Australian Who Escaped From Klong Prem Prison Writes A Book

[bunnaag]

I would like to see heroin legalised.

That way it would make it much easier for those who are addicted to heroin to get it and, ultimately, kill themselves. Of course, it needs to be taxed heavily, then society wins out in two ways.

Job done.

The society wins out in three ways,because police would know where to look if thefts,robberies ,murders for money to buy heroin occure because the identities of the addicts would be known.

[brahmburgers]

Listen, this is more than likely a piece of fiction unless he can prove he escaped. Are they any archived newspaper articles from the supposed time of his escape?

All we've got is his word. The likelyhood is he probably was jailed and then deported. While stuck in prison he wiled away the hours dreaming up escape plans.

So I'm 70% convinced it's a bunch of hot air and you lot letting it get you down have really got to chill out and take a few steps back.

again, Jimsknight sees a quirky other side to the issue - I like that - shows a creative way of thinking 'outside the box.'

But.....somebody who has drunk 8 beers every night for 2 years, can stop from one day to another without having any physical withdrawal symptoms.

That is dangerous nonsense. I know because that's the exact scenario I'm going through now. Alcohol is an absolute bugger to give up. Cannabis is easy, cigarettes are a pain, but alcohol is the most damaging and dangerous drug ever invented. It's an insidious bitch.

People...people...it is the legal status of a substance that determines its harm. Please try and understand this (relatively simple) concept.

Does this person believe that; because a substance carries a more severe legal penalty, that it's actually worse than substances which carry lesser or no legal penalty? That's remarkable!

As much as any other reason, heroin is illegal because it's near impossible to monitor by gov't agencies. If it could be monitored and taxed, it's quality would be purer and it would probably have a similar legal status as hard liquor. Same for ganga - both items can be easily grown and shipped by little people - and therefore are not easy to control by gov't authorities. Perscription drugs fall in to the category of being easy to monitor, therefore they're also legal - though their affects can often be physically and mentally devastating. Just recently, the UK banned a prescription drug (a pill to lose weight) that was found out, belatedly, to cause severe depression - after hundreds of thousands of Brits got to using it.

[sriracha john]

UPDATE

How to plan a successful jailbreak

Last week two prisoners made a daring escape from a Greek prison by helicopter - their second airborne jailbreak.

Convicted drug trafficker David McMillan, who spent two years plotting his escape from a Bangkok jail in 1996, told the BBC how much planning this kind of operation takes.

I had been planning [my escape] from the moment four policeman came into a travel agency and arrested me in Chinatown, in Bangkok.

As soon as I actually got to the prison about a week later I started looking at bars and walls and electric fences and I began looking for the best place to be. I went to building six simply because it had the thinnest bars in the windows...

There were not a lot of prison guards per prisoner. Probably one prison guard to 120 prisoners. So it was really run by the trustees, who had their own little uniforms with epaulettes and aviators' wings and things like that.

The entire essence of [the escape] was secrecy. No-one in there was capable of keeping a secret I would say...

The first thing to do was to get what you could call a private cell.

Most of the cells would be the size of a family garage and had 25 people in them, often sleeping like sardines packed into a tin, literally.

And if they had chains on, which everybody did, there would be the rattling of the chains, lights would be left on all night.

I paid for a light switch which was another little luxury.

It sounds like I was doing a lot of paying, I mean I had an office, a cook and a cleaner and that kind of thing, but it's not an awful lot of money - for £500 a month ($708) a person could live well.

But we have to bear in mind that most of the people in there were abandoned people. People who'd lost hope in a lot of their lives and had very few friends left.

Most people got excited at the prospect [of escape], of course, but quite soon realised, 'hang on a minute, what am I doing here?' They remembered very quickly the five inmates who'd tried and failed.

They'd got as far as the outside wall. They were all put in the punishment cell, which was really a tin box the size of a small coat locker, and dragged out every day in elephant chains and slowly beaten to death.

Four of those five died.

I knew that here were 12,000 people absolutely lost in this world, and sentenced to a life of pretty much misery, and I thought, if nothing else I have to do it

I started at midnight with hacksaw blades that had been sent over in a care parcel, carefully hidden, so I took those out and began working on the bars.

In fact only one bar was cut, and only partially at that. So my Swedish friend, he was built like a Viking, he had to stretch the thing out, as I squeezed through, oiled up, wearing nothing but my underwear and a pair of trainers.

I just got outside, and then I used a plank to get out and across the yard. It was a bookcase, in fact everything in the room had been built to assist the escape. Furniture turned into step ladders and shower curtains disassembled into long bits of rope.

I had six walls to go over. I assembled a ladder by breaking into a factory, and taking down some long bamboo pole and then I began the arduous haul over a number of these walls.

It was most eerie, I knew where all the guards were, they generally slept at night, but they could wander around, and in fact one did.

I had to hide in the shadows while that was going on. I had a few tricks to deal with that.

I was so exhausted by about 0330-0400 in the morning, that I didn't really feel anything, except wanting to keep going.

And I think that it was only that final thought as I looked around me, I knew that here were 12,000 people absolutely lost in this world, and sentenced to a life of pretty much misery, and I thought, if nothing else I have to do it.

As I got to the very top wall where the electric fence was, and dawn was creeping up, that soft orange glow was coming through. That meant that I was late. But I was tangibly outside.

[it was] a feeling I guess I haven't had since I was a child when you wake up and you know that there's something good in the world.

And then I more or less slid down the piece of rope I had. Burning my hands, I lost a bit of skin, but I was on the ground, I was outside.

And I went across the road and looked back for a few minutes at this huge prison from an angle I'd only seen from that prison van where a couple of hundred people had been squashed inside wearing the chains and prison uniform, and took a taxi.

David McMillan, author of Escape: The True Story of the Only Westerner Ever to Break Out of Thailand's Bangkok Hilton, was interviewed for the BBC World Service by Audrey Carville. A wanted man in Thailand and Australia, he lives legally in the UK.

- BBC / 2009-03-01

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Video News Link:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/video_and_audio/7915216.stm

[Maestro]

Flames and the reply to it have been deleted.

--

Maestro

[ozzieovaseas]

Flame me if like but the content of Johns rather long post is a complete and utter load of bullshite..

These guys invent a huge elaborate story as to how clever they are in busting out, maybe to sell a book...but i suspect mostly to protect the real story and the inside guys that were paid off to get him out.

The story is simply not credible and not even written very well.

Everyone knows these guys have hidden fortunes god knows where and they have the capabilities to buy themselves out of anywhere..and thailand would be a snap, especially when officials are privvy to how much this dirty dog drug dealer is worth.

If you believe the stories of these A-holes you are even sillier than the ones who buy the books.

I just hope someone runs into this guy and gives him what hes worth but then again its the poor bastard_s on the street who suffer giving this oxygen thief his living..

probably on a beach in Acapulco by now

[Duciboy]

He is obviously not that smart - he got caught in the first place didn't he