an addict tries to kick the most
addictive drug in the world by using the
scariest drug in the world I just want
to be happy man you know I just want to
wake up in the morning and you know not
want to blow my brains out every
day that would be
[Music]
nice the world is
changing now no one knows where it's
going but we'll be there uncovering the
news culture and politics that expose
the absurdity of the modern
condition that little child has a huge
gun this scene isn't uh really koser by
American Standards I was interviewing
suicide bombers and they were kids this
is the world through our eyes we went or
we die this is the world of
Vice hi I'm Shane Smith and we're here
in the vice offices in Brooklyn New York
for our first story this week we go to
Indonesia Lucy Yes dear give me a
cigarette will you hone don't say
cigarette say tell M before we woke up
to the fact that smoking is actually
very very bad for us it used to be
everywhere movies TV advertising even
doctor's offices everybody smoked then
Landmark legislation made it much harder
to promote cigarettes here and as a
result tobacco use is on the decline but
there are still places in the world
where no such legislation was enacted
and as such smoking has been left to
evolve on its own completely unchecked
so we sent Thomas Morton to Indonesia to
see what happens to a country that
refuses to regulate its
tobacco
[Music]
hi it's Thomas I'm in a clinic in
Indonesia um being cured of my acne by
smoking and um having something sucked
out of my ear this is also good for
cancer curing cancer not causing
it while smoking's been on steady
decline in the west from close to half
of all adults to 1th in the course of 40
years the East still loves their
cigarettes in 2005 Philip Morris bought
s parna cigarettes the third largest
cigarette maker in Indonesia for $5
billion why spend that much money on a
runner-up tobacco company in a country
on the opposite side of the earth simple
because Indonesia is a smoker Paradise
2third of Indonesian men smoke this in a
country of a quar billion people and not
only does everyone here smoke it's also
home to the biggest tobacco industry in
Asia so cornering the market is just a
simple matter of buying in royan was
senior vice president of Philip Morris
during big tobacco's Darkest Hour during
the 80s and 90s it was a difficult
period when the lawsuits came
restrictions came taxation came it was
it was difficult for the company to
really internalize because um it had it
was a legal product was recognized as
having harm but yet it was considered to
be acceptable it started to become
denormalized and and and then de
demonized and it moved much quicker than
I think that many people anticipated it
just changed the game you need to become
more creative in a different way
way unlike in the United States where
the where cigarettes have been declining
since the early 1980s in many other
parts of the world cigarettes were
growing and growing quite well for Phil
Mor International and and continue to do
so despite having some of the lowest
cigarette taxes in the world the average
Indonesian household spends more money
on smokes than anything else but rice
it's a Boom Town for tobacco tulis a
body heads the national commission for
Tobacco Control he's one of the only
guys in the Indo government fighting
against smoking how big is the problem
how many Indonesians
[Music]
smoke when this video of Indonesia's
famous baby smoker Hit YouTube most
westerners were a gas but Indonesians
just Shrugged by the time they're 16 one
out of every four Indo teenagers is a
regular smoker half if you just count
the
guys the average pack of cigarettes cost
less than a dollar here and you can pick
up lucies for a few cents so most kids
can afford them on their milk money
allowance like our 9-year-old buddy
riy so uh ri's picking up his morning
packed cigarettes and then we're off to
school
I do you think you'll ever be able to
get riy to quit
smoking why do you think riffy started
smoking like who do you think is to
blame for
that
for after school let out riy and his
Palace took us to their neighborhood
smoking spot the old Chinese graveyard
yeah just take a right at the um
cigarettes sponsored badon
court so this is the uh the cool kids
what's up
guys real all ages group this is like um
kind of like the cast like Indonesian
Little Rascals here how long have you
smoked what do you like about
smoking do gr UPS your care if you
smoke this scene isn't uh really kosher
by American Standards but um a number of
adults have walked by and a couple of
them have kind of like clucked but
nobody's uh nobody's in the alarms while
smoking is firmly entrenched with
Indonesian males only about 5% of girls
have picked up the Habit all of a here
is 12 and has been smoking since she was
nine why' you start
[Applause]
smoking what what do you like about
smoking do do girls typically like boys
who
[Music]
smoke smoking's manly image is
reinforced by pervasive advertising
America ban cigarette ads on TV and
radio in 1971 no you don't see many wild
stallions anymore come to Marlboro
country India not only still advertises
on TV and radio they advertise it
everywhere you see cigarette ads on
every stre corner on playground
basketball courts on posters for major
concerts and sporting events they even
sponsor schools like the S PARTA Academy
named after the same family that sold s
parna cigarettes to Philip Morris it's
as if we had a school called Marboro
prep we've seen uh maror branded uh uh
baby clothes and toys Chris Bostic is
deputy director of action on smoking and
health one of the biggest anti-smoking
lobbyist groups in the US they can
Target children and use cartoons I mean
Target children in ways that would be un
stomachal here
anymore how hard is it to like fight
tobacco
use the government's Kid Glove approach
makes sense when you consider tobacco
here as a hundred billion doll a year
industry and is the second largest
employer in the country they're
basically too scared of disrupting their
revenue stream to rock the boat which
makes the country a play place for
foreign tobacco companies especially
ones used to the anti-smoking atmosphere
of the West in the late ' 80s early '90s
the United States was uh uh involved in
several lawsuits against particularly
Asian countries uh about Market access
for the for big tobacco firms like
Philip Morris uh and one all of them
Philip Morris buying Sara in 2005 was a
bit of a GameChanger now as a foreign
investor Philip Morris can tap all those
trade treaties so even if Indonesia did
want to suddenly move forward on Tobacco
Control they would face all the
litigation in under every treaty that
that Indonesia is involved in it must be
extraordinarily frustrating trying to do
this like how do you feel about the work
you do you know
[Music]
that so not only do uh Indonesians think
smoking is like okay a lot of them
actually it's good for you people here
believe smoking cures toothaches clo
tobacco cigarettes are good for your
breath huk water is an antiseptic and on
top of all that they have clinics that
treat smoking related illnesses with
smoking this Clinic practices a new Agy
sort of therapy called bour which uses
clove cigarettes to cure a whole host of
diseases Dr seio opened it in 2007 and
has so far treated over 30,000 patients
is it okay yes bu Mir oh thank you cool
what are these fancy
cigarettes cancer is it all types of
cancer or is it just like specific ones
no all the cancer breast cancer cic and
then Prost the clinic makes their own
brand of cigarettes these Divine crex
are made from tobacco and cl and have a
special filter soaked in some sort of
amino acid broth which supposedly soaps
up all the free radicals in your bodies
which supposedly is what's causing all
that
cancer so this is the prep room for my
bour treatment which is basically they
rub stuff on you to open up your pores
and that breaks up the free radicals
that are collecting in your cells at
some point the tobacco comes in and
sucks it out makes you healthy did you
sign that okay um so this is what am I
signing I guess I've signed it so it
doesn't matter y lat on you're going to
have to wash your eyes it's never really
big on Eastern medicine but um so far
this beats my usual doctor's
[Music]
visit
us did he just use the eyewash to uh
shampoo my hair interesting the
traditional part of bour is pretty much
just a vigorous full body rub with
Tylenol red onions and a few other
household goods this clinics bour
however adds a few steps like basting
your skin and pores with Divine
cigarette smoke then a second rub down
this time with scalding hot water mixed
with Ura the same Ura that's in our
urine this is so
[Music]
painful hey there so so what is
happening right now
Al
okay thank
you thank you Doctor
yeah while I was doing blour to try to
clear up my embarrassing late 20s acne
the other patients in the clinic were
there for far Graver illnesses so what
are what are you being treated for
hodkin oh hodkin lymphoma do you do do
you do any other treatment do you do
like chemotherapy or um
[Music]
radiation can I ask you um are are you a
[Music]
smoker um do you have any problems with
um with people who are critics of
[Music]
B
all the free radical talk and baked
potato foil wraps were already major red
flags for pseudoscientific Hokum but
throwing Miracles into the works really
piqued my skepticism so we asked a
radiologist in one of jakarta's biggest
cancer Awards to explain how legit this
business really is does this hold up
against medical science they never
explain it to us when we invite them to
uh explain in front of us for me as a
doctor uh I cannot imagine that kind of
treatment or method it's far from uh
medical field even though it's not
medically recognized or sound the poor
and gullible still flock to these
clinics what what happened with your
[Music]
son
that kind of treatment may be popular in
Indonesia to my opinion it's because uh
regarding the access of uh Health Care
system in Indonesia the people feel
maybe it's very expensive to get the
treatment so they are trying to find the
[Music]
cheapest despite the astronomical cost
cost both on healthare and individual
lives it's unlikely that any effort is
going to get 2/3 of Indonesian guys to
quit smoking the only real way to break
the cycle is to keep the Next Generation
from starting as bad as it is now
they're actually at the beginning of
their epidemic curve because it has one
of the largest youth populations in the
world and most people start smoking when
they're youth so you got a combination
of a large youth population absolutely
no regulations on Advertising including
advertising to Youth and a growing uh
per capita income
that is the recipe for a massive
increase in the number of smokers in the
Next Generation if you go back in time
and try to find a tobacco company and
finally this gone bankrupt you'd be hard
pressed to find one it's a business
that's going to continue to be
successful for
[Music]
decades heroin is bad in fact it's so
bad that once you get hooked on
it you basically only have three options
one you can quit which is almost
impossible as evidenced by the over 90%
relapse rate two you can take so-called
replacement therapy drugs like methadone
that are just as addictive or three you
can die and as such hardcore addicts
will do almost anything they can to quit
but with so few options that are
actually viable they started turning
towards more obscure and extreme cures
one particular method uses super
powerful hallucinogens that shock the
body so much that it actually interrupts
the addiction to
[Music]
heroin this is a buy healing ceremony at
a harm reduction Center in
Harlem
and this is Dimitri mugus and he cures
people of heroin addictions he does so
using a special Voodoo ritual somewhat
like this the main difference is when
it's for kicking heroin he also
incorporates one of the most powerful
drugs on Earth
ibigan what is ibigan ibigan is a
hydrochloride meaning a extract from uh
a plant called aboga one of the
properties of aboga uh that was
discovered in the early 6 was that it
interrupts physical dependency on
opiates without withdrawal if that's
happened for me I was a heroin addict
and a methodone addict for 20 years how
many times did you try to get clean
before I I probably went cold turkey 50
times right yeah so the only thing that
ever worked in 20 years the only thing
that ever worked was ibaan illegal at
this time Ian has been illegal since
okay since Nixon ibaan was made illegal
in 1969 at the height of the hippie
movement and today lives right alongside
heroin as a schedule one drive
and although it's legal in most
countries ibaan has some of the stiffest
legal penalties here in America so if
you want to use it to get off heroin you
have to leave the states to do
so after Dimitri used IA gain to
successfully beat his addiction he
became kind of an evangelist for the
drug and illegally administered hundreds
of treatments to addicts in hotel and
motel rooms across the
country but after a very close call
where one of his patients nearly died
hey hey he realized that he had to find
out more about this drug so he went to
Africa he traveled to gabone and became
an initiate in buti which is a religion
that uses ibigan or rather aboga the
indigenous plant that ibag is made from
to talk to their ancestors through
hallucinations which in turn induces
spiritual
[Music]
enlightenment
since then Dimitri's been incorporating
elements of Bui rituals while he
illegally administers ibaan to heroin
addicts that is until he got busted by
the DEA in his thing operation and since
then he's been conducting a kind of buy
self-help group every week at a drug
clinic in Harlem with all of the
freakiness but none of the IBA
gain open up even though Demitri's
ceremonies can look as though the
lunatics have taken over the Asylum
people continually seek him out to ask
him for his help because heroin is the
most addictive drug on
earth now take Matt for example he looks
like a linebacker for Purdue but in
reality he's been a hardcore junkie for
over 10 years I was sniffing in in the
back of the car on the way here in fact
Matt is so far gone that his own mother
is willing to give him up to a bunch of
New York Voodoo fruit cakes and let them
take him to Mexico and give him one of
the most powerful drugs on Earth
that's how bad heroin is we're very
excited about this he's like our baby
and uh we'll take really good care of
him it's so sad to me though that it
can't be done here that it's I just
angers me to my bottom of my soul and
when you see that level of desperation
you realize why people put so much faith
in New Age healers like Demetri thank
you so much we'll take good care of him
okay all right call us to you know
anytime this is your New Path honey and
I can't wait to see the amazing things
that are going to happen in your life I
love you with my heart and soul baby all
right well God bless you baby all
right this is
Afric to avoid prosecution by the
American government much of the ibaan
underground communities actually moved
just South of the Border to Mexico where
the drug is still
legal
[Music]
so we're about an hour south of Tijuana
in A very upscale neighborhood it's
interesting because when you start doing
the story about underground heroin
clinics using sort of tribal African
rituals you kind of have an image in
your head of sort of dank basements in
the Lower East Side and then all of a
sudden you're in a really fancy Mexican
Villa by the Sea it's not what I had in
mind the reason we came down here to
work with Jeff Israel and his Clinic is
because what we're going to try to do is
combine our ritual with a medical ritual
right Jeff Israel runs a more medical
approach to ibigan at his clinic and as
such incorporates a lot of safety
equipment in case anything goes wrong we
don't like whe the pulse is or it starts
to go low or it gets irregular we'll
slap these on with three leads if
somebody vomits or aspirates we can
suction them out if somebody codes or
anything like that we have oxygen and
uh there is an emergency you know we
have an intubation kit for Matt's
treatment they're going to combine his
clinical approach with Demitri's
ceremony and it was finally time for
that ceremony to
[Music]
begin but first we had to pick up a
longtime heroin user from Brooklyn named
Nicole who's a friend of Jeff Israel's
and happened to be in Mexico and also
wanted to use Iva game to try and get
clean for the first ritual we had to
find a tree by the side of the highway
do you guys know what we're doing now
we're going to the tree right
yeah I don't know exactly what we're
doing
there so you give this as offerings to
the ancestors and to the tree because
this stuff is good Everyone likes Fanta
Everyone likes brze and candy so you're
offered
up
I think that for a drug user I mean the
whole life resolves around ritual the
ritual of coping of getting the drugs
procuring the drugs getting the money
and I think that even problematic drug
use is a a quest for uh deeper
[Music]
meaning how many times have you tried to
get clean uh at least 30 30 times at
least what do you hope happens now uh I
hope I stay clean I just I just want to
be happy you mean you know I just want
to wake up in the morning and you know
not want to blow my brains out
every day that would be nice nice change
of
pace are you worried about what you guys
are doing are you worried that the
rituals get sort of bastardized and and
and and and and morph into something
else yeah it is a worry and it is a
criticism of me uh but that's what
culture does right right and the thing
about an African religion and an African
music and it's very plastic and bends
and molds and shapes and it'll be
different our Bouy is different with all
of this the second they take a testos
their withdrawal will be gone that is
for sure every time the rituals
of the afternoon fed into the iaan use
of the evening and that's when things
started to get a bit
[Music]
heavy when the first iaan testos was
administered Nicole who is still
suspected of being on her heroin showed
little reaction whereas Matt who was
already in full withdrawal felt it
immediately okay and after another quick
round of medical tests to check his
vital stats they administered Matt the
flood dose and it was not an easy trip
this is probably between 80 and 90% IV
gain we gave it to him in like a
cocktail so it got in his system quicker
without a capsule the most important bit
of equipment in this
place is the vomit bucket BL you
[Music]
course
probably 15 hours into this now just
gave him some more IV gain this is
common what he's experiencing now is 15%
of what he would have if he was home
trying to kick an opiate habit okay this
is this is nothing this is baby
food just thinking about like this
crazy crazy life you know and
um I just kind of hope I don't have to
go back to it
[Music]
anymore but as of right now I
mean I don't want to that in itself is a
miracle an attic goes from being
completely numb physically and
emotionally for you know 1 5 10 20 years
to finally feeling their body again and
feeling emotions again and it's like H
unacceptable with imig sometimes it's
not a favor you know you're getting
kicked in the face it's aboga saying
hello Mama boti saying hello what's up
you know like a good parent telling you
something you this stuff is is is
miraculous and he's doing he's doing
fine it's just you know it's just not a
fun experience you know there's no
there's no easy Landing even with
iig Nicole who is suspected of still
being on heroin did not take her flood
dose that night but instead opted to
take her full dosage of Iain a few days
later without Demitri's buy
ceremony hey
[Applause]
you all right all bright and Stu got
look
good it was actually amazing to see the
transformation of Matt he was healthy
and smiling and he hadn't used drugs
since Mexico the Ia game had done its
job everything looks so different it's
just nothing looks the same it's
weird you know Matt was really suffering
in his addiction but the difference is
just profound just the way he looks his
skin color the way he's talking you know
this is sort of like a textbook example
of what aoga can do uh for a suffering
drug addict now I must admit that at
first seeing the rituals and craziness
of buy that I was a bit skeptical but
when I saw Matt literally reborn I was
happy to be proved
wrong and I can only hope that he like a
lot of iaan users before him stays clean
you feel like one good really good me
really
[Applause]
[Music]
good
[Music]
whole mountains of ice are just falling
into the
sea we're in for trouble
indeed this is where the Soviets tested
all their weapons this is the epicenter
of a nuclear bomb the last 6 months you
have 9,000
IEDs that's an
IED
man once you get someone in they can
never leave even police helicopters
don't dare fly over here cuz 2 years ago
one was shot down by an anti-aircraft
gun fun place to live
[Music]
okay let's get out of
here