This Laotian Drug Pills Only Sold for IDR 8,000
- Al Jazeera
For decades, the drug trade has provided vital funds for ethnic armed groups and military-aligned militias in the troubled state, with narcotics flowing across the border into China, Laos, and Thailand and onto the international market.
The coup in Myanmar has only accelerated the industry’s output.
The generals’ removal of the democratically-elected National League for Democracy government drove widespread protests and the military’s brutal response pushed the pro-democracy movement into a nationwide armed resistance.
With growing lawlessness and intensified fighting across the country, the anti-narcotics efforts of certain ethnic armed groups and the Myanmar authorities have been hampered.
More militias under the command of the military have also reportedly turned to drugs to fund food and salaries for their soldiers.
In Shan state, these post-coup conditions have created a perfect storm for drug production, according to Jeremy Douglas, the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime’s (UNODC) regional representative for Southeast Asia and the Pacific.
"There's disturbances in Shan state, accelerated post-coup drug production, and a very large and very fragile border along the Mekong river between Shan and Laos. It's a recipe for disaster," he remarked.
"This is a June report by UNODC also showed a second successive record-breaking year for seizures of methamphetamine tablets in Laos in 2022, with 144 million pills intercepted. In 2019 and 2020, this figure stood at just 17.7 million and 18.6 million respectively,"
But while large seizures make for good headlines, the criminal networks facilitating the shipments have been left untouched, according to an international observer with close knowledge of Laos.
The source, who requested anonymity due to the sensitivity of his work said that philosophical differences with Western anti-narcotics approaches, combined with a lack of capacity, means “there doesn’t seem to be any real effort to identify drug networks”.
“The drug seizure is the goal (for Lao police) and the seizures seem to be ad hoc in nature,” he said.
