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Southeast Asia's drug wars: The methamphetamine menace

Despite efforts to clamp down on trade, cheap 'ya ba' pills are fueling a health and social crisis in Thailand and elsewhere
Southeast Asia's drug wars: The methamphetamine menace

A man high on ya ba lies unconscious next to a travel advertisement at a Bangkok train station (Photo by Tibor Krausz) 

Published: July 25, 2019 03:48 AM GMT
Updated: July 25, 2019 04:03 AM GMT

The narrow passageways that wind their ways among derelict plywood shacks in a shantytown of squatters alongside a railway track in central Bangkok offer glimpses into the lives of the Thai capital’s perennially destitute social underclass.

Here, a man covered in crude tattoos loiters aimlessly, smoking a cigarette without his shirt on in the muggy afternoon heat.

There, an elderly woman wearing a faded old sarong sprawls by a small electric fan on a square piece of linoleum laid on the hard floor of a rickety wooden shack. Next to her a mangy dog lies in a motionless heap with its tongue lolling out of its mouth.

Yonder, a young mother soothes a crying child, who is naked and covered in mosquito bites.

Then, from a small doorway, an emaciated young woman appears. She stops short at the sight of a foreign visitor navigating the passageway outside her abode and proceeds to stare at him with a startled look on her face.

She is wearing badly smudged makeup and a hairdo that seems as if it had been styled haphazardly by rambunctious winds. She looks unwell.

“That, my friend, is what ya ba does to you,” observes Father Joseph Maier, an American Catholic priest who has made his home in one of the Thai capital’s most deprived inner-city communities for decades.

The priest is referring to the small pills with caffeine-laced methamphetamine in them that have long been sold in communities like this, blighting the lives of locals.

These days the pills sell for around 60 baht ($2) a pop. They now cost a third of what they did only a few years ago.

Their name in Thai translates as “crazy medicine” and many locals have long been taking them to self-medicate. Taxi drivers take ya ba to help them endure 12-hour shifts. Laborers use the pills for extra kicks. Young people take them ahead of exams or as a popular party drug.

For decades the ready availability of narcotics, especially cheap methamphetamines, has been fueling social and health crises in Thailand and other countries in Southeast Asia.

Despite repeated efforts by the Thai government to clamp down on wholesale drug trafficking, methamphetamine pills are more widely available and cheaper than ever before.

By lowering the prices of synthetic drugs, the criminal gangs that sell them have been making them more affordable to low-income people across the region. This strategy is working as it is helping generate more demand for the drugs and making law enforcement efforts to roll back the trade all the harder.

“What we’ve seen in the region is an engineered buildup of demand,” explains Jeremy Douglas, the regional representative for the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC).

“Drugs now cost [as little] on the street as a quart of milk,” he added while speaking with a group of reporters during a press briefing last week. “Incomes are rising across the region while the prices of drugs are dropping.”

Criminal syndicates are running manufacturing operations in war-torn Shan State in Myanmar, from where they export their illicit merchandise far and wide across the region.

Thanks to the porous borders of the Golden Triangle, a hilly region where the borders of Myanmar, Laos and Thailand meet, drug traffickers can move vast quantities of synthetic drugs — and other illegal merchandise such as counterfeit goods and fake medicines — across national borders with relative ease.

Criminal syndicates exploit weak law enforcement, endemic corruption and rampant poverty in Southeast Asia, which they have turned into a hub for the manufacture and sale of synthetic drugs, the UNODC says. Their profits are enormous.

“Synthetic drugs have rapidly become the most profitable illicit business in Southeast Asia as organized crime groups have innovated their business model and engineered an expansion of the methamphetamine market, which is now valued at up to US$61.4 billion annually,” explains the U.N. agency, which has just released a comprehensive new report on transnational organized crime in the region.

“The methamphetamine trade exceeds the GDP of several countries,” Douglas elucidates. Southeast Asia, he adds, has become “an epicenter of the global synthetic drug trade [with] a massive surge in synthetic drugs flooding the region.”

Last year, officials seized 120 tons of methamphetamines around the region, but the actual supply of the drugs dwarfed that amount, according to the UNODC.

Complicating effective law enforcement against the illegal trade in narcotics is that it is inexorably tied to other transnational criminal activities, including human trafficking, wildlife trafficking and large-scale counterfeiting.

“Organized crime groups are generating tens of billions of dollars in Southeast Asia from the cross-border trafficking and smuggling of illegal drugs [and from the trafficking and smuggling of] people, wildlife, timber and counterfeit goods,” Douglas says.

“Profits have expanded and illicit money is increasingly moving through the regional casino industry and other large cash-flow businesses,” the U.N. expert adds.

Around a quarter of the synthetic drugs mass-produced by criminal gangs in the region are sold within Southeast Asia, but China serves as the largest market for locally produced methamphetamines.

For societies that have already been suffering from the adverse social, economic and health effects of widespread substance abuse, this deluge of cheaper synthetic drugs spells plenty more trouble. It could lead millions more people becoming addicted to narcotics.

The societal, economic and health-related costs of that could be significant — and potentially crippling, experts say.

“Left unchecked, transnational organized crime can undermine governments, disrupt markets, drain national assets, inhibit the development of stable societies and endanger citizens generally,” stresses Peter Haymond, the United States’ ambassador to Thailand.

“Transnational crime requires an effective transnational response,” adds Haymond, whose government has been engaged in bolstering transnational cooperation against organized crime in the region.

For users, taking cheap methamphetamines can have devastating consequences.

Ya ba is a powerful stimulant whose effects on the nervous system last longer than cocaine. Depending on the dose taken, the effects can include everything from insomnia, increased alertness and euphoria to hallucinations, paranoid delusions and unbridled aggression.

Prolonged use of the drug, especially in larger doses, can leave people with permanent mental disabilities and other severe health problems. Most ya ba users are lower-income people who see the drug as a quick fix to their problems from work-related fatigue to stress and despondency to marital discord.

Yet international criminal syndicates would benefit from renewed ya ba epidemics in the region because they would have an even larger international market for their illicit merchandise.

That is why concerted law enforcement actions against drug traffickers must go hand in hand with efforts to reduce demand for narcotics, including rehabilitation projects and educational outreach, Douglas stresses. “We really need to address the growth of the market and demand [in] synthetic stimulants,” he says.

“We also need to boost the resilience of [disadvantaged] communities [wherever] people remain vulnerable,” Douglas adds.

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