For more than half a century heroin has been carried over the jungle-shrouded hills here, the first leg of a journey that delivers the drugs to cities as far off as Sydney and Tokyo. But anti-narcotics officials are rubbing their eyes at the spectacle they are now witnessing: A flood of heroin and methamphetamine is spilling out of Myanmar as traffickers slash their inventories in a panicked sell-off.
“It’s a clearance sale,” said Pornthep Eamprapai, director of the northern branch of the Thai Office of Narcotics Control, who has nearly three decades of experience tracking illicit drugs from Myanmar. “Some dealers at the border are buying on credit. They don’t even need to pay in cash. This is the first time I’ve seen this.”
The main reason for the surge in trafficking, officials say, is a crackdown by Myanmar’s military government on armed ethnic groups along the borders with Thailand, Laos and China. The ethnic groups, many of which have a long history of illicit drug production, are steeling themselves for battle with the Myanmar junta and rushing to convert their stocks of heroin and methamphetamine into cash to buy weapons, anti-narcotics officials say.
“Various traffickers are liquidating their stockpiles,” said Pamela Brown, an agent for the US Drug Enforcement Administration based in Chiang Mai, Thailand. “They are trying to get large shipments of heroin out, and some have been successful.”
Heroin seizures by the police in northern Thailand have increased more than twentyfold. From October of last year to this August, the authorities seized 1.2 tonnes of heroin, up from 57kg a year earlier, according to the Office of Narcotics Control.
The traffickers are also under increasing pressure in Myanmar, where the ruling junta appears to have become more aggressive in seizing illicit drugs. It sometimes has turned a blind eye to traffickers, but faced with the prospect of battling drug-financed armies, the junta had added incentive to crack down.
The ethnic groups are obscure to most outsiders — the Wa, Kachin and Shan, among them — but their fate is crucial to the future of the world’s heroin supply, experts say. Although they now produce only 5 percent of the total supply, instability could allow them to create much more.
The Myanmar junta and its proxies beat back ethnic Karen rebels along the Thai border in June and attacked and defeated an ethnic Chinese group, the Kokang, in the north in August. The campaigns have the leaders of other ethnic groups wondering if they are next.
The standoff between ethnic groups and the central government in the rugged and isolated northern hills of Myanmar is an anomaly in modern Asia, a throwback to much more unstable times. The Wa and Kachin have large, well-equipped armies and administrations akin to the small kingdoms that existed in Asia before European colonial powers introduced the concept of the nation-state.
GUNS FOR DRUGS
Now, in a desperate bid to protect their fiefdoms, they are casting a wide net for more weapons, according to Colonel Peeranate Katetem, the deputy commander of a Thai anti-narcotics unit based in Chiang Rai, near the Myanmar border.
Three months ago, he said, he received a call from a Wa representative who said he was looking to spend about US$25 million to purchase M-16 assault rifles and “anything capable of exploding.” Peeranate said the group appeared eager to barter heroin for the weapons. He said he declined to help.
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