South-East Asia is awash in drugs
OCTOBER WAS a stellar month for the Lao police. On the 27th an officer in Bokeo, a northern province, waved down a truck packed with Lao Brewery beer crates. Contained inside them were 55.6m methamphetamine pills and over 1.5 tonnes of crystal meth, a more potent version of the drug. It was Asia’s largest drug bust ever, according to the UN. Just the week before, the police had seized 16m amphetamine tablets during two operations in the same area.Law-enforcement agencies in South-East Asia have grown accustomed to breaking records. In almost every year between 2011 and 2020, the authorities seized more meth, as the drug is commonly known, than they had the year before. Between 2015 and 2019, the only other region to impound as much of the stuff as East and South-East Asia (which the UN groups together) was North America—though the overall volume of drugs flowing through Asia is probably greater, because authorities there are more corrupt and less well-equipped to intercept traffickers, says Jeremy Douglas of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), an UN agency. And recorded seizures are likely to be just the tip of the iceberg.Most such hauls occur in Indochina. Even though it is home to just 10% of the population of East and South-East Asia, it accounts for nearly three-quarters of the meth detected in the region. The meth labs that feed Asia’s habit are found in Shan state, a lawless patch of eastern Myanmar. Even before Myanmar’s military coup in February, it was a big centre of meth production. But the putsch has distracted already negligent authorities, making the area even more enticing to drug cartels. In neighbouring countries, seizures this year are once again breaking records—six times more meth has been seized in Laos in 2021 than in 2020. “It’s been a mess since February, especially the last few months,” says Mr Douglas. “It’s pretty clear the post-coup breakdown in governance and security in drug-production areas has had an impact.”Cartels sell their product as far afield as Japan and Australia, where richer consumers can afford to pay a premium. But they are increasingly targeting customers closer to home, too, where the population dwarfs that of Asia’s richest countries. Syndicates appear to have tailored their business model accordingly. Over the past decade the price of meth has plummeted across the region. That suggests that whereas once cartels tried to maintain prices at a certain point, now their strategy is to flood the region and build up sales by increasing levels of drug use.The strategy of jacking up demand by increasing supply seems to work. Data are sketchy—few people will admit to being a drug user or addict—but suggest there is enormous appetite for meth. In 2019, according to UNODC numbers, 0.61% of East and South-East Asians aged between 15 and 64 used amphetamine-like substances, including meth, at least once a year, compared with a global average of 0.54%.That translates to 10m people, making it the biggest market for meth in the world. Recent household surveys show that roughly 1m people in each of Indonesia, the Philippines and Thailand tried meth at least once in the past year. Between 2016 and 2019, the number of people who used meth at least once annually grew eight-fold in Vietnam and ten-fold in Thailand. In 2019 the UN reckoned that the regional market was worth $60bn.Meth appeals to users for several reasons. It is often the easiest drug to get—there is very little cocaine in the region—and is in plentiful supply. Suchart (not his real name), a Thai user, says that meth is even easier to procure in Bangkok today than it was two decades ago, and back then “people were giving it away”. Many prefer it to heroin, which was South-East Asia’s drug of concern until it was supplanted by meth about a decade ago. Heroin’s numbing effects “blank you out”, says Suchart. “Meth makes me more active, gives me more strength to do things.”That appeals to people who work long hours, like Somchai (a pseudonym), who was a truck driver when he first started popping yaba, tablets containing four parts caffeine to one part meth. Meth use was once confined to the working class but since crystal meth, the quality of which is higher than yaba, started flooding the market about seven years ago, it has attracted a well-heeled crowd. Stronger and purer than yaba, crystal is often used by those who want more energy to party.Dealers can count on their customers coming back to them. About one in ten meth users will develop a dependency. That number rises to one in five for regular users of crystal meth. It is hard to get a clear picture of the number of meth abusers in South-East Asia because the only metrics of drug dependency in the region are unreliable. Drug-treatment admissions are inflated by involuntary referrals while the number of drug arrests may be fuelled by arrest quotas.Even so, indicators in most countries are trending up. In the five years to 2020 the number of known meth users in Vietnam increased eight-fold. In Thailand admissions for treatment doubled in the three years to 2018. In Malaysia the number of crystal-meth users who had contact with the authorities increased six-fold between 2016 and 2019.This is taking its toll on public health. Meth kindles feelings of euphoria, often spurring users to engage in risky behaviour, such as having unprotected sex at “chemsex” parties. The urge to strengthen the rush leads some users to inject meth, which increases the chance of transmitting diseases like HIV.Once the high wears off, some suffer from anxiety and paranoia. Over a third of recreational users will acquire meth-induced psychosis, which is akin to schizophrenia. A hospital in Thailand discovered that six years after the completion in 2010 of a study of patients diagnosed with meth-induced psychosis, 8.2% had died—a share that is ten times greater than Thailand’s overall mortality rate. The top three causes of death were accidents, suicide and AIDS. (Meth users tend to have higher rates of sexually transmitted diseases.) Apinun Aramrattana, a professor of medicine at Chiang Mai University in Thailand, says that the country’s “meth epidemic” is fuelling growing rates of mental illness. Hospitals, he says, have struggled to accommodate the number of patients with meth-induced psychosis.The response of South-East Asian governments has not helped. Too often, the authorities punish users, locking them up or throwing them into “compulsory treatment” centres, where the only treatment provided is abstinence and labour. This punitive response “has simply failed to work”, says Ann Fordham of the International Drug Policy Consortium, an advocacy group based in London, pointing to the rocketing number of users.The UN argues that addicts should be treated like patients rather than rounded up as criminals. Many governments are starting to come around to that idea. But until they divert funding for drug treatment from law enforcement to health agencies, the number of addicts will continue to grow—much to the satisfaction of the cartels that supply them. ■This article appeared in the Asia section of the print edition under the headline “On a high”