This is Panghan Island, home to the infamous Full Moon Party. In its heyday, the monthly event pulled up to 10,000 drug-crazed travelers. Ganja was available from room service. Het Khi Kwai (literally: buffalo shit mushroom, more commonly known as magic mushroom) omelets were on the menu. Speed Punch was sold at every bar and drug-casualties were regularly ferried over to the Garden of Joy Psychiatric Hospital on the mainland. But the halcyon days began to wane six months ago when the Narcotics Suppression Bureau of Thailand decided to crack down. Now, the party pulls only 3,000 somewhat more subtly drugged-up punters and about 100 drunken, barely undercover cops.

Paranoia abounds. "Yeah man, the fuckin' CIA are down here--and the Dutch police," one dreadlocked tourist warns me. The travelers are smoking scared, squeezing tokes in their bug-ridden bathrooms or wading out to sea to sneak a puff on the reef. Yet the local pharmacist is happily hawking amphetamines. She even has a special prescription for pulling an all-nighter: "One blue pill followed by a red-and-white one an hour later," she says. "That should do the trick."

The party itself is still a manic, night-long beach barbecue. Techno music blasts from crackling stereos. Fireworks flare. Beach fires burn. Stalls sell mineral water, Lipovitan-D (a staple among Thai truck drivers), hot dogs, dried squid, moonshine and Corona beer. Waiters with T-shirts that say "Full Moon! Party! Party! Party!" in fluorescent pink are testimony to the sell-out factor of this once spontaneous bacchanal.

Three Japanese men in Polo shirts, sporting utilitarian bum-bags and clutching a toilet roll three-pack wander bewildered through the crowd of skinheads, hippies and funky London ravers. I watch a juggling traveler have his bag searched by a plainclothes policeman. "They never check in my pot of Foremost Yogurt," he tells me later with a wink. "Want some acid?" A table packed with screaming katoeys (transvestites) offers me an impromptu strip show and a glazed-eyed Scandinavian couple have sex on top of a sand castle they've spent two hours building. A straight-looking Thai family joins me in my voyeurism. "We came down to have a look at what the farangs do," says the father. The Patpong ping-pong show has nothing on this.

Sunrise is the climax as the motley crew of survivors--now whittled down to about 1000--begins its pagan worship of dawn. Camcorders and cameras record the revelers as they shake hands, hug, kiss and make statements like, "This is life," or, "First we had the moon and now we have the sun." Around 11am, the last dehydrated dancers finally collapse.

The two-room jail at the police station is packed with foreigners caught with a joint or a tab of acid. The catch-of-the-day, however, is a gang of Burmese pirates caught pilfering a fishing village on Turtle Island. One official merrily collects the 50,000 baht bail from each inmate. The Chief of Police is busy feeding me the line that there really is "no drug problem" when he gets a frantic phone call. "You speak Thai, don't you?" he asks me. "Come translate--we've got a crazy at the Palace."

The Palace is Panghan's only air-conditioned hotel. A man called Lee is leaning out of a fourth-floor window as a gaggle of policemen tries to communicate: "Do jump! Do jump!" they yell. "The fuckers want me to die," wails Lee. He has ferociously dark bags under his eyes, a bleeding nose, lacerated forearms and lanky but perfectly styled black hair. The police ask me to go up to his room and talk to him. "You'll be fine," they say. "Just stand by the window so we can see what's happening."

"The hotel manager is filtering opium through the vents," Lee tells me, turning the air off. He's fortyish, a civil engineer from North Hampton with three kids. On his room service tray is uneaten food; the boiled eggs have holes in them: "I think the chef is trying to poison me." He has barricaded the door with the shower rail and moved the cupboard against the opposite wall: "The Australians next door are trying to drill through--they want to kill me." On the mini-bar he has etched the words, "I'm not going to dy."

Three hours later, Lee is still telling his story, this time to the British Embassy's Vice Consular on the phone. Just as he gets to the good bit about fighting off three ten-foot sharks, he pauses. "No, I'm not on mushrooms. No, not acid." He hangs up in a fury.

As my "reward" for helping with Lee, the police take me to see the Norwegian cadaver. The stench is thick, almost edible. "When you write your article please tell them what a nice place Sunset beach is," pleads a self-appointed PR man. "Everyone stays at Sunrise Beach because that's where the Full Moon Party's held, but look around you--this beach is just as lovely." I look around: a policeman is puking outside Room 11, another is improvising a body bag from a hammock while a gaggle of Thai kids dare each other to touch the blackened body. The vomiting policeman looks up at me, wipes his mouth and says, "You know, it smells kind of sweet after a while."