Over 1 billion methamphetamine tablets were seized in East and Southeast Asia last year, highlighting the scale of illegal drug production and trafficking in the region. The U.N. said the sum is seven times the amount that was seized a decade ago.
The 1.008 billion tablets was part of a regionwide haul of almost 172 tons of methamphetamine in all forms and was seven times higher than the amount seized 10 years earlier, the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime said in a report.
“Production and trafficking of methamphetamine jumped yet again as supply became super concentrated in the Mekong and in particular Thailand, Laos and Myanmar,” Jeremy Douglas, Southeast Asia regional representative for the U.N. agency, told The Associated Press in an email interview.The increased production makes the drug cheaper and more accessible, creating greater risk to people and their communities, the report said.
The Golden Triangle area, where the borders of Myanmar, Laos and Thailand meet, was historically a major production area for opium and hosted many of the labs that converted it to heroin. Decades of political instability have made Myanmar’s frontier regions largely lawless, to be exploited by drug producers and traffickers.
“Every group denies involvement in drug production and trafficking and point at other groups as responsible, but the drug economy is arguably the largest part of the economy in most or many parts of Shan and border areas of Myanmar and there is plenty of intel connecting groups to labs and shipments,” Douglas said.
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