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ASIA
JULY 26, 1999 VOL. 154 NO. 3


Where Speed Really Kills
On the Thai-Burmese border, the booming trade in amphetamines sparks widespread bloodletting

Drug Culture: A man in Mae Sai shoots up. Patrick Brown for TIME

By NISID HAJARI

Big Brother Por doesn't hide the source of his riches. On the third floor of the spanking new building he owns in the red-light district of Mae Sai, he pulls a beautifully carved opium pipe from a drawer and heats a bowl, inhaling deeply. Bittersweet smoke fills the room. "I know all the top police officers here," boasts the ethnic Chinese "entrepreneur," one of the most powerful figures in the lawless Thai border town. "They come to this house for dinner." But ask Por about yaba--Thai for speed--and his bravado quickly cools. "I know all the suppliers over there," he says, pointing across the Mae Sai River to Burma. "I will place the order for you. But the goods will never be delivered here. If I am caught with yaba, there is nothing top officers can do to help."

Por isn't the only one cowed by yaba, literally "crazy medicine." In the past decade the drug has rampaged through Thailand's once-booming cities: since 1993 amphetamine use--once the province of truck drivers and other workers who had to keep exhausting hours--has exploded, making its greatest inroads among the country's urban youth. The Public Health Ministry says that the number of students entering rehab to deal with yaba has increased 970%, and 1 million Thais are now believed to be using the drug. An estimated 200 million pills entered Thailand last year, most across the border from Burma into towns like Mae Sai. And there, on the edges of the infamous Golden Triangle, even one of the most rough-and-tumble regions of Southeast Asia has been taken aback by the violence of the onslaught.

The jungle around Mae Sai is thick, creeping just to the edge of the steep riverbank. One road leads across a two-lane bridge to the Burmese bazaar town of Tachilek; another follows the river for about a kilometer before narrowing into a bush path. Here tinfoil, matchsticks and burnt shreds of paper litter the ground; thin, zombie-like figures stumble slowly through the vegetation. A pair of hollow-eyed addicts squat in the bushes beside the trail, inhaling yaba through bamboo pipes. A third man perches on the low branches of a tree. Another kilometer into Burma, the path bends sharply to the left and enters a clearing where, locals say, one can buy the cheapest dope in the world.

"Yaba is 20 baht [about 50 cents] a pill; No. 4 [heroin] is 100 baht a vial," says a young man wearing camouflage fatigues. He is doing brisk business. Elsewhere in the jungle, small mobile labs churn out the amphetamines for the equivalent of 10 cents apiece; in Bangkok, though, the pills can be marked up as much as 400%.

Those sky-high profit margins have drawn Thais of all stripes to the yaba business. On July 8 police in Ban Tham, 12 km south of Mae Sai, snared the village's headman and three accomplices in a sting operation, seizing more than 1 million pills. Yet, for every pill found, nine more make their way to the Thai market. Many of those are smuggled by small-time dealers, often with the aid of local authorities. Says one police sergeant assigned to the town of Huay Pheng, 30 km southwest of Mae Sai: "We know every village headman along the border is involved in the yaba trade. They know the producers, even all the officials on both sides of the river." He laughs: "The Mae Sai is so narrow they can just throw the drugs across."

The ballooning trade has produced an equal explosion in violence. A decade ago, heroin was king, and Burmese warlords like Khun Sa fielded private armies against one another in bloody turf battles. These days shootouts have spread across the Thai border and into ordinary society. Five past village headmen of Huay Pheng have been gunned down by assassins. Dozens of thugs in army-style uniforms swagger through the border region in broad daylight. Last September Huay Pheng's serving headman was shot along with four friends as they sat on the front porch of a village house; gunmen held back traffic and onlookers by brandishing AK-47 rifles. In April, nine villagers in Fang district were bound and shot by gunmen who then fled across the Burmese border. "In the old days, you didn't see this kind of gold-rush fever," says David Youngman, a Christian missionary who has spent his entire life in the region. "At least one villager is killed every other day."

In many ways, the bloodletting is a function of how widespread the illicit trade has become, and how inexperienced those involved are. "It's simple mathematics," Youngman says. "So many people want to get rich--headmen, small farmers, tobacco growers--and they don't understand the drug dealers' code. There are fights over territory, over unpaid debts. Add the informers and the undercover agents, and it's mayhem out there." Ironically, many villagers look back nostalgically to the days when heroin fueled the economy of the region: at that time Khun Sa cultivated Thai support to defend him against Burmese troops, and locals say he kept the border quiet.

Rangoon may have unwittingly contributed to the current problem by enlisting another separatist group to root out Khun Sa. In 1989 the United Wa State Army--the remnants of the Burmese Communist Party and what the U.S. State Department calls the world's largest, armed drug-dealing organization--signed a ceasefire agreement with the government that implicitly allows them to continue growing and selling opium. The Wa took over Khun Sa's territory after he surrendered to the government in 1996, and branched out into the more lucrative yaba business, which they now dominate. Once known as headhunters, the feared Wa tribals boast 20,000 battle-hardened troops, who control an estimated 14 amphetamine labs. The U.S. has offered $2 million for the capture of their leader, Wei Hsueh Kang, and Thai officials say they have proof that the gunmen who killed the nine villagers in April were Wa fighters. (Indeed, locals claim that most of the gunmen trolling the border are Wa thugs.) But, the same ceasefire agreement also forbids the Burmese Army from even entering Wa territory without permission.

Thailand's tolerance for such deal-making has begun to wane. According to some estimates, two-thirds of all crime in Bangkok may now be related to amphetamines. "Yaba is affecting every stratum of Thai society, from fashionable city kids, to laborers and truck drivers, to housewives and schoolchildren," says Rotsukhon Suwannarat, deputy head of the Ban Tawan Mai Rehab Center, near Bangkok. "It is tearing Thai society apart." In crystalline form (called shabu), methamphetamines have become the most widely abused drug in the Philippines; in Japan, some 90% of drug violations now involve speed. In Thailand, yaba has become a national obsession that fills the front pages and drives pundits to bemoan the collapse of traditional values. Last week a top security official threatened to impose a shoot-to-kill policy along the border; 29 suspected dealers have reportedly been shot by Thai police in the past three months.

Burmese aren't the only ones to blame: several Thai military and police officers have also been linked to the amphetamine trade. "The area can't be policed because the bordering states cannot agree on any joint action," says Josef Silverstein, a Burma expert at Rutgers University in the U.S. "All are benefiting from the trade financially and therefore will not allow the others to enter their space and police it." That may be changing. Last week, a Thai force of 800 troops reportedly received the green light to sweep clean a 40-km stretch of the border near Wei's jungle headquarters, even to enter Burmese territory to pursue suspected drug smugglers.

The operation may only portend more violence, however--something even the Golden Triangle's more hardened denizens have begun to dread. "There are 250 police officers in Mae Sai, but only 50 are in uniform," Big Brother Por says darkly, wagging his opium pipe. "Betrayals, police shootouts--these happen every day." That kind of bounty both he and his less fortunate neighbors could do without.

Reported by Kim Gooi/Mae Sai and Robert Horn/Bangkok



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