Reliving 1988 in a small pill
Bags of methamphetamine pills seized by the Thai narcotic police department before being incinerated in 2011.
At a glance, the little pills look as harmless as Skittles.
Each tablet is tinted candy pink and stamped with the number 88. They’re shaped like baby Aspirin. Black-market merchants sell them in 10-pill bundles double-wrapped in black baggies. Once the plastic wrapping is torn away, the pills reveal their distinct scent: a chemical sweetness that brings to mind cheap cake frosting. This is Asia’s newest brand of methamphetamine. It’s produced in Burma, the region’s top producer of illegal narcotics. By all accounts, the number 88 stamped on each pill is a perverse tribute to one of the most riveting events in Burma’s history — a bloody 1988 uprising against military tyranny led by prodemocracy idol Aung San Suu Kyi.
The 88-branded tablets are a potent variety of Asia’s go-to drug: smokable meth pills called “ya ba.” Filled with about 10 to 20 per cent methamphetamine and padded out with caffeine, ya ba offers a dazzling burst of confidence followed by a spell of clammy depression.
“Right now, the 88 pills are the best stuff on the streets,” says Zau Ring, a 35-year-old repairman and daily meth smoker living in the northern borderlands of Burma. (His name has been altered to prevent his arrest.)
This hinterland, abutting China and Thailand, is an anarchic frontier where rebels and pro-government militias clash over turf. In the chaos, the meth trade thrives.
Burma’s hidden jungle labs produce an astonishing amount of methamphetamine: possibly one to two billion pills per year, according to UN officials.
Meth users like Ring — perpetually shirtless, twitchy, raven-colored bangs drooping over his eyes — are often the first to sample the militias’ latest recipes.
The 88 pills, Ring says, are a welcome addition to the menu of narcotics sold freely in Burma’s north.
“They’re much more potent than the typical pills, which quickly go up in flames,” he says, crouching on the floor of a flophouse in his hometown of Myitkyina.
“It’s cool,” Ring says. “Everyone in Burma knows ’88 is all about fighting for democracy.”
Exploiting Burma’s iconic uprising to sell meth isn’t just sacrilege. It’s tragically ironic. Meth-trafficking militias keep the nation mired in exactly the sort of warlordism and corruption that the 1988 uprising sought to eliminate. Some are even linked to the object of the protesters’ rage: Burma’s military.
Starting in 2009, the military gave rise to dozens of new armed units backed by more than 10,000 troops. These groups — called “people’s militia forces” or “border guard forces” — are primarily stationed in remote borderland areas contested by rebels. Their main job: defending territory for the government. But in return, the army offers the militias impunity to traffic heroin and meth.
“It’s tacit approval,” says John Whalen, who recently retired as the head of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency’s office in Burma. “They just look the other way.
“The army likes to keep (the militias) happy,” Whalen says.