BANGKOK — Laos police have made their
third-biggest single seizure of illegal drugs by netting 33 million
methamphetamine pills, a UN official said Saturday.
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In recent years the reclusive communist nation has
become a gateway for traffickers moving meth out of
Myanmar’s troubled Shan
state across the Mekong River into Thailand as a way to circumvent Thai
patrols.
Laos is part of the Golden Triangle — covering the
border areas with Myanmar and Thailand — that has for decades been a hub for
Southeast Asia’s lucrative drug trade.
The seizure of 33 million meth tablets and 500km of
ice occurred Friday in the northern province of Bokeo near the notorious Kings
Romans Casino, UN Office on
Drugs and Crime regional representative Jeremy
Douglas said.
The location is also near a Chinese-run Golden
Triangle Special Economic Zone that analysts say is a hotbed for sex and
wildlife trafficking as well as the drug trade.
Friday’s seizure stemmed from information garnered
following a smaller capture of 200,000 meth tablets at a Ton Pheung district
checkpoint the same day, Douglas said.
The massive shipment was not a surprise, he added.
“Bokeo has been absolutely flooded with drugs the
past year and a half,” Douglas told AFP.
He said drug labs in Myanmar’s Shan state were
working overtime to pump out supply, while “northern Laos is now the frontline
for the region as traffickers continue to re-route around Thai forces”.
“We’re increasingly concerned about security in
Bokeo and neighboring provinces, and the sense is major organized crime and
traffickers more or less do what they want in the area,” Douglas said.
Photos seen by AFP show green bags of the seized
drugs stacked on top of each other. Laos police have made one arrest.
Myanmar has been in chaos and its economy crippled
since a military coup in February last year, but synthetic drug production was
already booming before the putsch.
Last October, Laos police made the biggest seizure
ever of drugs in Asia by netting 55 million meth pills, while a separate raid in
January this year uncovered 36 million tablets. Both took place in Bokeo
province.
A record 1 billion meth pills were seized across
East and Southeast Asia in 2021, according to a UN report in May this year.
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