Booming Meth Trade Challenges Southeast Asia. (Extensive article)

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Booming Meth Trade Challenges Southeast Asia. (Extensive article)

Post by Kung-fu Hillbilly »

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A Taang National Liberation army officer walking through a poppy field in northern Shan state, Myanmar, Jan. 30, 2014 (AP photo by Gemunu Amarasinghe).


By Daniel Quinlin
June 11 2019

“This region is by far and away the meth heartland of the world.”

"On a balcony in the heart of downtown Bangkok, Thailand’s sprawling capital, Jirasak Sirpramong smokes cigarettes while discussing his experiences with methamphetamine, a drug he has been using for 25 years. “I love it,” he says, “because it makes my brain so clear.”

"He eventually excuses himself, saying it’s time to “recharge his batteries.” Inside he begins to smoke yaba, or crazy medicine—a relatively cheap, impure form of methamphetamine commonly found across Southeast Asia that comes cut with caffeine and pressed into reddish pills. "

"But while seemingly straightforward, the devil is always in the details. Because the production and sale of methamphetamine is illegal, maintaining all the elements to make and sell it in large quantities requires a dangerous and unstable collaborative network of armed groups, drug labs and corrupt officials; a pool of active or potential drug users; and favorable geography and infrastructure. Perhaps most importantly, it also requires the lubricant that keeps all these complicated and interlocking parts moving together smoothly: greed. "

"The most powerful of these armed groups and militias today is the United Wa State Army, or UWSA, whose size and scale has led to comparisons with the Lebanese organization Hezbollah. The UWSA emerged, along with a number of smaller ethnic armies, from the collapse of the Communist Party of Burma in 1989. It soon gained an international reputation for running an isolated narco state. Partly in an effort to improve this reputation, the UWSA imposed a ban on opium cultivation within their territory in 1999, though the U.S. still indicted several UWSA leaders on heroin and methamphetamine trafficking charges in 2005. "

"A glut of skilled chemists from the more developed countries in the region is another factor in this perfect storm. According to Coyne, Taiwanese chemists, squeezed out of jobs in mainland China by that country’s rapidly expanding skilled workforce, have since found work “in the production and the provision of the higher-level skills required to make more refined drugs.” Thai police believe these chemists are in part responsible for driving recent advances in the purity of the meth they have intercepted. "

"In Cambodia, shortly after a visit in 2017 by Duterte, Prime Minister HE announced his own crackdown on drugs. The first year saw 17,700 drug-related arrests, an increase of 80 percent from 2016. Even before the campaign, Cambodia had been criticized for the state of its prisons, which are now overflowing. Nevertheless, the crackdown is continuing, with 4,434 drug suspects arrested in the first quarter of 2019."

"So with little enthusiasm and virtually no belief in a final victory, the war on drugs will go on. Jails will continue to fill up. Lives will be destroyed. Police will make massive busts, even as some take bribes from traffickers. And users will continue to buy, making a very few individuals unimaginably rich. "

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Re: Booming Meth Trade Challenges Southeast Asia. (Extensive article)

Post by Kung-fu Hillbilly »

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Southeast Asia's meth gangs making $60 billion a year: UN

BANGKOK — Southeast Asia's drug gangs are making over US$60 billion a year pumping out record amounts of methamphetamine, then laundering the profits through the region's mushrooming number of casinos, a UN study showed Thursday.

"Last year 120 tonnes (120,000 kilogrammes) of meth was seized in East and Southeast Asia, up from around 40 tonnes in 2013, the report said."

"Crime groups are also piggybacking on improved infrastructure to hustle Made-In-Myanmar meth to neighbouring drug markets, and as far as Australia and Japan, the report said."

"The study shows increasingly sophisticated and diverse drug gangs are shuttling it across Asia - cooked by Taiwanese chemists, orchestrated by shadowy financiers from Thailand, Macau and China, and run by Myanmar producers who brand their 'ice' in tea-packages."

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Re: Booming Meth Trade Challenges Southeast Asia. (Extensive article)

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17 March 2019
CEO News: A new report from the UN Global SMART Programme published in March 2019 : Synthetic Drugs in East and South-East Asia Trends and Patterns of Amphetamine-type Stimulants and New Psychoactive Substances shows the extent of the rising trans-border traffic of methamphetamine and other drugs between Myanmar, Laos, Thailand, Cambodia and beyond.
With link to document:
post322380.html?hilit=south%20east%20as ... ne#p322380
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Re: Booming Meth Trade Challenges Southeast Asia. (Extensive article)

Post by fsdfdsdf »

Ive become somewhat of an expert on meths living in PP and befriending the local girls. I can assure you that in the last 6 months there has been very little meths sold in PP. Its mostly MSM which is a health supplement mixed with a few other things, maybe caffeine or diuretics. Or perhaps it is meths but not made properly so its very weak, but always mixed with MSM. A $20 bag can be made in a standard oven for about 20c. It gives a slight and not very pleasant high that lasts about 30 minutes but I guess the placebo effect is such that the addicts keep on buying it. Its called meths by the police but Im sure they dont test it to see what it actually is. In my view it should be legalized as its a health issue and also most home invasions and street muggings are people trying to steal money to get this stuff, its no cheaper here then in the west, an addiction costs about $20 a day, so obviously most addicts have to steal, especially since they are usually unemployed.
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Re: Booming Meth Trade Challenges Southeast Asia. (Extensive article)

Post by CEOCambodiaNews »

Pipe dreams
A Chinese-funded property boom in Cambodia’s Sihanoukville is casting the city’s meth addicts to the margins
WHY WE WROTE THIS: Because addiction shouldn't sentence people to a life of poverty and fear.
Andrew Haffner
October 18, 2019
[This article is the second part in our two-day dive into Sihanoukville’s rampant development. You can read the first part here.]

Sreymau is a small and slight woman, which helps somewhat as she edges her way around the cramped, jerry-built home she’s carved from an abandoned building in the city of Sihanoukville on Cambodia’s coast.

To reach the “apartment,” a set of scaffolding jammed in a kind of front vestibule of a crumbling, gray structure, Sreymau and her boyfriend must first wade through one of the city’s many kerbside rubbish dumps before scrambling up a rickety, homemade wooden ladder.

31-year-old Sreymau is eight months’ pregnant. Each day it gets harder to hoist herself up to the entrance, a glassless window punched in the outer wall.

Social workers clamber across piles of rubbish to get to Streymau’s makeshift home. Many meth addicts in SIhanoukville are now squatting in construction sites. Photo: Andrew Haffner

Rough and ready as her place is, Sreymau has neither a plan nor the choice to move, even after the baby comes. She offers refreshments in the modest form of the first sip of a can of soy-flavoured drink, and is bubbly, even giggly, as she explains the downward spiral that brought her to live on a wooden platform under a leaking slime-slathered roof, along a road that pounds to the incessant thudding and drilling of the city’s ubiquitous construction sites.

Sreymau isn’t her real name, but one given to her to hide her identity. And her name is not the only part of her story as hazy as smoke.

Years of addiction will do that.

Sihanoukville has been the scene of a runaway period of development that’s left most of the city unrecognisable to visitors. But it’s not just the look of the place that’s changed – social workers there say the city’s lurch to modernity has unravelled much of the community fabric that once provided a basic degree of protection to its most vulnerable residents.

Perched above the greasy puddles of the garbage dump, Sreymau certainly qualifies. She’s been hooked for years on crystal methamphetamine, or crystal meth, a drug known across Asia as ice. After years of ice addiction, say the aid workers that check in on her, Sreymau often thinks and acts as a child might.

She’s also far from the only one in Southeast Asia to be snared in the chill of ice dependency. Use of the drug has exploded in recent years across the region, driven by international criminal groups making a killing from selling to people like Sreymau.
https://southeastasiaglobe.com/down-and ... h-addicts/
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