INSIDE ASIA’S GOLDEN TRIANGLE OF DRUGS
Every country that’s on this call today, this very day, there will be drugs from the Golden Triangle arriving in each one of your countries—Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia, everywhere in the region,” said Dean Johnson to a group of journalists from different parts of Southeast Asia.
Johnson is executive producer of the docudrama “Traffickers: Inside the Golden Triangle,” which is now streaming on HBO GO.
“This is the untold story of Asia,” said director Steve Chao. “When it comes to methamphetamine, the Golden Triangle has taken the top spot for producing methamphetamine for the rest of the world.”
Initially, Johnson had assumed that there had to have been documentaries made about the Golden Triangle— the name for an area in Myanmar, Laos and Thailand that has been used for drug production for years and years. “When we realized that there hadn’t been a production made, we were just blown away. It’s the biggest untold secret. We’ve all seen lots of dramatized series about different drug traffickers in Latin America but there’s this far bigger story. It’s kind of been like a dark secret in the region.”
Johnson and Chao, both award-winning filmmakers, dove into the story, spending two years working on the series. It traces the origins of the Golden Triangle and its continued (and growing) role in the drug trade. “It’s an incredible exploration and it’s a dangerous story to tell,” said Chao. “But we feel that it really does raise awareness for many people around the world, as to what’s happening in this region in the Golden Triangle.”
Exclusive interviews
Featured in the show are exclusive interviews with journalists, drug enforcement agents and people close to the drug lords. “It really went back back to old gumshoe journalism. We really want to get to the people who knew the drug lords, the people who worked with the drug lords, and we also wanted to get deep into law enforcement, the people who actually were part and parcel of taking down some of these drug lords,” said Chao.
His work on the show brought him to the Golden Triangle for interviews and to the United States, in his search for archival, never-before-seen footage of Khun Sa, otherwise known as “The Opium King,” who is the focus of their first episode.
In that episode, journalist Stephen Rice says, “Pablo Escobar and El Chapo may have had notoriety but Khun Sa pulled in more cash than they could ever have dreamed.”
“Traffickers: Inside the Golden Triangle” also tells the stories of “The Mekong River Pirate” and “The Playboy Drug Lord.”
Johnson said, “Audiences love to understand what’s behind the mind of, for example, a serial killer or a murderer, how can a human being can do this.
I think it’s the same with drug traffickers. They’ve chosen this very extreme way to live their life. And I think that’s what the audiences want to look at— what happened, what choices did you make, how did you become this … So this is a series on three really fascinating characters who chose a very different way to lead their lives. It’s history that’s not boring, history that’s really exciting.”
Working on the “Traffickers” got dangerous at times, the filmmakers said. “There were times we had to slip through checkpoints to meet up with people who were still involved in the drug trade,” said Chao.
Rifle-armed men
One time, while he was on a boat with a monk in the midst of filming, rifle-armed men emerged from the jungle. “We were just right there in the middle, and there was a tense moment where we just stared at each other. We knew this was drug militia-controlled territory. Fortunately enough, they saw the monk and they just disappeared back into the jungle.”
“There were very, very rigorous safety procedures in place,” said Johnson, who spent five years as a Royal Marines commando in the United Kingdom before becoming a producer. “We spent a long time doing risk assessments, judging the level of danger, what would happen in certain scenarios. There were moments where we knew that we were going to be in a certain amount of danger and we would spend a lot of time planning systems on how we can minimize that and how we could mitigate that. It was very calculated risk taking. And Steve’s very experienced, after working in so many conflict zones.”
For Johnson, realizing just how big the drug operations continue to be in the Golden Triangle was a surprise. “We realized that it’s not just a story about history, it’s a story about today. The shocking thing was the amount of amphetamines
that are flowing into Southeast Asia. I didn’t understand just how much drugs are out there in the market. And their market is anybody.”
Johnson found out through sources in law enforcement and the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime that during the pandemic, “the export of drugs from the Golden Triangle to Southeast Asia has increased dramatically. And the COVID lockdown situation has caused a boom in drug addiction problems as well. People are suffering because of COVID and some people turn to illicit drugs to try and deal with their problems, and then there are people like these traffickers who are capitalizing on that.”
Governance and lawlessness
Johnson and Chao’s passion for telling untold stories is just one of their motivations in working on “Traffickers: Inside the Golden Triangle.” Chao said, “There’s hope that public discussion will come from these biopics on the drug lords and the hope is that the discussion will eventually get into the question of governance and lawless areas. What we see globally, and throughout time is that when there is a lawless area, the criminal elements of the world will take advantage, whether that is in Afghanistan, Somalia, or the Golden Triangle. And I think there are healthy questions to be asked about the role that all of us play in ensuring that we have good governance and we tackle any perceived corruption, and that we really ensure that we take care of poverty. Because part of what motivates a lot of people in the Golden Triangle to work for these super labs is the need to feed their families. There’s so many layers of understanding and discussions that need to be had … how to help, how to push our governments to be better. These are really highfalutin sort of hopes but that’s something that we’re aiming for.”
Watch “Traffickers: Inside the Golden Triangle” on HBO GO.