December 2024, Tha Phae Road, Chiang Mai. This page keeps three things separate on purpose: what is documented, what the record does not establish, and what happened to us. Read it in that order.
On December 20, 2024 a 25-year-old British visitor bought psilocybin mushrooms near Tha Phae Gate, for a few hundred baht a bag, after photographing the gate with his girlfriend. He died at a resort in Mae Rim district roughly forty minutes after eating them. Thai and English press reported it; we do not use his name here, though the reports do.
Region 5 Police ran an undercover purchase and then raided two premises on Tha Phae Road, in Chang Moi sub-district. On December 25, 2024, at a press conference covering four separate mushroom cases, they named the two premises: The Glory Day — my wife's bar — and Riverside Dispensary, the cannabis shop registered in her name at 400 Tha Phae Road. Four women were detained, my wife Ploypailin among them. The charge was the illegal sale of a Category 5 narcotic, which in Thailand carries up to five years, and one to fifteen where commercial distribution is found.
The Thai and English reports do not describe her role the same way. The primary Thai report of the press conference names another woman as the operator of the shop and says Ploypailin consented to a search of a room. The English-language reports call her the shop owner. Both are in the record, and we leave them as they are.
Sources: Matichon, December 25, 2024 (the press-conference report that names both premises); Naewna, December 2024; MGR Online, December 24, 2024; The Nation and The Thaiger, December 2024. Narcotics Code B.E. 2564.
A crime report is a press conference and a list of names. Everything below is what a press conference does not contain.
Our second son was one week old when the police came. My wife was arrested and held, a week after giving birth, still bleeding, still feeding.
The chef from the bar smuggled a breast pump in to her so that her milk would not stop. Nobody official arranged that. A cook did.
I am the American husband. I was at home with a newborn and a toddler.
I am not going to tell you here what the police wanted or what was said in that building, because the record is silent on the outcome and my wife's name is on the charge sheet, not mine. What I can tell you is what a nursing mother in a cell looks like, and that no report anywhere mentions a baby.
My wife runs her own businesses. None of them is part of this one, and this one has nothing to do with them. I tell the story because it is the reason Logotherapies is built the way it is, and because I will not sell anyone a version of this world in which none of it happens.