HANOI: The narcotics industry reaped between US$30.3 billion and US$61.4 billion last year, an increase from US$15 billion in 2013, helped by 12 million users encompassing East Asia, Southeast Asia, Australia and New Zealand.
The users consumed about 320 tonnes of pure methamphetamine (meth) last year, with the bulk from industrial-scale labs in northern Myanmar, said a United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) report quoted by Bangkok Post.
UNODC representative for Southeast Asia and the Pacific Jeremy Douglas had announced that the Asia-Pacific meth market was now the biggest in the world.
‘Of all the organised crime types, meth trafficking is the most dangerous and profitable.It underpins the growing power of these crime groups.’
Transnational crime syndicates are growing more powerful, especially in Southeast Asia, by exploiting rampant corruption, weak law enforcement and lax border controls.
‘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 report said.
The groups generate huge profits each year from increased trade in drugs, counterfeit goods and medicines, people smuggling, and trafficking of wildlife and timber.
Most worrying is that many of the drug cartels, based in Hong Kong, Macau, Taiwan and Thailand, are ‘outpacing the ability of law enforcement to respond, while posing serious threats to public security and sustainable development’.
Rapidly expanding and poorly regulated casinos offer crime syndicates an easy way to launder illicit profits.Proceeds of crime are also laundered through the formal banking system in Singapore and Hong Kong.
Most crystal meth users in developed countries are middle-class party-goers, but ingested in poorer countries as tablets mixed with caffeine to help users cope with gruelling work in factories and construction sites.
UNODC said the purity of crystal meth, in its most potent form, ranges between 50 and 90 per cent, but in tablets from 15 to 25 per cent.
In terms of drug raids, Thailand, Laos, Malaysia and China have seen record busts, The Thaiger portal said. The biggest drug haul last year was 120,000kg of crystal meth and meth pills coming out of the Golden Triangle. More than half took place in Thailand, where authorities confiscated more than 515 million meth pills.
From January to August last year,Chinese authorities reported a 22-fold increase in crystal meth seizures in the Yunnan province alone, compared with the haul in 2015.
Pills are reportedly selling for less than US$1,lower than the price two decades ago.
Apart from the booming business of clothes and food, as well as drugs, as in the ‘law of unintended consequences’, China’s Belt and Road strategy to open up trade routes throughout Asia has inadvertently made trafficking much easier.