Other - The yaa baa phenomenon in Mainland Southeast Asia

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Yet another article from Geopium.org. This one looks at the increase in production and consumption levels of illicit synthetic drugs in Mainland Southeast Asia during the 1990's and methamphetamine (yaa baa) in particular. It compares the production and supply of heroin with methamphetamine and looks at the markets. It also takes a look at how methamphetamine affects security policy and asks whether or not it is a security threat. Although originally published in late 2005 it is still very much of interest.

The yaa baa phenomenon

in Mainland Southeast Asia

Pierre-Arnaud Chouvy

CNRS – PRODIG

***


Article paru dans / Article published in :

Harvard Asia Pacific Review
Vol. 8, N° 2

Fall 2005, pp. 19-22

After the opium and heroin decades that made the so-called Golden Triangle world famous, the 1990s were marked by a sudden increase in production and consumption levels of illicit synthetic drugs in Mainland Southeast Asia. These illicit synthetic drugs are classified as amphetamine-type stimulants, or ATS, a category that includes amphetamine, methamphetamine and ecstasy. Since the 1990s, synthetic products such as methamphetamine and ecstasy have flooded illegal drug markets across Southeast Asia and China. The most important of these synthetic drugs in terms of quantities produced and consumed in Mainland Southeast Asia is methamphetamine, a substance that greatly benefited from the pre-existence of the well-functioning integrated system of illicit opium and heroin production, distribution, and consumption in the region.

Southeast Asian methamphetamine comes mainly from Burma (also known as Myanmar) but it is also produced in Laos and Cambodia. It has been produced in Thailand too, the drug’s biggest regional consumer market, where it is known as yaa baa, or ‘madness drug’. Regional yaa baa consumption is concentrated in Thailand, but it has also spread to Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam, Malaysia, and China. Methamphetamine consumption developed more or less quickly in these countries, replacing, to some extent, declining consumption of heroin.

Yaa baa versus heroin

Methamphetamine production developed in the context of rapidly decreasing opium and heroin productions in Mainland Southeast Asia, both because of a market evolution and because yaa baa benefited from clear comparative production advantages over heroin.

Heroin is obtained by chemical transformation of morphine, one of the many alkaloids of opium, the latex-like produced by the opium poppy, Papaver somniferum L. Opium poppy cultivation is illegal in Mainland Southeast Asia and in China, and opium and heroin production, also illegal, could only occur in the region because tens of thousands of hectares of poppies were cultivated in Burma, Laos, Vietnam, and Thailand. However, during the last decades, Thailand rid itself of opium poppy cultivation, and Vietnam and Laos followed in the early 2000s. Even in Burma, where the heart of the Golden Triangle had settled decades ago, is opium production undergoing a drastic reduction. However, in the mean time, methamphetamine production has exploded in Burma.

Methamphetamine, also called ice, crystal meth, or cranck in the United States, shabu in Japan, or yaa baa in Thailand, can be produced from ephedrine, an alkaloid contained in certain Ephedra, a perennial xerophytic bush or creeper that grows in dry tropical and temperate regions. The genus Ephedra is thought to have originated in Northern China and Mongolia, where Ephedra sinica S. grows on large tracts and is commonly found in the Chinese pharmacopoeia under the name of mahuang.

The plant’s properties, related to its ephedrine and pseudo-ephedrine content, has led it to be used in China for medicinal purposes since at least 4,800 years ago. China has large areas, in Yunnan and Fujian for example, where Ephedra grows in the wild. Ephedra cultivation is also particularly developed in the Yinchuan plain in the north of Ningxia, as the plant helps to limit the expansion of sand dunes over the country’s most fertile land. In the last decades, China has invested in the commercial production of this old remedy and has become the world’s largest producer of ephedrine.

But illicit drug producers and traffickers have also benefited from ephedrine being readily available as they supplied their illicit methamphetamine production facilities with the alkaloid. In the early 1990s China had not only become the main destination for exports of Burmese heroin but had also become a significant ATS producer. Indeed, contrary to the official line, the country’s massive increase in drug consumption and addiction cannot be attributed solely to foreign production. The increase in Chinese production of amphetamine and ecstasy during the year 2000 would thus account for a large part of the 26 per cent increase in the number of illicit drug consumers recorded in the country.

The origins of methamphetamine production in China can be traced back to Japan. By the 1980s, Japanese methamphetamine (shabu) producers were known to be operating in South Korea. They were forced to close down, however, with the 1988 Olympic Games in Seoul and accompanying crackdown on crime in the country. Producers then opted to transfer their operations to Taiwan before that country, in turn, decided in October 1990 to put methamphetamine production and consumption on the top of the list of social problems to be eradicated. The Japanese producers therefore moved their activities once again, this time to the Chinese province of Fujian. The province rapidly became a major drug production and consumption centre.

Most likely, methamphetamine production also started in the early 1990s in Burma as the first regional methamphetamine laboratories were reportedly established in the hilly Wa regions southeast of Pangshang, in Burma’s Shan state, around 1993. However, methamphetamine production developed quickly and considerably in Burma, partly due to its various advantages over heroin production.

For instance, agricultural constraints are relatively absent from methamphetamine production. Unlike those who produce heroin, or cocaine, methamphetamine producers do not depend on a vast area dedicated to illicit cultivation, where the vagaries of climate and eradication campaigns may endanger their own production. Furthermore, Ephedra, unlike the opium poppy, is not subject to legal restrictions of any kind: it is considered illicit only if misused. However, the illicitness of methamphetamine did not prevent it from being produced, trafficked and consumed in Burma, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam.

Yaa baa: a performance-enhancing yet harmful substance

Beyond surveying the economy and geopolitics of methamphetamine, it is necessary to precise what kind of a substance methamphetamine is. While no toxic substance is necessary for an ‘addict’ to exist, as any compulsive or habit-forming practice, whether it involves sport, gambling, work, or even sex, amply illustrates, some substances can cause physical addiction while others only provoke psychological addiction.

To the difference of heroin, yaa baa is a performance-enhancing drug and one that can be consumed for recreative as well as work purposes. Heroin is very rarely consumed for work purposes as it sedates the brain. Opioids and opiates, such as morphine and heroin, are the only true “narcotic” drugs since they cause dullness, induce sleep and relieve pain: narcotics, as etymology tells us, cause drowsiness and numbness. Hence, morphine, the principal alkaloid of opium, is an analgesic and a sedative and has an effect on the central nervous system, while cocaine, for example, an alkaloid obtained from coca leaves, is a topical anesthetic and, as a stimulant, provokes euphoric effects. Like cocaine, amphetamines differ greatly from heroin and other true narcotics, for they are stimulants which cause physical and mental hyperactivity, which is why they are sometimes called ‘wake-up amines’.

Like many substances, ATS can cause addiction or dependence. The World Health Organisation (WHO) defines drug addiction as “a mental and sometimes also a physical state, resulting from the interaction between a product and an organism” that causes behavioural changes and drives the user to take the product continuously or periodically in order to experience its pleasurable mental effects, if he is not already taking the drug simply to avoid the sickness caused by deprivation. The WHO stresses that drug dependence always includes “a compulsion to take the drug on a continuous or periodic basis”. But such a compulsion can be attributed to either physical or psychological addiction, or to both. Physical addiction can be described as “an adaptive state that manifests itself by intense physical disturbance when the administration of drug is suspended”, while psychological addiction can be observed when “the drug produces a feeling of satisfaction and a psychic drive that requires periodic or continuous administration of the drug to produce pleasure or to avoid discomfort”.

However, methamphetamine and other psycho-stimulant drugs rarely cause physical addiction and its resultant state of withdrawal. Hence, weaning, which in the strict sense of the term corresponds to the first step of the detoxification of a person physically dependent on an addictive substance, does not occur with ATS. On the other hand, the methamphetamine user can rapidly develop a strong mental addiction. Tolerance, the decreased sensitivity to the same dose of a given substance that leads to a compensatory increase in quantities of it consumed, is not yet clearly demonstrated in the context of the use of psycho-stimulants.

If dependence to methamphetamine differs greatly from addiction to heroin, methamphetamine consumption is nevertheless extremely detrimental to human health as many of its side-effects can be permanent and can easily prove fatal to the substance user. Methamphetamine is thus a powerful performance-enhancing substance that is clearly a harmful health practice.

The wide-ranging markets of yaa baa consumption

Higher-than-average levels of social and economic development seem to favour ATS use by younger populations, particularly school-age youngsters and university students. Over the last decade, Thailand, Macao and Hong Kong have showed strong ‘recreational’ methamphetamine use patterns among these groups. In Hong Kong as well as in urban areas of Thailand, the drug’s popularity with young people is clearly part of a Western-influenced nightlife culture that includes techno music and fashion, clubbing, and illicit drug-taking. However, it now seems that methamphetamine consumption is also rising in countries such as Laos, where Western-influenced nightlife culture is far less widespread than in Thailand but where yaa baa consumption by young people has increased since 2000. Students, however, consume methamphetamine not only for recreational purposes such as extending dance sessions but also to increase their work capacity, especially during exam periods.

But in the region, methamphetamine is far from being used only by the youth. A wide-ranging consumer market exists: from truck drivers to farmers, fishermen and commercial sex workers, many kinds of people use or abuse methamphetamine to increase their productive capacity, whether physical or intellectual. Hence in Thailand, methamphetamine can be considered as both a labour and a recreational drug.

The use patterns of methamphetamine are very different from those of other illicit drugs, such as heroin. Alongside its recreational use, yaa baa is in fact partially a ‘labour’ drug consumed by individuals everywhere from schools to fields. Alternatively, heroin, used by more marginalised sections of society, is clearly a drug far less ‘conducive’ to work. A study carried out in 2000 by the Thai Farmers Research Centre on a sample group of 728 workers in Bangkok showed that 88 per cent of them regularly resorted to stimulants so they could work more and longer hours. Of the latter, 20 per cent acknowledged using methamphetamine.

The intricacies of yaa baa consumer markets in Thailand are very complex. Yaa baa consumption is indeed extremely diverse and wide-ranging, and the drug in turn proves able to satisfy the expectations of many different types of users. This has clearly to do with the peculiarity of yaa baa itself, a substance that defies the usual consumer profiles for illicit drugs.

In Thailand methamphetamine is not positioned along a market segment for psychotropic products, but rather pervades the entire consumer market. Far from conforming to the classical model where a drug becomes associated with a particular social category, yaa baa is as popular with ‘street children’ as it is with privileged youth. Unlike most drugs, yaa baa is as widely consumed both in rural and urban areas. This is especially the case for user patterns in some politically ‘sensitive’ parts of the countryside, where consumption levels are particularly high. Finally, if methamphetamine is consumed today by an overwhelming majority of young, even very young Thais – from primary school-goers to high school and university students – this is the result of an astonishing trend reversal. As recently as ten years ago, yaa baa belonged to a market comprised mostly of working adults who took it to cope with the demands of physically or mentally taxing livelihoods.

These social trends, coalescing around a drug whose multiple properties allow it to satisfy the varied aspirations of Thai consumers, have served to elevate yaa baa to the ranks of what could be called ‘virtuous substances’. Methamphetamine’s secondary effects are rarely recognized or admitted by its users; according to its fervent supporters, yaa baa has all the advantages of a drug with none of its defects. It is largely considered something harmless and enticing despite the fact that individuals’ habitual yaa baa use over the long term can threaten social well-being, since those given to such practices are likely to suffer irreparable degeneration of the nervous system and psychological damage.

Yaa baa as a national security hreat?

The production and trafficking of ATS and other illicit drugs also bears upon national security, if indirectly. The case of Thailand is particularly striking in this regard. To fight drug trafficking and related violence, the country’s armed forces, police, and customs authorities have been mobilised along the Thai-Burmese border on a scale unmatched since the end of the communist threat. This effort has also seen other formerly anti-communist groups redeployed to drug trafficking campaigns. The fact that Thai military troops from the Laotian and Cambodian fronts have also been diverted to the Burmese border illustrates the perceived urgency of the situation. However, it can be argued that the armed violence characterizing the illicit drug trades proceeds as much from its illicit nature and the conflict-ridden contexts in which it thrives, as it does from the militarization of anti-drug operations and policies.

Given all this, the very causes and effects of the entire spectrum of methamphetamine production, trafficking, and consumption need to be dealt with. Although methamphetamine production in Burma can be said to spur consumption in Thailand, it is also true that Thailand is the country whose thriving market for drugs stimulates methamphetamine production in Burma and other areas of Mainland Southeast Asia. To understand the specific mechanisms of the illicit drug market, one has to provide a clearer picture of the push and pull factors that are so characteristic of an illegal economy. Thus, yaa baa production, trafficking and consumption must be understood in regional terms, without dissociating production from consumption. A geographical and geopolitical approach to the phenomenon is therefore desirable, as these perspectives illuminate production and trafficking patterns. Of course, bilateral relations between Burma and Thailand also call for such a geopolitical approach: the consumption boom in Thailand is only the alter ego of the explosive rise in production in Burma, and vice versa.

Thai authorities have widely denounced what they termed the “methamphetamine threat” after they estimated that 600 million pills had been produced in Burma in 2000, and 800 million in 2002. Therefor, at the beginning of 2003, Thailand’s Prime Minister, Thaksin Shinawatra, launched his highly controversial “war on drugs”.

During three-month, the Thai authorities seized forty million methamphetamine tablets and imprisoned 92,500 drug users, 43,000 dealers, and 750 drug producers and traffickers, or at least alleged drug uses, dealers, and drug producers and traffickers. Some 1,300 civil servants were sacked or placed in custody for their complicity in the illegal drug trade. These dramatic results of Thailand’s war on drugs have come at a very high social price, baffling basic justice and human rights. At least 2,500 people were killed during the anti-drug campaign, mostly by gunfire, many of them no more than ordinary users and some others by mistake or by revenge for other reasons. “Extra-judicial killings” have been widely denounced and condemned by human rights activists in Thailand and abroad. Nevertheless, the government claimed the operation to have been a “victory beyond expectation”, although such war on drugs were later repeated but with much less violence and publicity. In 2005, methamphetamine is still widely produced in Burma and in the rest of Mainland Southeast Asia, where consumption is still developing.

The methamphetamine industry has clearly benefited from a marketing system whose working mechanisms were already in place. In fact, major players in heroin trafficking could easily reposition themselves in this new methamphetamine market, using people and methods that were already tried and tested. Notably, the jump in demand for yaa baa corresponded to the 1996 sudden increase in the price of heroin. Methamphetamine’s technically easier and cheaper production techniques, compared to those of heroin, assured correspondingly larger profit margins.

In the context of the Asian crisis, the financial gains to be made at all stages of drug trafficking have been particularly high. The rise of the yaa baa market has been a very timely one and a very lucrative one as methamphetamine consumption is not confined to a few socio-economical niches. It transcends the divisions of Thai society, so much so that one can reasonably conclude the yaa baa economy has, at least for the time being, outstripped that of heroin in Thailand. And the same is now happening in Laos, where the suppression of opium production has deeply impacted on opium availability and prices.