Happy Pizza to Lose Its Smile

Happy Pizza to Lose Its Smile

Cambodia's Interior Ministry has declared a war on drugs – and that means pizza. No, not to order in while they are in a meeting – Cambodia's famous (or infamous) happy pizza may finally have met its Waterloo.

That is if Police General Lou Ramin, chief of the nation's anti-drug squad, has anything to do with it.

This week he proclaimed marijuana as Cambodia's first "total victory" in eliminating a drug from both domestic and export markets, going as far as to call the plant once endemic to Cambodia virtually extinct.

Pot heads don't agree, but they do admit that finding the stuff is incredibly difficult compared to a decade ago when it was openly available at the nation's markets. And marijuana is, of course, the key ingredient of the happy pizza.

If valium is mother's little helper, this ridiculously strong pizza must be the hippy's little helper. Lou Ramin has his sights set on weeding out those hippies.

In just a decade, a packet of 25 pre-rolled joints has gone from a dollar to $25. Legal drugs such as beer, in comparison, have barely risen at all and a can of Anchor still sells for 75 cents in the shops.

Many of the nation's most notorious dope smokers have gone from chain smokers to occasional connoisseurs in recent years due to the scarcity of what they call quality.

"Marijuana is no longer a problem in Cambodia," Lou Ramin said by telephone this week.

"We are strengthening our monitoring throughout the country and its borders ... "The government goal is that this drug does not exist any more in Cambodia. We will only be satisfied when it is not available at all."

Police are all in favor of the demise of the happy pizza – not so much because they object to marijuana, which has been traditionally used, sparingly and cautiously, in Cambodian soups and even medicines – but because they are tired of fishing stoned and paranoid foreigners out of fishy situations.

"Many times I saw people take their clothes off after eating this – especially women. Some people laughed too much, but some cried, and some even jumped into the lake," one officer said recently.

The happy pizza has reached legendary status on the backpacker circuit, even earning itself mentions on YouTube and Lonely Planet.

"This is my journey into Happy Pizzaland Phnom Penh. The obvious happened – paranoia, and missing two paid for flights back to Bangkok. FOOL!!!!!!" one YouTube poster laments as a forward to his video contribution.

But how long can this legendary foodstuff, the rite of passage for foreign youth traveling the region and the nightmare of their parents, survive?

"We keep selling it, but the price is going up and the dangers for us are getting bigger," says one happy pizza purveyor of about a dozen left around the country. "People still ask for it, and if we stop and another shop keeps selling, they make the profit and we lose."

Meanwhile heroin, cocaine and methamphetamines such as yaba and ice are on the rise in Cambodia. That, says Lou Ramin, is what his sights are set on next – after pizza.