Ruthless meth networks get Myanmar hooked

KutKai: Mobs of stick-wielding church-goers in Myanmar’s northeast used to descend on dealers and addicts in a desperate effort to save their communities from a meth-induced health crisis sweeping the country.

But anonymous death threats brought the vigilante operations to a halt.

“It simply became too dangerous for us,” says Zau Man, leader of the local Baptist church in Kutkai, a town in Shan State scarred by addiction.

Myanmar is the second-biggest producer of opium in the world after Afghanistan and is now believed to be the largest source of methamphetamine.

The multi-billion dollar industry outstrips rivals in Latin America to feed lucrative markets as far away as Sydney, Tokyo and Seoul.

Shan is the epicentre of production in Myanmar, with a network of local armed groups linking up with transnational trafficking gangs.

Kutkai sits between Mandalay and the militia-riddled town of Muse on the China border, a key entry point for precursor chemicals heading to Myanmar’s illegal meth labs.

Trucks carrying illicit goods roar through the town in both directions, past a Chinese temple and streetside restaurants with signs in Mandarin.

Heroin and meth use here are rampant. Zau Man says nearly every household has at least one drug user, dealers work out in the open and often violent meth addicts have turned parts of Kutkai into no-go zones.

“In some areas, you can only get food until 10pm, but you can get drugs 24/7,” he says.

Myanmar is facing a “public health disaster” because of meth and few villages in the country are left unscathed, Jeremy Douglas, regional representative of the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, said.

But the crisis is at its most acute in the poppy-covered hills of Shan State, where a landscape overrun with armed rebel groups, militias and security forces is an ideal breeding ground for meth labs.

Accurate figures of production of high quality crystal meth, or “ice”, and low-grade meth, known in South-East Asia as “yaba”, are unavailable.

In January 2018, Kutkai police seized 30 million yaba pills, 1,750kg of crystal meth and 500kg of heroin with a domestic value of some $54 million in the country’s largest-ever drug bust.

But huge raids leave street prices unaltered, suggesting they are only a small slice of production, according to the International Crisis Group, which says the business now “dwarfs” Shan’s formal economy. — AFP