Myanmar burns confiscated drugs worth around US$300 million

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YANGON, Myanmar — Officials in Myanmar’s major cities destroyed about US$300 million worth of confiscated illegal drugs Thursday.

The destroyed drugs included opium, heroin, methamphetamine, marijuana, ketamine and the stimulant known as ice, or crystal meth, Yangon Police Brig. Gen. Sein Lwin said in a speech at a drug-burning ceremony.

The drug burnings came nearly a month after UN experts warned of unprecedented levels of methamphetamine production and trafficking from Southeast Asia’s Golden Triangle region, where the borders of Myanmar, Laos and Thailand meet, and Myanmar’s eastern Shan State in particular.

The production of opium and heroin historically flourished there, largely because of the lawlessness in border areas where Myanmar’s central government has been able to exercise only minimum control over various ethnic minority militias, some of them partners in the drug trade.

The UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) said in a May report that the political crisis across the country after the military takeover in 2021 — which led to a civil war — has turbocharged growth of the methamphetamine trade.

In the country’s biggest city, Yangon, a massive pile of drugs worth more than $117 million went up in a blaze, Sein Lwin said.

Similar events to mark the International Day Against Drug Abuse and Illicit Trafficking also occurred in the country’s second-largest city of Mandalay, and in Taunggyi, the capital of eastern Myanmar’s Shan state, all areas close to where the drugs are produced.

The state-run MRTV television reported on Thursday that 66 types of seized narcotics worth $298 million were torched and buried in three locations at the same time. 

Myanmar has a long history of drug production linked to political and economic insecurity caused by decades of armed conflict. It has been a major source of illegal drugs destined for East and Southeast Asia, despite repeated efforts to crack down.

That has led the flow of drugs to surge “across not only East and Southeast Asia, but also increasingly into South Asia, in particular Northeast India,” the UN said last month. Drugs are increasingly trafficked from Myanmar to Cambodia, mostly through Laos, as well as through maritime routes linking Malaysia, Indonesia, and the Philippines, with Sabah in Malaysia serving as a key transit hub, it added.

The UN agency labeled Myanmar in 2023 as the world’s largest opium producer.