Cheap Myanmar meth flood India, Bangladesh
By Saleem Samad
Despite bloody conflict raging in Myanmar with ethnic rebels, the anti Junta are gaining grounds, the drug trade from so-called Golden Triangle has further spiked.
One of the prime reasons for this has been that Myanmar Border Guards Police (BGP) along India and Bangladesh have abandoned their border posts and check points after the onslaught of the rebels mainly the Arakan Army in north Rakhine State.
A glimpse of a vibrant drug trade surrounding the highly addictive stimulant, expanding eastward and overseas from Myanmar as civil war turned vast swaths of the country virtually lawless for three years.
Since orchestrating a takeover in February 2021, Myanmar’s military regime has faced challenges in suppressing resistance from groups including pro-democracy factions and armed ethnic minorities.
Violence escalated in last October when a coalition of ethnic-minority factions initiated an offensive in northern Shan state, the epicentre of methamphetamine production. In the months since, the regime has witnessed a significant loss of territorial control, accompanied by a breakdown in drug enforcement and wanton corruption. The political instabilities caused by the conflicts between Myanmar’s military regime and ethnic militias have ushered in an environment conducive for drug lords to traffic narcotics, particularly methamphetamine.
“The focus of the judicial apparatus has been redirected from tackling crime towards fighting the opposition to the regime. Corruption has soared to unprecedented levels: Drug and gambling dens operate in complete impunity through heavy bribing,” Yangon-based security analyst Adrian Rovel told Nikkei Asia, an influential Japanese economic journal. “Economic collapse has pushed vulnerable people into drug production and trafficking.”
Concern is growing among experts that the current conflict may worsen an already critical situation that is inundating nations across Asia with methamphetamine. Consumption is surging, prices are plunging and meth is flowing into countries as far as Australia to the east and Saudi Arabia to the west.
With porous borders to its east and west, Myanmar is Asia’s leading manufacturer of illicit synthetic drugs. Shan state as well as Thailand’s north and Laos’ northwest form the “Golden Triangle,” long known as a hotbed of illegal drug production and trafficking, particularly of methamphetamine and opium.
Moreover, India’s northeast and Bangladesh share long borders with Myanmar that enable drug trade access in the region without much hindrance. Myanmar is wedged between two major drug markets, South Asia and East Asia, and bordered by two major producers of chemical precursors, India and China. After crackdown in China on the black market trade, Myanmar drug producers quickly found alternative suppliers in India and Bangladesh.
Trafficking routes and supply chains have shifted to bypass the heaviest fighting in Myanmar and heightened anti-drug crackdowns in neighbours such as China, Thailand, Bangladesh and India. Still, wholesale and retail prices of methamphetamine tablets and crystal meth have plummeted to record lows, indicating uninterrupted supply.
The supply boom has created a larger mass market, particularly among labourers, long-haul truckers, farmers and students who depend on the drug to stay awake. According to experts, Yaba pills contain 1% to 30% methamphetamine that is mixed with caffeine and can stimulate a high that lasts three to 12 hours. Crystal meth, also called ice, contains 80% to 100% methamphetamine, keeping a person high for more than 20 hours in some cases.
In most instances, methamphetamine users exhibit fewer overt physical symptoms when contrasted with opioid users, who risk respiratory failure due to overdose. Yaba is measured by pill count. Crystal meth is measured by weight. However, the surge of dopamine, a neurotransmitter associated with pleasure, can elevate the likelihood of psychiatric complications such as paranoia, delirium, and other symptoms akin to those observed in schizophrenia.
“There is a direct causation between the hike in opium production, narcotics processing, supply side dynamics and the coup,” Avinash Paliwal, a senior lecturer at SOAS University of London, told Nikkei Asia. “If you use a higher dose of methamphetamine, it can have an intoxicating effect like your heartbeat is racing. If someone has a myocardial infarction or a stroke when they’re an adolescent or very young, we have to ask if they use this type of substance.” “The entire political economy of Myanmar is primarily an underground economy,” said Paliwal, an expert on security policy in South Asia, Afghanistan and Myanmar.
“That’s why we call it Yaba — it means crazy in Thai. Methamphetamine can cause psychiatric symptoms that are more concerning than physical symptoms,” said Dr. Rasmon Kalayasiri, director of the Centre for Addiction Studies at Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok.
Observers say the Myanmar military has tried to keep most ethnic groups away from the resurgent conflict – with great leniency on drug trafficking. One of those groups is the United Wa State Army, which controls parts of Shan state and has business interests in Tachileik, a “sin city” of casinos, scam centres and drug transit hubs facing Thailand.
Until the conflict began raging in Rakhine State in December, tugboats carrying timber and betel leaves frequently travelled from the border trade post of Maungdaw in Myanmar to the Keruntoli jetty in Bangladesh on the narrow, winding tidal Naf River separating the two nations.
On occasion, under the wood and the lush produce lay millions of colourful, candy-like Yaba tablets, are ferried by vessels carried not only drugs, but also Rohingya refugees fleeing Myanmar in 2017-2018.
Languishing in crammed barbed-wired camps in Bangladesh without legal employment, some Rohingya refugees become drug mules for income. Each can carry up to 5 kilograms of ice or up to 3,000 pieces of Yaba, making the vulnerable population an obvious choice for drug traffickers, Bangladeshi police in Teknaf, writes Nikkei Asia.
Bangladesh has about 8 million methamphetamine addicts, according to the Association for Prevention of Drug Abuse. The densely populated nation, which flanks India and Myanmar, has ranked among the world’s top five countries for annual Yaba seizures every year over the past three years, according to the Bangladesh Department of Narcotics Control (DNC). More than 50 million pills and 176 shipments of crystal meth were recovered each year.
The amount of methamphetamine smuggled into Bangladesh has more than doubled since the Myanmar military overthrew the civilian government in February 2021, lawmakers in Bangladesh parliament were told.
Last April, the Border Guard of Bangladesh seized 22 kilograms of crystal methamphetamine — its largest ever seizure of the substance being trafficked by mules.
In Bangladesh, multiple shipments of crystal meth and Yaba destined for the Middle East by air and sea have been seized in the last two years. The DNC recently seized a shipment containing more than 20,000 pieces of Yaba bound for Saudi Arabia, which hosts more than 2.5 million Bangladeshis.
“Recovery of drugs is obviously an indicator of increased entrance of drugs in the country,” Humayun Kabir Khondokar, deputy director of the DNC told Nikkei Asia. “And the amount recovered, unfortunately, reveals just the tip of the iceberg.”
Bangladesh said it shared a list of 60 illicit factories and 25 major drug dealers in Rakhine state with the Myanmar regime, to no avail.
Long before the military takeover shattered any semblance of national cohesion in Myanmar, it was already the epicentre of Asia’s methamphetamine trade. Then supply grew in volume and reach as ethnic armed organisations — a number of whom are involved in the drug trade — crowded the regime’s forces into tighter territory. Since the offensive launched in last October, the regime has lost control of borderlands straddling China, India and Bangladesh, all key to the drug trade.
As the ethnic offensive in Myanmar sends the regime’s troops fleeing, some traffickers aiming for lucrative markets overseas have opted for roads through Mandalay to ports in Yangon and Irrawaddy.
Mandalay also connects the Shan hills to roads leading to Bangladesh and India. Strategic trade routes, developed from old mule tracks that have existed for centuries, have devolved into anarchy as organised resistance factions supplant military checkpoints and official taxation gates.
Northeast India is not the core market, SOAS University’s Paliwal told Nikkei. “The region is a transhipment hub,” he said. “The markets are in Africa, Europe, and Southeast Asia. The global supply lines of narcotics [are] where the significance [of northeast India] really kicks in.”
Across the world, methamphetamine trafficking continues to grow, according to a 2022 report by the UNODC. The volume of meth confiscated grew fivefold in the decade to 2020, with 117 countries reporting seizures in the four years ending the decade — up from 84 a decade ago.
Meth busts have been climbing across the region is the closest proxy for consumption, according to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC). Seizures have also been climbing in South Asia, where more than 10,000 kilograms of meth was seized between 2018 and 2023.
The methamphetamine trade flourishing along the Mekong River, with its roots in Shan state, Myanmar, has ballooned since 2019 when the UNODC estimated its value at a staggering $61.4 billion. It is worth far more than opiates and heroin, which stood at $10.3 billion at the time, despite heroin being Myanmar’s initial narcotic product. The country has now surpassed Afghanistan to become the world’s largest producer of opium.
The UNODC estimates that opiates constituted 2% to 4% of Myanmar’s GDP in 2023. Despite average annual growth of 6% from 2011 to 2019, GDP slowed sharply after the 2021 military takeover, with the World Bank forecasting growth of just 1% this year. The conflict has significantly affected Myanmar’s economy, according to the World Bank, leading to a drop in GDP per capita to $1,150 in 2022 from $1,480 in 2020.
The UNODC warned in a 2023 report that producers were bolstering their sourcing of noncontrolled substances such as raw materials for methamphetamine, like pseudoephedrin
The author is an independent journalist and columnist based in Bangladesh, a media rights defender with the Reporters Without Borders (@RSF_inter). Recipient of Ashoka Fellowship and Hellman-Hammett Award. He could be reached at saleemsamad@hotmail.com; Twitter (X): @saleemsamad
