Set in the Golden Triangle—the name given to the point where Laos, Myanmar and Thailand meet along the Mekon River—is a museum with an unlikely mission: to educate people about opium, the addictive drug derived from the juice of the opium poppy. The aptly titled Hall of Opium Museum, which sits in Thailand not too far from where opium fields were once cultivated, uses multimedia to tell the 5,000-year-old story of the Golden Triangle’s place in opium history—the Chinese opium wars, drug cartels and the government’s battle against the growers. There’s even an artificial poppy field, a clone of a Chinese tea house where people smoked the drug, and information about the development of morphine (helpful) and heroin (not so much.)
