Southern Shan State, Myanmar – Tian Win Nang squats on the hard-packed earth, balancing a kilogramme (2.2 pounds) of chocolate-coloured raw opium in each hand like a human weighing scales.
“Each kilogramme is worth around $250,” said Tian Win Nang, wearing worn white flip-flops and a black T-shirt.
The son of poppy farmers, Tian Win Nang appears to be barely out of his teens.
“Chinese traders pay us in advance for the harvest,” he said, showing Al Jazeera three dinner-plate-sized mounds of opium.
“We don’t know what happens after,” he says of the journey that will see the opium go “north to the labs” where it will be processed into morphine and eventually refined into heroin.
“We do this to survive,” he adds.
The sun is high and the air is still in the poppy fields blanketing the hills in this part of southern Shan State in eastern Myanmar.
Men and women, young and old, their faces shielded with scarves and straw hats, move with quick, practised motions as hands use sharp tools to score green poppy pods before silently progressing on to another plant.
A milky fluid slowly oozes from the wound inflicted on the pod. When it has dried to the consistency of gum, the same hands will scrape off the sticky substance, gather it together and leave it to dry in the sun until it reaches the toffee-like consistency of raw opium.
This is a daily ritual for many farmers in this part of Shan State near where drug shipments have flowed along these mountain roads near the town of Pekon for decades. The routes wind towards the borders with neighbouring Thailand, Laos and China.
Armed conflict between Myanmar’s military and ethnic armed organisations in these regions has fuelled opium farming and drug production for generations, but the trade has surged in step with the country’s intensifying civil war.
Alliances have long existed, experts say, between high-ranking Myanmar military officers, ethnic armed groups, local criminal networks and transnational syndicates that handle the drug trade’s logistics, refining and distribution.
“Drug trafficking in Myanmar has been facilitated by the military since the 1990s,” said Mark Farmaner, director of the London-based Advance Myanmar charity and an expert on Southeast Asia. “Many officers profit personally, and the institution as a whole reaps political advantages,” he said.
One of the most powerful regional syndicates is Sam Gor, a sprawling network made up of an alliance of rival Chinese triad gangs that operates across China, Myanmar, Laos, Thailand, Cambodia and beyond.
Despite the 2021 arrest and extradition to Australia of Tse Chi Lop – a Canadian national of Chinese origin widely believed to be the leader of Sam Gor – the network remains largely intact.
The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) estimates that the Sam Gor syndicate generated at least $8bn – and possibly as much as $17.7bn – in 2018 from controlling between 40 and 70 percent of the wholesale methamphetamine market in the Asia Pacific region.
Despite the high-profile arrest of Tse Chi Lop, the regional drug trade is flourishing with more than 1.1 billion methamphetamine pills seized across Southeast Asia in 2023 – a historic record, according to UNODC.
‘We oppose the production, trafficking and use of narcotics’
Most of the methamphetamine originates from laboratories hidden in the mountains of northern Shan State and other areas on Myanmar’s eastern borders, which have become the region’s epicentre of synthetic drug production and are part of the “Golden Triangle” – the lawless territory encompassing the shared borders of Myanmar, Thailand and Laos.
But before the explosion in methamphetamine production, the Golden Triangle was infamous for its opium crops and the heroin it produced while under the rule of the self-styled drug lord Khun Sa – the undisputed drug kingpin of the 1980s and 1990s regional drug trade.
Khun Sa is believed to have commanded a personal army of some 15,000 men and under his direction much of Shan State became the global centre of heroin production. He surrendered to the military government in Myanmar in 1996 and died in Yangon in 2007, under the protection of the same generals who had shielded him for years.
“In the early 1980s, the United States Drug Enforcement Administration estimated that 70 percent of the heroin consumed in the US came from his organization ,” Kelvin Rowley, a lecturer at Swinburne University of Technology in Australia, wrote after Khun Sa’s death.
“The US government placed a $2 million bounty on [Khun Sa’s] head – an amount reportedly less than what he earned in a single month,” Rowley said.
Opium has now made a comeback in the Golden Triangle.
After the Taliban banned poppy cultivation in Afghanistan in 2022, Myanmar returned to being the world’s top producer of opium.
In 2023, according to UNODC estimates, Myanmar’s poppy fields stretched over more than 47,000 hectares (more than 116,000 acres), and by 2024, some 995 tonnes of raw opium was produced – an increase of 135 percent since the military takeover in 2021. The gross value of the opium and heroin trade in Myanmar last year was estimated to be between $589m and $1.57bn, according to UNODC.
The scale of drug production, the UN reports, is also tied to the civil war in Myanmar, which is now in its fourth year.
Myanmar’s economy has collapsed since the military coup in 2021, and with options narrowing, people have traditionally turned to poppy cultivation as a means to survive.
The UN notes that opium poppy cultivation in Southeast Asia has long been linked to poverty, lack of government services, economic challenges and insecurity.
“Households and villages in Myanmar that engage in poppy cultivation and the broader opium economy do so to supplement income or because they lack other legitimate opportunities,” the UN said.
But now parts of Pekon, long a military stronghold and a key drug trafficking corridor, are under the control of the Karenni Nationalities Defence Force (KNDF) and other Karenni armed groups fighting the ruling military.
They say they want to change things.
“We oppose the production, trafficking, and use of narcotics,” said Maui, a deputy commander of the KNDF.
“When we capture Burmese soldiers, they’re full of meth,” Maui said.
“We ask where it comes from and they tell us, without hesitation, it’s distributed by their superiors to push them to the front lines,” he said.
“Once the war is over, we’ll go after the opium too. We want it to be used only for medical purposes,” he added.
As part of those antidrug efforts, Karenni police forces stop and search motorcycles and vehicles on roads in the areas of Shan State they now control.
“We are stopping cars and motorbikes we don’t recognise to search for drugs,” said Karenni police commander Win Ning Thun, standing at a checkpoint just outside a village in Pekon district.
“We’re looking for yaba pills,” said Win Ning Thun, using the local name for methamphetamine pills.
“Until recently, this area was under military and pro-junta militia control,” Win Ning Thun said.
“Meth was moving freely under their supervision. They took a percentage of the profits from every shipment passing through,” he said.
‘I was supposed to make a lot of money’
Deep in the forests surrounding Pekon, a small prison holds rows of detainees arrested by Karenni police.
“Everyone here has been arrested for drug trafficking. Some were carrying yaba pills to the Thai border. Others were internal couriers,” a Karenni police official told Al Jazeera.
“These are the pills we confiscated just this past month,” he said, holding up a plastic bag stuffed with small red yaba pills that are easy to conceal, sold cheaply, but represent a trade that is worth millions of dollars.
Among the detainees in the prison was Anton Lee, who wore glasses and a calm, unassuming look.
“They stopped me at a checkpoint with 10,000 pills,” Lee said.
“I was taking them to the Thai border. I was supposed to make a lot of money,” he said, offering no further details, only to say that the profit he hoped to earn would have fed his family for a year.
Now, he faces a long time in prison.
Not too far from the prison, the civil war grinds on in Myanmar as the military regime buys more advanced weaponry, and the rebel forces try to hold out and extend their advances.
The military’s air raids, drone strikes and artillery fire hammer schools, hospitals, homes and religious sites, turning entire villages into targets.
Yet, even under fire, here in southern Shan State, some appear to be trying to staunch the flow of drugs.
With limited resources, they tell of doing what they can in another battle inside a much larger war.
Leave a comment