A Burmese policeman has been arrested after switching 64kg of seized crystal meth with salts loosely resembling the party drug known as “ice,” officials said yesterday.
Officers stumbled across the suspect packages of confiscated ice about a week ago as they carried out an inventory of seized narcotics at a police station ahead of an annual burning to mark an international day against drugs on June 26.
“Sixty-four packages out of 103 were fake,” said Deputy Police Colonel Myint Swe, chief of Kengtung District police force in Shan State.
Each packaged weighed 1kg, he added.
A kilogram of ice is worth about 20 million kyat (US$13,000) locally, giving the pilfered product a value of about US$830,000 inside the nation.
It fetches several times more the further it travels from source.
Police sergeant Myint Naing was arrested on Sunday, several hours drive away, and had been flown back to Kengtung for interrogation, police said.
“We found that he substituted the ice with alum [crystallized potassium] salt and other things which look similar to ice,” said a senior drugs police officer in the capital, Naypyidaw, requesting anonymity.
Drug experts believe Myanmar may now be the world’s biggest meth producer, with jungle labs in ungovernable areas of Shan state churning out untold tonnes of ice and hundreds of millions of meth pills — known regionally as yaba.
Made-in-Myanmar yaba is pouring west into Bangladesh and east into Laos, Thailand and beyond in record amounts.
High-grade crystal meth — or “ice” — is smuggled out of Myanmar via sophisticated networks to lucrative developed markets as far away as Japan, South Korea and Australia.
In late March Burmese authorities said they seized 1.7 tonnes of ice worth nearly US$30 million in a boat off the nation’s south.
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