LULLABIES FOR THE DISPOSSESED

Asia’s zombie vapes are poisons of last resort

The freaks in Singapore are lying low, explained a friend, smoking a cigarette outside an Italian deli fronting for a champagne bar speakeasy in Chinatown. It was my last night in town, and he’d met me in a suit from his corporate job—a grind that allowed him to throw parties that were like gifts to the scene. While we stood in an alleyway, under a horizon of twinkling skyscrapers, he gestured to the shophouses around us, which stood silently in the shadows with their hatches batten down. “A few years ago, right after the pandemic, man—these streets were full of club kids going from one party to the next!” he said, listing the short list of venues that make up Singapore’s underground nightlife circuit. He took another glum drag and continued. “People just aren’t going out like that anymore. The financial anxiety you guys have been feeling in the States, it’s just starting to hit us here now. And if people like me are starting to give up, man… I just don’t know.”

At these parting words, I felt a profound hopelessness. Stories like this are too familiar, and I was unable to envision a way for the Singapore scene to prevail against the forces mounting against it: the real estate squeeze, closures of spaces that once felt like home, lack of late-night public infrastructure, the soaring costs of everything, police crackdowns, increased surveillance, and a general anhedonia borne from the anxieties mentioned above. Even though I know that nightlife ebbs and flows in cycles, it was as if the way forward was narrowing into a dead end. I had an overwhelming sense that the dominant system of capital and order was once again tightening its grip.

Electronic music has always looked at a world in flames, and in the burning horizon seen the inevitability of radical change. When I first started chronicling this subculture in the Obama years, a new wave of techno-feminism and post-Black Lives Matter political consciousness infused dancefloors with an exhilarating sense that collective liberation was just around the corner. This was music “that brings the hardest hit of futurity, the most jolting break with tradition,” as critic Simon Reynolds put it in Futuromania. But these days, a real rave revolution has begun to seem to me like a lie—or more like a vision that shines brilliantly for a brief burst, before it collapses under the weight of its dreams.

Still from Rave New World’s minidoc on Singapore’s rave scene

Just two years ago, I had been enraptured in the Singapore underground’s dream of blasphemy, as I witnessed—and then chronicled in a short documentary—a new wave of queer parties popping up in abandoned tunnels, movie theaters, and bank buildings across the island, fusing noisy, technofuturistic sounds with Southeast Asian folklore and spiritual traditions. A yearning for a tropical rave tradition connected to the soil of my ancestors had been answered by an incoming generation bold enough to build altars in the blind spots of global capital, and the satisfaction I felt moving next to bodies that looked like kin was distinct. I wished the story didn’t always go like this: a revelatory moment that turns out to be a flash already fading; maybe I would have danced harder if I’d known.

Earlier in the trip, I’d stopped by a cute bar frequented by artists and musicians. The rave circuit had been quiet during this trip, and I was hoping to run into some friends. The bar sometimes hosted DJ nights and was a good place to pick up local gossip; about a year ago, while chatting with a local chef in the smoking zone, I’d first heard about blackmarket drug vapes called “kpods” that were being sold on Telegram. “You never really know what’s in them because it’s usually a mix of stuff, including ketamine,” he said, explaining why they were called kpods. “What does it actually feel like?” I asked. But he’d never tried it, and neither had anyone else I spoke to in the electronic music scene.

I learned that k-pod’s typical consumers were not from the underground club world; rather, they tended to be teenage students who got into vaping from candy-flavored nicotine, as well as hardcore drug users who might also be into meth or heroin. Sprinkled into this spectrum were adult professionals with stressful jobs, “uncles” who typically crush beers at karaoke bars, and other random normies. It was shocking to discover that such a wide swath of Singapore’s population was flouting the country’s strict drug laws—the relative accessibility of vaping, and the veneer of safety around this mode of drug consumption, had created a rift in the sober social order through which they had fallen in.

When I walked into the bar this time, the CDJs in the DJ booth were missing. The speakers were pushed against the wall, like silent witnesses of better days that lingered in the imprints of the plush velvet sofas. A handful of people sipped beers on the patio, but I recognized no one except for a DJ-friend in his 30s who sometimes worked there. We sat down at a table, and he proceeded to tell me about the bar’s recent misfortune: police officers had recently raided the place in search of people smoking vapes—the latest crackdown in an all-out War on Vaping that the government had launched earlier this year.

The kpod loophole in the country’s zero-tolerance drug prohibition had been discovered, and etomidate, the main psychoactive substance in kpods, was reclassified as an illegal drug, meaning that dealers were now jailed and caned. Nicotine vapes have actually been illegal in Singapore since 2018, but in the past, the police tended to look the other way. These days, owning any type of vape resulted in steep fines, and possibly getting shipped away to a mandatory “rehab” program in jail-like conditions. Vaping, in effect, was now criminalized as a drug offense.

Anti-vaping campaign in Singapore

I asked my DJ-friend if people were smoking kpods at the bar, and he shook his head. “Nobody lah! But people were stuffing their vapes down their bras and underwear, trying to hide them,” he said. “A few unlucky ones got caught, and they kena $700 fines.” The War on Vaping also led to the bar catching some stray fire: when the cops saw the DJ booth, they warned that spinning records was considered “live music,” which required a permit. Other venues in the circuit had been given the same warning, resulting in a general hushing of the electronic music scene, which had already been under strain. In a way, the crackdown was working. “No one is vaping anymore,” my friend said, taking a drag of his cig. “We’ve all gone back to analogs.”

There were more signs that Singapore’s anti-drug efforts are intensifying. A public hotline has been set up, with citizens encouraged to record videos of people vaping in public and report them to the police—even if they are underage teens. Throughout my trip, I’d also noticed the posters blanketing MRT stations, bus stops, park billboards, and other public spaces that warned about the dangers of vape addiction. In addition to advisories about the higher penalties, the campaign questioned if vapes are really a safer alternative to cigarettes, arguing that many users get addicted to both.

I went home from the bar and started reading everything I could find about etomidate, the main synthetic chemical compound in kpods. The popularity of etomidate vapes, I learned, was not limited to Singapore—the internet was full of concerned media reports from across Asia, where the drug has been given various street names like “space oil” in Hong Kong, and “zombie cigarettes” in Japan. Much of the online reporting highlighted how the legal grey area that etomidate has so far existed in has accelerated its spread as authorities scramble to catch up. The reports also frequently mentioned a particularly disturbing side effect of the drug: erratic physical behavior that one woman in Okinawa compared to “an insect writhing after being sprayed with insecticide.”

This explained the videos I found on TikTok of people purportedly fucked up on etomidate: a teenager falling sideways to a train station floor like a felled tree; two men staggering across a plaza, limbs swinging at sharp angles, heads collapsing toward their knees. Shot from a distance by strangers who’d seized on their bizarre behavior, these clips were often folded into news segments warning of the drug’s dangers. There was something lurid about this “gotcha” footage that filled me with voyeuristic fascination and second-hand shame as I consumed the familiar spectacle of public debasement, reframed through the increasingly normalized practice of citizen surveillance. Even as I resisted the media’s scaremongering, it was hard not to feel like the drug’s effects had crossed into something supernatural and truly zombie-like.

The stuttering, mechanical motions also reminded me of the “tranq walk” associated with xylazine, a veterinary tranquilizer saturating the United States opioid supply. The resemblance suggested that these were not typical recreational drugs, but poisons of last resort. In these videos, users seemed to stumble past the threshold of weird-but-harmless intoxication into some disturbing hinterland—an unholy place of oblivion the body visibly resists. What, exactly, was going on with this new drug of the moment? And if the side effects were this brutal, what was drawing so many people into its grip? The further I went down this dark rabbit hole, the more I realized that zombie vapes aren’t just a weird trend. They represent a broader shift in drug culture—a shift that’s already been happening for decades, and whose deadening effects are really starting to hit.