BANGKOK – East and Southeast Asia are awash in record quantities of methamphetamine and other synthetic drugs, the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime said in a new report Tuesday. Its origins largely date back to the cross-border region known as the Golden Triangle, where Thailand, Myanmar and Laos meet.
The region is historically known for growing opium and being home to many of the laboratories that convert it into heroin.
“We are used to recording seizures, but the scale that methamphetamine production in the Golden Triangle has now reached is enormous. The same goes for the profits generated,” Benedikt Hofmann, UNODC deputy regional representative for Southeast Asia and the Pacific, told the Associated Press. “For East and Southeast Asia, we are now looking at something close to $80 billion a year, feeding back into the region’s illicit economies.”
The Golden Triangle area has experienced decades of political instability.
Myanmar’s border regions are largely lawless and exploited by drug producers and traffickers. In recent decades, it has become the region’s epicenter for illegal amphetamine products. A military takeover in 2021 that ousted the elected government of Aung San Suu Kyi and triggered nationwide armed resistance further destabilized the country.
The new report states that the total amount of methamphetamine seized in East and Southeast Asia will reach a record high of 190 tonnes in 2023. About 89% of this came from Southeast Asia, with much of it from the Golden Triangle.
The 1.1 billion methamphetamine pills seized, weighing 98.3 tons, were the most recorded in the region, as was the 90 tons of crystal methamphetamine seized, the report said.
Even regional seizures of the drug ecstasy, although representing a very small portion of the illicit synthetic drugs trafficked in the region, reached record levels last year of more than 26.7 million pills, the majority originating in Europe, the report states.
It also highlighted the increasing appearance in recent years of ketamine, a powerful anesthetic used in patients undergoing surgery, but recently used to treat depression and anxiety, as well as for recreational use.
The UN report states that networks producing and trafficking ketamine have diversified their business model and supply channels, moving from other parts of East and Southeast Asia to the Golden Triangle area of Myanmar and, more recently, to other countries in the lower Mekong River basin.
Regional methamphetamine production is concentrated in Shan State in eastern Myanmar – the heart of the Golden Triangle – especially in areas known as Special Regions, where ethnic minorities with their own armies enjoy some self-governing privileges, the report says. .
“The illicit drug manufacturing activity is carried out by Asian organized crime groups who have partnered with armed groups in Shan,” he said.
Myanmar’s northern and eastern border regions have also become known for hosting major organized casino crime operations involving online fraud, illegal gambling and human trafficking.
“The increasing convergence of drug trafficking and emerging forms of organized crime in the Mekong is a major concern,” said UNODC’s Hofmann. “An online casino can be used to launder proceeds from the drug economy, while the same building can house a fraud center – all in the hands of a criminal group offering additional criminal services through Telegram and other channels.”
The report also states that drugs originating in Myanmar are increasingly smuggled to other countries along sea routes. The drugs are shipped to South Korea, Australia and New Zealand and other Pacific nations.
“Trafficking routes that combine complex land and sea corridors have become more common, essentially creating superhighways for large drug shipments from the Mekong, many of which go unnoticed,” Hofmann said.
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