Booming Meth Trade Challenges Southeast Asia. (Extensive article)
Posted: Thu Jul 18, 2019 4:31 pm
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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