Transnational crime groups are trafficking vast quantities of methamphetamine made in Southeast Asia, the UN said yesterday, putting the value of the Asia-Pacific market for the drug between US$30.3 billion and US$61.4 billion.
The explosion in the meth trade, from an estimated US$15 billion in 2013, comes as powerful syndicates exploit endemic graft, weak law enforcement and lax border controls, the UN added.
“In many parts of Southeast Asia, the systematic payment of bribes at borders is as regulated as the payment of fees in official bureaucratic systems,” the UN Office of Drugs and Crime (UNODC) said in a report.
The cartels, based in Taiwan, Hong Kong, Macau and Thailand, produce most of the meth in northern Myanmar in industrial-scale laboratories and distribute it as far away as Japan and New Zealand.
“The Asia-Pacific meth market is now the biggest in the world,” UNODC representative for Southeast Asia and the Pacific Jeremy Douglas said. “Of all the organized crime types, meth trafficking is the most dangerous and the most profitable. It underpins the growing power of these transnational crime groups.”
The most valuable markets in Australia, Japan, New Zealand and South Korea account for US$20 billion, or a third of the high-end estimate of the trade, the agency added.
More than 12 million users in East Asia, Southeast Asia, Australia and New Zealand consumed about 320 tonnes of pure methamphetamine last year and a record 120 tonnes was seized by law enforcement.
Crystal meth is mostly consumed by middle-class partygoers in developed nations. In poorer nations, users take it as tablets mixed with caffeine, often to help cope with grueling work in factories and at construction sites.
Mushrooming poorly regulated casinos in Southeast Asia offer criminals an easy way to launder illicit earnings, the agency said, and such funds can go through the formal banking system in Singapore and Hong Kong.
“There has been a proliferation of casinos, something that is rarely talked about and deserves attention,” Douglas said.
He said that casino numbers in Southeast Asia have swelled to 230 after a money-laundering crackdown in Macau.
Responding to the report, a Thai senator offered to join hands with the agency and other nations to fight the menace.
“We are ready to take a leadership role and work with UNODC and international partners to build resilience and address cross-border trafficking,” former Thai deputy prime minister Prajin Juntong said.
Organized crime groups also fuel a rising trade in counterfeit goods and medicines, people-smuggling, and trafficking of wildlife and timber, the report added.
“Wildlife and timber trafficking is also an emergency,” said Douglas, calling for a joint effort to combat the trade. “Extinction is on the horizon.”
The Burmese junta has said that detained former leader Aung San Suu Kyi is “in good health,” a day after her son said he has received little information about the 80-year-old’s condition and fears she could die without him knowing. In an interview in Tokyo earlier this week, Kim Aris said he had not heard from his mother in years and believes she is being held incommunicado in the capital, Naypyidaw. Aung San Suu Kyi, a Nobel Peace Prize laureate, was detained after a 2021 military coup that ousted her elected civilian government and sparked a civil war. She is serving a
China yesterday held a low-key memorial ceremony for the 1937 Nanjing Massacre, with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) not attending, despite a diplomatic crisis between Beijing and Tokyo over Taiwan. Beijing has raged at Tokyo since Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi last month said that a hypothetical Chinese attack on Taiwan could trigger a military response from Japan. China and Japan have long sparred over their painful history. China consistently reminds its people of the 1937 Nanjing Massacre, in which it says Japanese troops killed 300,000 people in what was then its capital. A post-World War II Allied tribunal put the death toll
‘NO AMNESTY’: Tens of thousands of people joined the rally against a bill that would slash the former president’s prison term; President Lula has said he would veto the bill Tens of thousands of Brazilians on Sunday demonstrated against a bill that advanced in Congress this week that would reduce the time former president Jair Bolsonaro spends behind bars following his sentence of more than 27 years for attempting a coup. Protests took place in the capital, Brasilia, and in other major cities across the nation, including Sao Paulo, Florianopolis, Salvador and Recife. On Copacabana’s boardwalk in Rio de Janeiro, crowds composed of left-wing voters chanted “No amnesty” and “Out with Hugo Motta,” a reference to the speaker of the lower house, which approved the bill on Wednesday last week. It is
FALLEN: The nine soldiers who were killed while carrying out combat and engineering tasks in Russia were given the title of Hero of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea North Korean leader Kim Jong-un attended a welcoming ceremony for an army engineering unit that had returned home after carrying out duties in Russia, North Korean state media KCNA reported on Saturday. In a speech carried by KCNA, Kim praised officers and soldiers of the 528th Regiment of Engineers of the Korean People’s Army (KPA) for “heroic” conduct and “mass heroism” in fulfilling orders issued by the ruling Workers’ Party of Korea during a 120-day overseas deployment. Video footage released by North Korea showed uniformed soldiers disembarking from an aircraft, Kim hugging a soldier seated in a wheelchair, and soldiers and officials
RSS