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A record one billion methamphetamine pills were seized in East and Southeast Asia last year, the UN said Monday, as crime gangs took advantage of the Covid-19 pandemic and instability in coup-hit Myanmar to boost their activities.
Southeast Asia’s so-called Golden Triangle has for some time been an infamous hotspot for drug trafficking, with Myanmar, Laos and Thailand’s porous borders and lax local policing allowing illegal substances to slip across.
The UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) said law enforcement netted almost 172 tons of methamphetamine – – approximately seven times more than 10 years ago – – and the surging supply has sent street prices in Thailand and Malaysia crashing to all-time lows.
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“The scale and reach of the methamphetamine and synthetic drug trade in East and Southeast Asia is staggering,” Jeremy Douglas of UNODC said in a statement.
“Organised crime have all the ingredients in place that they need to continue to grow the business,” he said, adding that they crucially had a “massive population with spending power to target”.
Kavinvadee Suppapongtevasakul, UNODC regional synthetic drugs analyst for the global SMART programme, said the medication’s plummeting prices had made it “much more accessible and available to those that could not afford it before.”
“The social consequences of increased use are significant, and health and harm reduction services remain limited across the region,” she added.
Myanmar’s northern Shan state stays the region’s primary source of meth, with the medication increasingly sent to Laos, then Thailand prior to arriving at Malaysia, where it is trafficked onward to nations all through the Asia Pacific, the report said.
