Drug busts reveal fentanyl first

BANGKOK: Myanmar has made Southeast Asia’s largest-ever seizure of synthetic drugs in raids that revealed the “unprecedented” production of opioids in an area notorious for pumping out heroin and meth, the UN said on Monday.

Between February and April, authorities swooped on labs in the lawless Kutkai area of Shan State, seizing nearly 200 million meth tablets, 500 kilogrammes of crystal meth, some 300kg of heroin and 3,750 litres of methyl fentanyl.

The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime described the haul as one of the largest and most successful counternarcotics operations in the history of the region.

“What has been unearthed through this operation is truly off-the-charts,” UNODC Southeast Asia and Pacific representative Jeremy Douglas said in a statement.

The production network could only have been possible with the backing of serious transnational criminal groups, he added.

The raids unearthed “unprecedented” methyl fentanyl, the sign of a new trend of synthetic opioid production emerging “on a scale nobody anticipated”, said Mr Douglas.

Fifty times stronger than heroin and up to 100 times more potent than morphine, fentanyl can be lethal from as little as two milligrammes — the equivalent of a few grains of sand. It has fuelled an opioid crisis in the US which killed 32,000 people in 2018.

Myanmar is under pressure to stem the deluge of drugs from its freewheeling border regions.

Shan State is part of the “Golden Triangle” — a wedge of land cutting into Myanmar, Laos, China and Thailand and virtually untroubled by authorities despite its multi-billion dollar trade.

Myanmar is the world’s second-biggest producer of heroin after Afghanistan, and is now widely thought to be the largest global source of meth, fuelled by the flood of precursor chemicals from China.

Cheap, caffeine-cut ya ba pills are pushed regionally, prices tripling as they cross borders into Thailand and Malaysia. The more addictive and expensive crystal meth or “ice” is smuggled to Tokyo, Seoul or Sydney.

REUTERS Precursor chemicals used to make illicit drugs seized by Myanmar police and military are seen in this undated photo near Loikan village in Shan State, in what the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime described as Asia’s biggestever drug bust.