UN says organised crime shifting drugs routes in Southeast Asia

The UN Office on Drugs and Crime says nearly 151 tonnes of methamphetamine will have been seized in Southeast Asia by 2022.

The synthetic drug market in Southeast and East Asia is becoming more diverse, the United Nations warns, and drug trafficking syndicates are using new smuggling routes to move large quantities of methamphetamine and other drugs throughout the region.

Nearly 151 tons of methamphetamine were seized last year in Southeast and East Asia, as well as a record 27.

4 tons of ketamine, marking a 167 percent increase in seizures of the powerful sedative compared to 2021, it reports. United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) said on Friday.

Launching its latest report on the situation of synthetic drugs in the two regions, the UNODC noted that record methamphetamine seizures have been recorded almost every year in Southeast and East Asia for the past decade, although a leveling off is expected in 2022 of seized drugs could be seen until before COVID. -19 quantities. But this may have less to do with a reduction in production and supply than traffickers turning to new smuggling routes to avoid interception.

In an attempt to evade detection, organized crime groups in the Golden Triangle — the largely lawless region where the borders of northern Thailand, Myanmar, and Laos converge — have shipped significant amounts of crystal methamphetamine through the central region of military-controlled Myanmar to the Andaman region. Sea, UNODC said. This was in addition to the haul that continues to be smuggled through northern Thailand and Laos.

“Transnational organized crime groups anticipate, adapt and try to evade what governments do, and in 2022 we saw them operating around Thai borders in the Golden Triangle more than in the past,” Jeremy Douglas, UNODC Regional Representative for South East Asia and the Pacific Ocean, a statement said.

Commenting on the new routes through central Myanmar, where the army is engaged in an intensified military campaign against pro-democracy forces, Douglas said: “It seems few were looking in that particular direction”.

“The supply in central Myanmar itself increased significantly and traders quietly began to move produce to the coasts – the supply literally sailed past on the Andaman Sea,” Douglas notes in the report.

Control of territory and the freedom to produce and distribute from locations dominated by organized crime groups and partners in the armed groups proliferating in the Golden Triangle region allows drug producers “to vastly increase and diversify supply with for market expansion and domination”. , Douglas said.

“In other words, the most powerful regional smuggling networks are able to operate with a high degree of certainty that they can and cannot be stopped, and as a result are able to dictate the conditions of the market,” he said. .

While Myanmar’s Golden Triangle and Shan State continue to be centers of synthetic drug production and opium cultivation in the region, organized crime gangs are also protecting themselves from risk by establishing new production centers elsewhere, Cambodia being an example.

the UNODC.

“Cambodia has emerged as a major transit and to some extent production point for the regional drug trade,” Douglas said.

“The discovery of a series of clandestine industrial-scale ketamine laboratories, processing warehouses and storage facilities across the country has set alarm bells ringing in the region and among international partners,” he said.

South Asia has also become more closely integrated into Southeast Asia’s drug supply market with “methamphetamine trafficked in large quantities from Myanmar to Bangladesh and, [with] increasing frequency, to northeast India,” UNODC said.

“Wholesale and street prices of methamphetamine remained at or fell to record lows across the region in 2022, indicating uninterrupted supply,” UNODC added.

Regional authorities also discovered large shipments of mixed methamphetamine and ketamine loads, suggesting crime groups are “pushing the two drugs as a package to increase demand for ketamine” in new markets, the UN agency said.

“The ketamine situation in the region in many ways reflects the supply-driven approach used to expand the methamphetamine market in the mid-2010s,” Inshik Sim, UNODC’s regional coordinator for synthetic drugs, said in a statement.