Yesterday, authorities in Thailand and Indonesia announced separate major drug seizures, highlighting the alarming growth in the production and trafficking of narcotics in Southeast Asia.
According to the Associated Press, the Department of Special Investigation (DSI) of the Thai police announced that its personnel had seized around 2.4 metric tons of crystal methamphetamine from a tourist boat near a pier in Rayong province in eastern Thailand on Saturday. They said that the drugs were ready for smuggling out of the country, although they did not disclose whether they knew the intended destination.
Pol. Capt. Surawut Rangsai of the DSI told the press that the shipment was worth an estimated 300 million baht ($9.15 million), but if successfully smuggled and sold abroad, the shipment would have been worth around 10 times that – or more than $90 million. (A report in the Bangkok Post said that the DSI put the total value at $1.5 billion, or around $45.7 million. The reason for the discrepancy is not clear).
Eight men were arrested in connection with the shipment, and authorities also seized a van and a truck believed to be involved in the smuggling operation. The seizure came a day after the anti-narcotics Pha Muang Task Force reported an armed clash with a drug trafficking group near Thailand’s northern border, resulting in the deaths of two suspects and the seizure of 4 million methamphetamine pills.
Also yesterday, authorities in Indonesia announced the results of a two-month-long anti-drug operation. Marthinus Hukom, the head of the country’s National Narcotic Agency (BNN), told the media that 285 people had been arrested on suspicions of drug trafficking during the campaign, including 29 women and seven foreigners.
As the AP reported, “thirty-six of the suspects, including 21 women, were paraded in front of reporters, along with confiscated drugs, in their orange prison uniforms and hands handcuffed.” The authorities had also seized around 0.68 tons of various narcotics, including crystal meth, marijuana, ecstasy, THC, hashish, and amphetamines, another BNN official said.
The two massive seizures hint at the steady expansion in the production and trafficking of narcotics – particularly methamphetamine – in Southeast Asia in recent years. As the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) noted in a report on the Asian synthetic drug market last month, Asian seizures of methamphetamine jumped by 24 percent to a record 236 tons last year, 94 percent of them in Southeast Asia.
According to the UNODC, much of this meth is manufactured in the Golden Triangle, the rugged region where the borders of Myanmar, Thailand, and Laos converge. The epicenter of this production is in parcels of Myanmar’s Shan State controlled by rebel groups who have established lucrative partnerships with increasingly flexible and tech-savvy organized crime syndicates. The conflict that has engulfed Myanmar since the military coup in 2021 has only “heightened the reliance on drug-related proceeds while simultaneously disrupting law enforcement responses.”
The UNODC also noted the increasing significance of maritime trafficking routes linking Malaysia, Indonesia, and the Philippines, with Sabah in Malaysia now emerging as one of Southeast Asia’s “major maritime trafficking hubs.”
On May 20, Indonesia seized a shipment of two tons of methamphetamine from a fishing boat in the vicinity of the Riau islands, which BNN officials described as the “biggest drug discovery in the history of drug eradication in Indonesia.” In mid-April, Indonesia’s navy impounded a ship carrying just shy of two tons of meth and cocaine in the same region of the Indonesian archipelago. Indonesian officials valued the two seizures at around $300 million and $426 million, respectively.