Thailand's army is bracing for an influx of millions of speed pills which were buried by traffickers along the border with Myanmar at the height of a drug crackdown this year.
Lieutenant Colonel Jeerapan Khrutthalai, assistant deputy director of intelligence for Thailand's Third Army which is responsible for patrolling the rugged frontier, said traffickers were trying to shift millions of buried pills.
"I can say hundreds of millions," he said. "They buried them in February, March and April, May through to August. It's about time they are recovered," he said, adding that the pills' lifespan underground is just three to six months.
This week the Third Army and the border patrol police unearthed more than a million plastic-wrapped pills buried at a village in northern Mae Hong Son Province; earlier this month they seized 2 million that also appeared to have been dug up.
Thailand is the world's largest per-capita consumer of methamphetamines, known here as yaa baa, or "crazy medicine," with 5 percent of Thailand's 63 million people thought to be users.
The army said last year that it expected a record 1billion pills to be brought in from Myanmar last year, up from an estimated 700 million last year.
But now officers say that a brutal three-month drugs war launched by Thai Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra in February has managed to halt or divert the flow of methamphetamines pumped out of clandestine border laboratories.
According to police figures released in mid-April -- and not updated since then following the furore that greeted their release -- 2,275 people were killed nationwide from the start of the war.
While it is not known how many were drug-related killings, the toll was widely seen as an indicator of an alarming number of deaths resulting from the no-holds-barred battle and sparked an outcry from human rights groups.
But the bloody images splashed across news updates on Thai television had a clear deterrent effect. Prior to the crackdown, ambushes netting hauls of several million were not unusual, Jeerapan said.
"But 10,000, 100,000 is very common for us right now," he says of the army's suppression efforts which remain on high alert despite the official end of the "war."
However, Jeerapan also warned that as the northern frontier becomes better guarded, trafficking routes are changing and drugs are now entering Thailand via the northeast, west and south, and being trafficked into Laos and Vietnam.
Major General Suthep Pohsuwan, commander of the Naresuan Task Force which is charged with patrolling part of the northern border, claims the situation has improved since February.
"We have been successful since the war on drugs began ... It has been really quiet and that is very unusual. There has been less movement because some networks inside Thailand have been dismantled," he said.
Suthep said he believes that overall production has declined because the market has been reduced in Thailand, but he cautioned that army intelligence has revealed traffickers are again on the move.
"According to intelligence information there have been movements opposite this province by armed ethnic groups," he said, referring to the United Wa State Army.
Thai and US authorities allege that the militia, which is aligned with the military government in Yangon, is responsible for the vast majority of methamphetamines produced in the region.
Pittaya Jinawat, director of the northern narcotics control office, said he also believes millions of pills are poised for transport into Thailand.
"We are quite afraid that the situation of the smuggling might return to normal levels. One of the signs is that the price of the drugs has become close to the same price prior to the war on drugs," he said.
Thaksin plans to declare Thailand drugs-free on Dec. 2, to mark the birthday of revered King Bhumibol Adulyadej a few days later.
But Pittaya said the victory would really be about a reduction in the level of drug addiction in the kingdom.
"It means we can narrow down the extent of the problem. For instance if you consider the number of people or villages that have the problem, it's about 80 percent of the villages in Thailand -- more than 80,000 villages," he said.
"But we have set a target to narrow down this number to 40 [percent] or 50 percent," he said.
Donald Trump’s return to the White House has offered Taiwan a paradoxical mix of reassurance and risk. Trump’s visceral hostility toward China could reinforce deterrence in the Taiwan Strait. Yet his disdain for alliances and penchant for transactional bargaining threaten to erode what Taiwan needs most: a reliable US commitment. Taiwan’s security depends less on US power than on US reliability, but Trump is undermining the latter. Deterrence without credibility is a hollow shield. Trump’s China policy in his second term has oscillated wildly between confrontation and conciliation. One day, he threatens Beijing with “massive” tariffs and calls China America’s “greatest geopolitical
Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Chairwoman Cheng Li-wun (鄭麗文) made the astonishing assertion during an interview with Germany’s Deutsche Welle, published on Friday last week, that Russian President Vladimir Putin is not a dictator. She also essentially absolved Putin of blame for initiating the war in Ukraine. Commentators have since listed the reasons that Cheng’s assertion was not only absurd, but bordered on dangerous. Her claim is certainly absurd to the extent that there is no need to discuss the substance of it: It would be far more useful to assess what drove her to make the point and stick so
The central bank has launched a redesign of the New Taiwan dollar banknotes, prompting questions from Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) legislators — “Are we not promoting digital payments? Why spend NT$5 billion on a redesign?” Many assume that cash will disappear in the digital age, but they forget that it represents the ultimate trust in the system. Banknotes do not become obsolete, they do not crash, they cannot be frozen and they leave no record of transactions. They remain the cleanest means of exchange in a free society. In a fully digitized world, every purchase, donation and action leaves behind data.
The Honduran elections seem to have put China on defense. The promises of trade and aid have failed to materialize, industries are frustrated, and leading candidate Salvador Nasralla, who has increased his lead in the polls, has caused Beijing to engage in a surge of activity that appears more like damage control than partnership building. As Nasralla’s momentum has grown, China’s diplomacy, which seems to be dormant since the establishment of diplomatic relations in 2023, has shown several attempts to avoid a reversal if the Liberal or the National party — which also favor Taipei — emerge as winners in the
RSS