Tian Win Nang, from Southern Shan State, Myanmar, squats on the hard-packed earth while balancing a kilogram (2. 2 pounds) of chocolate-colored raw opium in each hand like a human weighs the scales.
“Each kilogramme is worth around $250”, said Tian Win Nang, wearing worn white flip-flops and a black T-shirt.
Tian Win Nang, the son of poppy farmers, appears to be just about to enter adulthood.
He said, “Chinese traders pay us in advance for the harvest,” while displaying three dinner-plate-sized opium mounds to Al Jazeera.
“We don’t know what happens after”, he says of the journey that will see the opium go “north to the labs” where it will be processed into morphine and eventually refined into heroin.
He continues, “We do this to survive.”
The sun is high and the air is still in the poppy fields blanketing the hills in this part of southern Shan State in eastern Myanmar.
As hands work quickly to score green poppy pods, both young and old, before silently moving on to another plant, their faces are shielded by scarves and straw hats.
The wound that was inflicted on the pod gradually releases milky fluid. When it has dried to the consistency of gum, the same hands will scrape off the sticky substance, gather it together and leave it to dry in the sun until it reaches the toffee-like consistency of raw opium.
Many farmers in this area of Shan State, where drug shipments have been flogging along these mountain roads for decades, practice this daily. The routes lead to China, Laos, and Thailand, respectively.
Armed conflict between Myanmar’s military and ethnic armed organisations in these regions has fuelled opium farming and drug production for generations, but the trade has surged in step with the country’s intensifying civil war.
According to experts, there have long been alliances between senior Myanmar military officers, ethnic armed groups, local criminal organizations, and transnational syndicates that deal with the logistics, refining, and distribution of drugs.
“Drug trafficking in Myanmar has been facilitated by the military since the 1990s”, said Mark Farmaner, director of the London-based Advance Myanmar charity and an expert on Southeast Asia. He claimed that “many officers profit personally, and the institution as a whole reaps political benefits.”
Sam Gor, a sprawling network of rival Chinese triad gangs that are active in China, Myanmar, Laos, Thailand, Cambodia, and other regions, is one of the region’s most powerful syndicates.
Despite the 2021 arrest and extradition to Australia of Tse Chi Lop – a Canadian national of Chinese origin widely believed to be the leader of Sam Gor – the network remains largely intact.
The Sam Gor syndicate, which controlled between 40 and 70% of the Asia Pacific region’s wholesale methamphetamine market in 2018, is thought to have generated at least $ 8 billion in revenue in 2018, and possibly as much as $ 17.7 billion, according to the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC).
Despite the high-profile arrest of Tse Chi Lop, the regional drug trade is flourishing with more than 1.1 billion methamphetamine pills seized across Southeast Asia in 2023 – a historic record, according to UNODC.
We oppose the use, production, and distribution of narcotics.
The “Golden Triangle,” or “lawless territory encompassing the shared borders of Myanmar, Thailand, and Laos, is where the majority of the methamphetamine comes from laboratories hidden in the mountains of northern Shan State and other areas on Myanmar’s eastern borders, which have become the region’s epicenter of synthetic drug production.
But before the explosion in methamphetamine production, the Golden Triangle was infamous for its opium crops and the heroin it produced while under the rule of the self-styled drug lord Khun Sa – the undisputed drug kingpin of the 1980s and 1990s regional drug trade.
According to legend, Khun Sa commanded a personal army of about 15, 000 men, and that region became the world’s heroin producing hub. He died in Yangon in 2007 while being guarded by the same generals who had provided him with security for years after giving in to the military government of Myanmar in 1996.
After Khun Sa’s passing, Australian lecturer Kelvin Rowley wrote in response to the United States Drug Enforcement Administration’s estimate that the US drug enforcement agency made up 70% of the heroin produced in the US.
According to Rowley, “The US government placed a $2 million bounty on] Khun Sa’s head, which is reportedly less than what he earned in a single month.”
Opium has now made a comeback in the Golden Triangle.
Myanmar became the world’s top producer of opium in 2022 after the Taliban outlawed poppy cultivation there.
By 2024, some 995 tonnes of raw opium had been produced in Myanmar, up 135 percent from the military takeover in 2021, according to UNODC estimates. The gross value of the opium and heroin trade in Myanmar last year was estimated to be between $589m and $1.57bn, according to UNODC.
According to UN reports, Myanmar’s civil war is now in its fourth year, and the volume of drug production is related to it.
People have traditionally relied on poppy cultivation as a means of survival because Myanmar’s economy has collapsed since the military coup in 2021, and options are narrowing.
The UN notes that opium poppy cultivation in Southeast Asia has long been linked to poverty, lack of government services, economic challenges and insecurity.
According to the UN, “Households and villages in Myanmar that cultivate poppy and the wider opium economy do so to supplement their income or because they lack other legitimate opportunities.” <, /p >, <, p >,
But now parts of Pekon, long a military stronghold and a key drug trafficking corridor, are under the control of the Karenni Nationalities Defence Force (KNDF) and other Karenni armed groups fighting the ruling military.
They claim to be interested in making changes.
We oppose the use, production, and distribution of narcotics, according to Maui, the KNDF’s deputy commander.
“When we capture Burmese soldiers, they’re full of meth”, Maui said.
They immediately tell us that it is distributed by their superiors to push them to the front lines, he said, “we ask where it comes from and they tell us without a doubt.”
We’ll pursue the opium as soon as the war is over. We want it to be used only for medical purposes”, he added.
In the areas of Shan State, which they now control, Karenni police forces stop and search motorcycles and other vehicles on the roads.
“We are stopping cars and motorbikes we don’t recognise to search for drugs”, said Karenni police commander Win Ning Thun, standing at a checkpoint just outside a village in Pekon district.
Win Ning Thun, who uses the local name for methamphetamine pills, said, “We’re looking for yaba pills.”
This region was formerly under the control of the military and pro-junta militia, according to Win Ning Thun.
“Meth was moving freely under their supervision. He claimed that they reclaimed a portion of the profits from each shipment that transited.
I was supposed to earn a lot of money, I thought.
Deep in the forests surrounding Pekon, a small prison holds rows of detainees arrested by Karenni police.
“Everyone here has been detained for drug trafficking,” the statement read. Some people traveled to the Thai border with yaba pills. Others were internal couriers”, a Karenni police official told Al Jazeera.
He remarked, “These are the pills we confiscated just this past month,” pointing to a plastic bag full of small, inexpensive red yaba pills that he claimed represent a lucrative trade worth millions of dollars.
Anton Lee, one of the prisoners, had a calm, unassuming appearance and wore glasses.
“They stopped me at a checkpoint with 10, 000 pills”, Lee said.
They were traveling to the Thai border, I said. I was supposed to make a lot of money”, he said, offering no further details, only to say that the profit he hoped to earn would have fed his family for a year.
He is currently facing a lengthy prison sentence.
The military regime’s purchase of more sophisticated weapons and the rebel forces’ attempts to hold out and advance continue are just a few kilometers away from the prison.
The military’s air raids, drone strikes and artillery fire hammer schools, hospitals, homes and religious sites, turning entire villages into targets.
Yet some people in southern Shan State appear to be trying to stop the flow of drugs, even when they are under fire.
