Cigareets, whisky and .....wild, wild chocolate

Somewhere I read that "kuah" in Malay means "gravy." Well this main town of Langkawi is certainly trying to get on board the (ahem) gravy train. Sometime ago, in order to boost the tourist revenue, Langkawi was given duty free status. The result can be seen in Kuah where a few streets of rather tumbledown buildings throb and pulse with the energy of money and goods changing hands for a variety of luxury items such as chocolate, booze, tobacco and electrical goods.
No matter how much of a fan of chocolate you are how are you ever going to get through even one of the megaboxes on sale? More astonishing to me, an occasional lover of M&Ms and good dark chocolate is the variety of liqueur chocolates on offer. Except as a attempted decadent teenager I have never been clear on the allure of these luridly packaged confections. I mean you either want to savour your alcohol, follow it up with a good coffee + chocs and then, if you really want to top yourself off, down a few sickly liqueurs. To mix the separate experiences seems to me to be curtailing a much broader opportunity for hedonism. Am I missing something?
Of course I do not scorn the alcohol - 20p for a bottle of beer and £5 for a litre of top grade Tequila - is a temptation I will not resist. But again how would I ever get a crate out of the country even if I could pay the duty which Singapore would, no doubt, levy? There must be something going on that is not entirely legal or so illegal that it needs a short news feature to uncover. But then again maybe it's not so interesting, the moving of the illicit goods of last century? These days there are much more desperate things been traded, moved and counter-traded.
As for tobacco, I have more-or-less given up - I had a lapse last year but now I am back on the straight and smokefree road. So it is only with slight pangs that I look at the huge stacks of numerous nicotine brands and the slightly more alluring displays of first quality cigars from Havana. I suppose I could invest in a lifetime supply of Xmas/New Year cigars but then I would have to invest in a humidor or whatever you would need to keep the tobacco sprightly and the leaf moist.
Walking the streets you begin to wonder where all the money passed over the counters goes. It certainly isn't on the pavements, the roads, the drainage or any other observable infrastructure. When I say "walking the steets" I mean it figuratively, it's more like delicately picking your way between the potholes, the subsided pavements and the open drains. I mean for a serial tourist like me it is all, in a way, quite quaint, but to live amid this - hard to say how I would feel. Grateful for small mercies such as all day electricity and a road which reasonably frequently gets me from A to B?; settle for a more basic life where I ask for less and don't get frustrated with how things should be? I am pampered by the Singapore standard, I know, but people here must ask questions as to why, a tiny country so close(an hour away) is capable of such growth and development while places like Kuah, awash with money from the exchange of duty free still lacks a decent pavement.