This article compares Buddhist and Christian approaches to the drug problem among ethnic minorities in northern Thailand. Government programmes implemented through Buddhist monasteries aim to construct Buddhist subjects and realise agendas of national security in border areas. Yet, they also offer development support and access to resources. Meanwhile, gospel rehabilitation centres provide much-needed drug treatment services while drawing highlanders into transnational spheres of Christian fellowship. Consequently, I argue that the relationship between ethnic minorities and the state can be defined in terms of aspiration and negotiation, as well as resistance and evasion, as has been previously argued in the literature.

During the fall of 1962, the American war correspondent Richard Tregaskis spent three months in South Vietnam. In Vietnam diary, published the following year, Tregaskis offered vivid descriptions of his experiences, which included joining South Vietnamese army troops on combat missions against ‘Viet Cong’ fighters, as well as observing an election inside one of the Saigon government's newly built ‘strategic hamlets’. But the main purpose of Vietnam diary was to detail the author's many encounters with Americans in South Vietnam — specifically the US soldiers, marines, and other military personnel serving as advisers to the South Vietnamese Army. Tregaskis greatly admired these Americans, whom he portrayed as indomitable Cold Warriors. He was particularly impressed with Lieutenant Dave Marr, a Marine intelligence officer he met at a US base in the city of Da Nang. Lt Marr, whom Tregaskis described as a ‘slim blond youth’ from California, spoke excellent Vietnamese, thanks to a year of intensive language training. He also displayed a marked ‘enthusiasm for things Vietnamese’. Tregaskis noted that Marr was rather less optimistic than many of his peers about the prospects for success against the communist enemy. ‘The best you can say is that we're holding our own,’ the marine told the journalist.