Photo of the Day 293

Opium Smoke, Doi Sam Mun, Thailand, 1985

Photograph by Steve Raymer

A woman smoking opium on Chinese New Year fills her small, sunlit home in Thailand's Doi Sam Mun village with a bluish haze. Thailand was once a significant producer of opium and heroin, but government eradications efforts begun in the 1980s have significantly curtailed poppy cultivation.

(Photo shot on assignment for, but not published in, "The Poppy," February 1985, National Geographic magazine)