Despite a bloody war on drugs and frequent seizures by authorities, the supply of yaba pills has grown to the point prices are falling. An estimated 2 million yaba pills containing meth and caffeine are being produced every day. But where are these drugs coming from?
According to the Thai government, there are more than 10 yaba production bases in the Golden Triangle, where Thailand, Myanmar and Laos converge on the banks of the Mekong River. The area, long controlled by armed militants, has an estimated production capacity of 2 million yaba tablets a day.
“The ‘oversupply’ causing the price drops of yaba is linked to the massive surge coming out of [Myanmar’s] Shan State into Thailand across the border around Chiang Rai, but also increasingly through Laos to bypass Thai efforts along the Myanmar border,” said Jeremy Douglas, regional representative of the United Nations office on drugs and crime for Southeast Asia and the Pacific.
The high production capacity has also rendered ineffective the government’s subsequent attempts to control ya ba. From November 2018 to January 2019, Thai authorities confiscated 248 million pills in 2017 alone, up from 124 million in 2016.
“It, unfortunately, shows the heavy Thai efforts are having little impact on supply to the streets, and that the interception rates are likely low even though seizures are rising,” Douglas said.
The UN representative believes that there’s a chance the situation might turn around if the regional leaders are willing to consider the gravity of the problem and completely rebalance their approach.
“Basically, they need to get away from quick fixes and the usual focus on mass street-level arrests, seriously focus on organised crime, which is running amok in the region, and start to deal with market demand by getting treatment, prevention and harm minimisation efforts in place.”
Those mass street-level arrests have caused another aftershock of the drug epidemic – prison overcrowding. As of March 2018, 74% of inmates in Thailand were held on drug-related charges.
“The prisons in Thailand will be empty without prisoners on drug charges,” said Sunthorn Sunthorntarawong, a Protestant pastor who runs the House of Blessing Foundation, an organisation that acts as a juvenile detention centre and also manages vocational and social rehabilitation programmes for adult inmates before and after their release from custody.
Furthermore, he said, “They begin as drug mules because they want to buy things like mobile phones or bicycles before they start taking drugs together.”
Jaroenchai Klaimek, who works with Sunthorn at the foundation, said the way for young mules or addicts to turn their lives around was by breaking ties with friends who were involved in drugs. A former drug dealer, he was in and out of four detention centres before the age of 20, where he said he had made many business contacts before leaving it all behind eight years ago. "With the cheap meth price now, I cannot imagine anyone would want to risk dealing it", said Jaroenchai Klaimek. Furthermore, he also added that in the detention centre, the more drugs you’re arrested with, the cooler you are, as he recalls his first-hand experience of the yaba boom.
“I could sell 200 yaba pills for 25,000 baht, after I bought them for 18,000 baht,” he said. “Within half an hour those pills would reach the hands of construction workers, office workers, motorbike taxi drivers, street cleaners, managers and actresses. But with the cheap meth price now, I cannot imagine anyone would want to risk dealing it.”
The government has implemented a free treatment programme for addicts in exchange for a reduced – or, in some cases, withdrawn – jail sentence, but there have been fewer volunteers than the authorities hoped. “No addicts would think of themselves as sick,” Sunthorn said.
He has been helping addicts and inmates for the past 40 years, and still has hope for those he encounters. “There is no measure to save a man from getting involved with drugs but we want them to be able to depend on themselves. We only have to trust that they will do that.”
Source: South China Morning Post. Image: REUTERS/Chaiwat Subprasom