Myanmar’s military junta is “facing challenges” in stemming opium poppy cultivation and synthetic drug production, a senior military officer admitted this week, following reports from the U.N. that the country has become a leading global source of both drugs.
In a statement to mark the International Day Against Drug Abuse and Illicit Trafficking on June 26, the junta’s Minister for Home Affairs Lt.-Gen. Yar Pyae said that the country was “severely facing challenges related to opium poppy cultivation, synthetic drug production, and drug abuse.” The statement, which was published in full in the state-run Global New Light of Myanmar, then detailed the various activities that the military was implementing to fight the production and trafficking of narcotics.
Myanmar saw a “slight increase” in illegal opium poppy cultivation in 2023 over the previous year, and was also “severely faced with the production, trafficking, and distribution of synthetic drugs,” Yar Pyae said.
These claims both more or less track with the figures compiled by the United Nations Office for Drugs and Crime (UNODC). In December, the agency reported that Myanmar produced 1,080 metric tons of raw opium, up from 790 metric tons in 2022. This made the country the world’s largest producer of opium, following a drop in production in Afghanistan due to the imposition of a strict poppy cultivation ban by the country’s Taliban government.
In a May report, the UNODC also reported that the synthetic drug market in East and Southeast Asia continues to expand at “concerning levels,” with regional seizures of methamphetamines reaching an all-time high of 190 tons. The vast majority of this was produced in Myanmar’s Shan State, where the booming drug trade is both a symptom of the state’s tangled ethnic conflicts and “also an obstacle to sustainably ending them.”
Yar Pyae’s diagnosis of the country’s drug problem was obviously understated and self-serving, and skirted over the question of who exactly is responsible for the drug production. He accused some of Myanmar’s ethnic armed groups of manufacturing synthetic narcotics, saying, “they illegally import chemicals across the border into the areas they control by working together with foreign chemists to produce drugs.”
This is true as far as it goes; many of the largest drug labs are concentrated in the state’s “special regions,” which are run by rebel groups like the United Wa State Army (UWSA) and the National Democratic Alliance Army. Having ceasefire agreements with the central state, these groups enjoy a considerable amount of autonomy, and in the case of the UWSA, have used drug production as a means of state-building and a “financial engine, subsidizing everything from bullets to medicine to concrete.”
But for obvious reasons, Yar Pyae’s diagnosis overlooks the fact that drug production has also been facilitated by militias and other paramilitary units aligned with the Myanmar military, to say nothing of the reality that sections of the armed forces are themselves directly involved in the trade.
It also ignores the broader context of Myanmar’s drug boom: the impact of the military coup of February 2021. The military’s takeover, which terminated a period of graduated political and economic opening, has inflamed the country’s conflicts, worsened security, and led to the atrophying of large sections of the legitimate economy. This has expanded the conditions of “predictable insecurity” in which drug traffickers and their protectors have flourished. Unsurprisingly, drug production has increased steadily in the three years since the coup, and currently shows no signs of slowing.
In these circumstances, the Myanmar military’s efforts to eradicate drugs, even assuming its good faith, will amount to little more than an attempt to douse a forest fire with a garden hose.