Illicit drug markets in the Asia-Pacific region continue to expand and diversify, and appear to be largely unaffected by the COVID-19 pandemic, the UN said yesterday.
The production of methamphetamine, the most popular drug in the region, continues to hit record highs, while prices fall to new lows in East and Southeast Asia, as well as Australia and New Zealand, the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) said in a report that compiled data from last year to the first quarter of this year.
“It is hard to imagine that organized crime have again managed to expand the drug market, but they have,” UNODC representative for Southeast Asia and the Pacific Jeremy Douglas said. “While the world has shifted its attention to the COVID-19 pandemic, all indications are that production and trafficking of synthetic drugs and chemicals continue at record levels in the region.”
UNODC illicit drugs analyst Inshik Sim said that intelligence suggested that there had been no change in the street price of methamphetamine in Bangkok or Manila, the biggest markets for the substance in Southeast Asia.
This showed that there had been “no impact on its availability in the market,” Sim said.
However, the pattern of drug trade at the consumer level has shifted more to online social media platforms as government measures against the coronavirus limit people’s movement, Thai Narcotics Control Board Deputy Secretary-General Paisith Sungkahapong said.
“We have found the increase in the online drug trade via Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and also we found a lot of drugs being conceal and transport to buyers via the postal, public and private services,” he said.
The relative stability of the drug market in much of the Asia-Pacific region contrasts with the experience in North America and Europe, where tougher travel restrictions and border controls have disrupted supply chains and pushed prices higher.
Transnational crime groups based in Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macau have expanded the sophistication and scale of methamphetamine production in industrial-scale laboratories in northern Myanmar, and widened their distribution network as far as Japan and New Zealand.
As supply has surged and prices have fallen, the purity of the drug has increased, the report said.
Asian crime syndicates produce both potent crystal methamphetamine and less expensive tablets of methamphetamine mixed with caffeine, known as yaba (crazy drug) in Thailand.
While opium cultivation and heroin production has been declining in Southeast Asia’s Golden Triangle, which straddles northern Myanmar and parts of Laos and Thailand, there has been a “steady emergence” of dangerous synthetic opioids such as fentanyl in East and Southeast Asia, the report said.
“The illicit drug market here is at a tipping point, as synthetic opioid production appears to be migrating into places with deep governance problems like the Golden Triangle,” Douglas said. “Southeast Asia could well become a source of opioids for other parts of the world while these substances get mixed into or displace part of the regional heroin supply.”
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