Heroin

HEROIN

Besides natural resources, the other big source of revenue for Burma's despots has been opium, which is refined into heroin. If Burma was once the world's largest exporter of rice, it is now the world's largest exporter of opium, supplying about half of the world's demand for that drug. Opium production doubled in Burma between 1984 and 1989, and it has increased greatly since then--to more than 2,000 tons of raw opium per year--because of an important political development. Until 1989 much of Burma's share of the opium-producing Golden Triangle was controlled by the Communist Party of Burma (CPB), which had been waging an insurgency against the government in Rangoon since independence in 1948. In 1989 the CPB self-destructed through internal factionalism and disappeared as a political and military force. SLORC quickly stepped in and offered a deal to the militias which had supported the communist insurgency. If they would refrain from further fighting against the Burmese government, and if they paid the Burmese military protection money, they could engage unmolested in any business they wished. As a result of this deal, Burmese authorities now move freely in Burma's part of the Golden Triangle for the first time. This has resulted in an extraordinary streamlining and expansion of the region's drug empire, which has been switching from harvesting and exporting raw opium to using heroin refineries and thereby exporting a more lucrative finished product. SLORC has repaired the deteriorated trade routes in the region, including the legendary Burma Road of World War II fame. What was once a network of pony paths endangered by insurgents and gangs of thieves has become a safe and easy free-trade heroin highway between Burma and southern China. The rapid increase in drugs and prostitutes in the area has engendered "the AIDS route," spreading the disease into even the remotest hinterlands. The surging drug trade now reaches deep into Burma from what was once a remote frontier. Because of SLORC's protection, police and the military do not search trucks carrying heroin into the nation's heartland. Thanks to the Burmese regime's involvement, drug money has recently become an integral part of Burma's economy, with drug lords investing in property and businesses throughout the country. Drug addiction has been rising rapidly among the Burmese. There are 30,000 officially registered addicts, but unofficial estimates put the number at 160,000, half of whom are estimated to be infected already with the AIDS virus. Most of these are young people. Drug authorities in the United States estimate that 80 percent of the heroin currently sold in the US comes from the Golden Triangle. The amount of cocaine coming through Panama is dwarfed by the amount of heroin originating in Burma. In a public relations stunt in late 1990, SLORC made a show of burning two supposed "heroin refineries" in a non-opium-producing area. The buildings were located in q the middle of a wide-open paddy field, which observers considered a very unlikely site for heroin refining. The foreign press was invited, and officials from the US Drug Enforcement Agency and the UN Fund for Drug Abuse Control attended. One featured speaker at the ceremony was Pheung Kya-shin, one of Burma's most powerful drug lords. US Assistant Secretary of State Melvin Levitsky summed up the Burmese regime's drug record as "shameful." SLORC, he said, was even involved in "collusive efforts with some of these traffickers."