Massive drug busts highlight Thailand’s narcotics crisis

Thailand

Thai police have arrested 122,000 suspected drug smugglers and dealers over the past six months

Thailand’s narcotics crisis was brought into sharp relief on May 2 when Thai drug and border police officers shot dead eight suspected drug traffickers in a firefight in a jungle in the northern province of Chiang Rai and seized around 6.7 million methamphetamine pills.

The officers were on patrol some 5 kilometers from the border with Myanmar when they encountered 10 men, who were armed and carrying heavy backpacks, according to an official account.

The Thai officers ordered them to stop so that they could be searched, but the men opened fire, which led to a 10-minute gunfight during which eight of the men, who reportedly belonged to an ethnic minority group in Myanmar, were shot dead.

The same day Thai police seized 8 million amphetamine pills they found in a sports utility vehicle in the northeastern province of Nakhon Ratchasima.

Based on a tip-off, officers began to track a Toyota Fortuner with a Bangkok license plate on a highway and soon found the vehicle overturned and abandoned in an apparent accident with the large haul of narcotics inside.

The 8 million pills, stashed in 18 bags, had just been smuggled into Thailand from Laos, according to the Narcotics Suppression Bureau.

Over the past few years, vast quantities of narcotic have been flooding into Thailand from war-torn Myanmar and communist Laos

The incident is merely the latest in a series of drug busts in which Thai officials have confiscated large quantities of illegal narcotics over the past few months.

Over the past six months Thai police have arrested 122,000 suspected drug smugglers and dealers in addition to confiscating large quantities illegal substances, including more than 260 million speed pills, over 7,550 kilograms of crystal meth, more than 53,000kg of marijuana, and 370kg of heroin.

Drug trafficking and drug use have long bedeviled Thailand as many as four out of five people in the country’s prisons, which hold more than 300,000 inmates, have been jailed for drug-related offenses, according to the Justice Department.

Over the past few years, vast quantities of narcotic have been flooding into Thailand from war-torn Myanmar and communist Laos. 

The volatile political situation in Myanmar, where the military seized power in a coup early last year, has worsened cross-border trafficking, according to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC).

“There have been many contributing factors, but the fact remains that behind the drug business there are sophisticated organized crime groups exploiting the region,” UNODC’s executive director Ghada Waly explained recently.

“They use Shan state for production. They launder vast amounts of money through businesses like casinos in border areas of the Mekong or real estate, and they illicitly access chemicals to produce drugs easily,” she added.

In order to tackle the problem, Waly said, “we need additional focus on slowing and lowering demand for drugs by expanding our work with Thailand and the region on prevention, treatment and health services, as well as on drug policy and justice reforms to reduce the burden on policing and court systems, and to address prison overcrowding.”

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