Myanmar’s military government has, since the late 1980s, used the drug economy as a means to finance its own state-building objectives, rather than launch sustained efforts to dismantle it.

14 June 2016

Author:

Patrick Meehan recently completed his PhD in the Department of Development Studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London.

For the past 10 years drug production in Myanmar has been on the rise. The amount of land used to grow poppy — from which the opium sap used to make heroin is derived — has more than doubled since 2006. According to the UN, Myanmar now accounts for more than 25 per cent of the global area under illegal poppy cultivation, making the country the second largest producer of illegal opium in the world after Afghanistan.The vast majority of opium is produced by poor farmers in highland areas of Shan State close to the country’s borders with China, Thailand and Laos, which have been affected by decades of conflict between ethnic armed groups and the central government. In 2012, studies conducted by local researchers recorded opium cultivation in 49 out of Shan State’s 55 townships involving more than 200,000 households.Drugs play an ambiguous role in Myanmar’s borderlands. Drug abuse has taken far more lives than armed conflict in many communities over the past decade and the growing heroin epidemic across parts of Shan and neighbouring Kachin State is one of the main drivers of HIV/AIDS in Myanmar.

 

READ MORE: http://www.eastasiaforum.org/2016/06/14/how-the-military-benefits-from-myanmars-growing-opium-economy/

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