Rich Cambodian parents are secretly sending their drug-addicted children for detox in Australia and China to avoid the social stigma of drug use and the poor quality of rehabilitation centres in Cambodia.

The details of a rising drug problem in Cambodia are buried in one of 777 US diplomatic cables released by WikiLeaks two weeks ago in a rare large dump of every cable from an American embassy, in this case the embassy in Phnom Penh.

The country, which emerged in the 1990s from decades of civil war to become one of the region’s best performing economies, is struggling to deal with an explosion in drug use caused by Cambodia’s porous borders, indigenous drug industry, rapidly expanding young urban population and “ruthless gangster” business elite.

Under the tabloid-style heading “Burgeoning Youth Population increasingly Seduced by the ‘Perfect High'”, US ambassador Carol Rodley details stories of “drug parties”, violence, rape and “spoiled children” who spend as much as $1000 of their “parent’s money in one month on drugs, a huge sum in a country where the average family lives on less than a dollar a day”.

With the use of ice, the “party drug of choice”, spreading from gangs into the mainstream community (the UN estimates “as many as half a million” drug users in the country), the medical need for treatment and rehabilitation has collided with cultural taboos over drug use. To most Cambodians, “drug use is unmentionable … and certainly does not happen among ‘good families’.”

This has resulted in rich families trying “to hide their children’s drug use by secretly sending them to rehabilitation centers, often abroad … the majority send their children to private clinics in China or Australia” with the “readily accepted story that their child has gone abroad to visit family or study”.

Further compounding the problem with local treatment is the poor state of Cambodia’s 11 rehabilitation centres, which, according to the ambassador “are boot camps at best and … ‘torture centres’ at worst”. Treatment includes “being shocked with electric batons, whipped with twisted electrical wire, beaten, forced to perform arduous exercise and labor, and sexual abuse”.

Despite these problems there is growing attention on the issue in Cambodia, with a slow increase in “community services to eventually eliminate the need for residential centres” and the importance of “civil society” as a core solution to drug use. The US ambassador singled out the Australian government for its pledge to fund community services through the HIV/AIDS Asia Regional Program.

While US activities in South-East Asian countries such as Cambodia may not grab the headlines compared to Afghanistan or Iraq, cables such as this give a glimpse into the massive health and social work that occupies much of international diplomacy.