Jeremy Douglas on Southeast Asia’s Drug Boom

Late last month, Indonesian authorities announced the seizure of around 2.6 tons of liquid methamphetamine from a ship off the coast of Sumatra. The bust was just the latest in a series of drug mega-seizures that have taken place over the past two years, as the region’s law enforcement agencies struggle to combat an unprecedented surge in trafficking.

According to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), authorities in East and Southeast Asia seized a record 349 tons of methamphetamine in 2025, a 48 percent increase over the previous year – and just 65 tons a decade ago. Seizures of ketamine also hit 52 tons, up 185 percent on 2024.

What lies behind Asia’s drug boom? The Diplomat’s Southeast Asia Editor Sebastian Strangio spoke recently with Jeremy Douglas, deputy director of operations at the UNODC, who previously spent a decade as the agency’s lead for East and Southeast Asia in Bangkok. Douglas spoke about the factors that have contributed to the unprecedented levels of drug production, the impact of civil war in Myanmar, and what might be done to stem the tide of illegal narcotics. Watch the interview, or keep scrolling for the transcript.

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

First, why don’t you give us an overview of the issue in terms of particularly synthetic drug production? What are the basic trend lines and what is the current scale of the crisis?

Well, the trend is not good. We have a region that last year sees 350 tons of crystal methamphetamine [of seizures], 50 tons of ketamine. This is a region that is arguably now the largest epicenter of synthetic drug production in the world. If you look at what is seized in the region, 90 percent of it I’m guessing at the moment is seized in the Mekong. So within Southeast Asia, if you look at the concentration point of the Mekong and within that the upper Mekong, that’s where the vast majority is seized.

That concentration point is exceeding North America. And possibly Myanmar is now the largest source in the world. So the trend is that it’s just going up, up, up and there’s no brake on the production at all. It’s diversifying, as I said, ketamine has come onto the scene in a big way, 50 tons last year. There’s no other part of the world that’s seizing ketamine on that scale. So it’s really a bad trend line, and we don’t see this reversing anytime soon.

Most of this drug production takes place in what is known as the Golden Triangle, the tri-border area between Myanmar, Laos, and Thailand. Now this is a region that’s historically been associated with opium and heroin production going right back through the Cold War and even to colonial times. What underpinned the shift to synthetic drugs such as methamphetamine and ketamine in recent years? When did this shift begin?

Well, methamphetamine started really being produced in a big way in in the early 2000s in in the Golden Triangle – in Shan State, just north of that tri-border area you just referred to. And it was a form called yaba. And yaba was very localized. So, it was produced for the Thai market primarily, used by workers, factory workers, taxi drivers, truck drivers, and so on and so forth, right?

So that was the first wave. But yaba is a cheap form of methamphetamine. You don’t find it in other parts of the world, except that Mekong subregion and really in Thailand. So it’s a unique product. I worked there 2002 to 2007, and that’s when we really saw it flooding out and we were studying and tracking the trends and the locations from where it was coming and so forth at that time.

At that time though, it was still a huge production point for opium and heroin, which is coming out and reaching markets as far as Australia, in some cases even to Europe or California – you’d see Golden Triangle heroin reaching far. In and around 2010, we saw the expansion of methamphetamine across Southeast Asia, but at that time production was kind of scattered. It was in South China primarily, in big industrial production areas [like] Guangdong, in the Philippines, in Indonesia, crystal meth I’m referring to at this point. So again, yaba stays concentrated in the in the Mekong. Crystal meth is being produced in the other parts of Southeast Asia.

In and around 2010, when that’s you start seeing a little bit of crystal meth coming out of Myanmar, out of Shan State. Not very much, a little bit. In 2013-14, you start seeing more, but it’s really not in a big, big way. And then in 2015, something happens, and that’s an event in Lufeng in China. Now at that point we had a lot of crystal meth from that particular location I’m referring to, Guangdong – Lufeng is in Guangdong – spilling out. But China had a very aggressive anti-drugs campaign, in part under pressure from Australia and other countries. They were working closely together to go after methamphetamine trafficking. Intelligence was being shared. Anyway, there’s this meth village Lufeng, a very famous operation to take out methamphetamine labs there. They essentially crushed it.

But that actually caused a displacement effect. So right after that, we suddenly start seeing crystal meth rising out of the Golden Triangle. What had occurred was the organized crime syndicates that were sourcing out of Guangdong said, okay, we can go back to what we used to where we used to source our heroin. And this is some very sophisticated organized crime groups that had decided to synthetic take the market into the direction of synthetic. So they shifted their production, they made investments in labs with ethnic armed groups and other groups inside Myanmar. They shifted their production there and then that’s what we see today.

That’s not to say that heroin is not still a concern. We still see it. It started rising, particularly post-coup [in Myanmar] where we see people returning to make an income. You know, the economy tanked in Myanmar. So people went back to into opium production. So now we see more and more heroin, but not now nowhere on the scale that we did in in the mid-2000s, early 2000s.

Let’s talk a bit more about who’s actually responsible for this production. Is it predominantly Chinese criminal syndicates that have moved into Myanmar, or are there other criminal groups that are involved as well?

Well, it was actually some major ethnic Chinese organized crime groups, triads, some people refer to them as triads, those are very old in the region, right? So we’ve had the heroin trafficking you referred to earlier, which spilled out in colonial times or in the Cold War era. the triads would go and source heroin. So those groups have long, long ties in the region. And they have bases. They operate in Bangkok, they operate in Malaysia, they operate in Jakarta. But of course they’re primarily centered in South China, Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan.

So those are the groups that partnered with the armed groups in Myanmar and shifted that production in. Within those groups, there’s a kind of famous case, a gentleman named Tse Chi Lop. He was arguably the man who really revolutionized the business with his syndicate, Sam Gor syndicate. They partnered up very effectively with armed groups in in Shan to source meth, to invest in those labs that I was referring to before. That group was, I would argue, the biggest of the ones and behind a lot of what I’ve described: the teabag meth.

Myanmar had a military coup in 2021, which was followed by protests and then an armed uprising that inflamed the existing conflicts in the country, particularly its ethnic conflicts. What impact has that had on the political economy of Shan State and of the drug industry in that part of Myanmar?

It’s had a phenomenal impact. As I said earlier, just talking about opium, opium for poor people is a way to have an income. And when the economy tanked post-coup, you saw a lot of people lose their jobs in Mandalay, lose them in Yangon, lose them in towns. They returned to their villages, they don’t have other sources of income, there’s less cash flowing in society. So they return to what they know. And so we see people returning to opium farming at that point looking for an income. So that’s a direct, very clear impact. You can see the trend line right after the coup.

Synthetics are slightly different. They’re not an employer as such, because a very small, tight knit organized crime group or armed group working with organized crime can produce mass amounts with a lab and a small group of specialists, chemists and others. But that is coming from the same kind of geography as the opium: very remote, no rule of law, no state authority. So essentially that there was no brake on the synthetics being produced in there because there was no functional government paying attention to the drug trade because they were preoccupied with fighting insurgency or fighting back against the different various movements that were fighting them.

So on the one hand, you have the poverty-induced production of opium. On the other, you have no brake and nobody stepping in to try to stop the precursors flowing in and the drugs flowing out on the synthetic side. So it’s really an explosion at that point. And now we see what we saw last year, this 350 tons of meth being seized. That’s a fraction of what’s actually produced seized in in the region. So it’s just phenomenal.

Another development that’s been alarming in this region in recent years has been the rise of online scamming, particularly these industrial scale scamming compounds which have been established across Cambodia, Laos, but also in parts of Myanmar that are home to most drug production. To what extent are these two criminal ecosystems interwoven or connected?

Well, the scam ecosystem has evolved fast. It’s come on fast, it’s also evolved very quickly in a very short period of time, but at least the early stages of it were very, very deeply connected to the drug trade in an interesting way. In and around the time I referred to, 2015, when you see that flood of crystal, the profits being generated by the drug trade grow exponentially and business people –organized crime figures are also business people – they start looking for places to invest their money. They need places to launder their money. So there’s this explosion of casinos that takes place inside Southeast Asia. You see it in the Golden Triangle, the special economic zone there. You see it also up in the special regions up in northern Myanmar. You see this along the Thai border, Tachileik and different locations, Cambodia, casinos everywhere.

Now, that casino model that they had, they can launder money through those things. A lot of them had drug and drug money investors in the casino infrastructure. But then that also gave them a vehicle through which they could facilitate payments through junkets and the casinos themselves to those that they needed to pay in the drug business. The casinos were serving as that vehicle.

Then COVID hits. And what happens to the casinos? They lose their foot traffic, which is tourists, mainly from mainland China, but also from the region itself, that were walking in and creating “legitimate” business. That COVID hit stops the foot traffic. But they still had a lot of money, so basically put the casinos online. They become online gaming companies.

So we saw suddenly online games popping up all over Southeast Asia. The same infrastructure in many locations has served as scam infrastructure. So that’s the beginning connection and the strongest connection still to this day. And a lot of the guys that were laundering the drug money in the region went straight into taking money that they made from the drugs, taking the money they made from the casinos, and reinvesting it in new business lines, scams, using the IT infrastructure that they had built for themselves when the casinos went online during the COVID era.

Now of course now scams have taken off in a different direction. All kinds of people came in with their own ideas and you’ve got technology involved and there’s non-drug people involved as well. So it’s not just drug money, but nonetheless there’s that deep connection.

Right. Now, looking at some of the recent UNODC reports, they really stress the idea that these syndicates are innovators. They’re constantly thinking and anticipating law enforcement operations and they’ve become quite adept at changing things up in response to official crackdowns. What sorts of methods are they now using in terms of both production and trafficking to try and evade these efforts?

Well, with the trafficking, they’re using every type of technique, comingling their shipments into legitimate goods, mixing or trying to disguise the drugs in different forms. We’ve seen it inserted into all kinds of commercial goods and commercial shipments.

We’re seeing lots and lots of maritime shipments and of course there’s a big fishing fleet to use in the region to move drugs. So there’s lots of lots of different ways they’re moving the drugs. And I they will continue to innovate their MO on how they disguise, how they kind of package and try to move them.

I think one of the bigger innovations that’s interesting is on the production side, which is the use of non-controlled chemicals in the production of the methamphetamine in north Shan. So if you look at the chemical profile of the of methamphetamine that’s seized in the region, it’s still largely to this day pseudoephedrine, ephedrine-based, which is the best quality methamphetamine in the world. But there’s no pseudoephedrine and ephedrine chemical being seized anywhere in the region. No one seems to know where they get it from.

Actually, we do know where they get it from. What they’re doing is they’re producing their own precursor chemicals. They’re essentially using non-controlled pre-precursor chemicals, which can be used in different industries. They’re not controlled by international law because they’re used in various industries. And then they’re shipping those into the Triangle and then they’re producing using these pre-precursors. Now what does that tell you? That tells you that you have really big sophisticated labs up there with sophisticated chemists operating them. So the innovation has been on the production side most significantly because they, without that break on the inputs, they can have the outputs, which is the drugs, right? So there’s no break on the chemicals getting in there at this point. There’s just a steady flow going in across all kinds of borders. and then out comes the drug. So that’s the big innovation that the world needs to grapple with: how do we address the technology they’ve got and that the capacity they’ve got to use non controlled chemicals in the production space?

And in terms of technology, we’d also be talking about cryptocurrencies and digital money laundering of various kinds, right?

Sure, absolutely. The innovations on the money laundering are phenomenal. And that comes back to the point I made about the scams and the casinos. Fundamentally, what we’re talking about is underground banking. Now the traditional methods of laundering money through cash are still relevant to this day. And there’s mechanisms that governments have agreed to try to control transfers through banks, and they monitor their banking systems in countries and so forth, fine. But criminals these days can move value, move money much, much faster instantly worldwide through use of cryptocurrencies. And then there’s specialists that help them take that crypto into fiat currencies, into an Australian dollar, Canadian dollar, Singapore dollar, and then off-ramp it into the banking system.

So they’re using crypto very effectively. It’s a very, very effective way of moving value and mingling money and moving it overseas, and it’s not essentially regulated in any way. There’s no global regulation on cryptocurrency movement.

And that’s accelerated the business because more money’s made, more money’s moved, more reinvestment in new tech, in new ways to produce, in all kinds of things. So it’s a really great time to be an organized crime figure. You’ve got no brake on the production in the Triangle, you’ve got ease of production, you’ve got methods to move your money, and then you make all that money. What are you gonna do? You’re gonna reinvest it.

So what does the region and the world need to do to try and get a handle on this issue? I mean, you know, it seems as if they’re seizing a lot, but a lot more is getting through, and what are the stakes if they can’t?

Well, the stakes are only growing, and I’ve asked myself this question many times. When is when is enough enough for the region? I thought years ago when they hit 100 tons [of drugs seized per year], my God, the region’s gonna do something about this. The youth of the region are being addicted to drugs and there’s the whole huge social and health implications of that. And then there’s of course the corruption implication. It just keeps on going.

That was years ago that it hit that level. Now here we are and there’s 350 tons.

How do we address this then? First and foremost, I think we have to address the tools. We have to break down the business model of the organized crime groups in a much more effective way. You can’t seize your way out of this. So the model of law enforcement in Southeast Asia is, I’m gonna seize a lot of drugs. Law enforcement love those photos with big piles of drugs, many, many tons. They’re constant in the media.

But where’s that leading? It’s just more of the same, right? They’ve got to address the money laundering, following the money, breaking down the business model and confiscating money and taking it away. They’ve got no choice. They have to address the chemical trade, the inputs. Without the chemicals, there is no drug trade. That’s also true of heroin. You need chemicals to make heroin, just differently. But the point is without those inputs, you cannot make the drugs that are now flooding the region.

So that’s got to be addressed. And as I said, that requires paying attention to different kinds of chemicals, sharing intelligence on different kinds of chemicals. That intelligence is not freely flowing in the region and there’s no control. And they can regionally control things in a much different way than you can at a global level, if they so choose. So I would highly recommend that the region looks at addressing the chemical trade in a really different way.

They’ve got to go after the people actually controlling this business. It’s not about the truck driver with the two tons of drugs who may or may not know that they have two tons of drugs in their truck. But the fact is, it’s the guys who own the two tons of drugs, that’s who they need to get.

The other element is Myanmar. We have to build pressure on the situation in Myanmar. This will not end, and there will be additional production pumping out of those special regions. The drug lab locations are not unknown. Thai intelligence knows where they are. I’m sure neighboring China, many foreign law enforcement organizations have a pretty good sense. We do, we have a pretty good sense of where they are.

But there has to be pressure on that situation and there has to be action in the special regions. Until that takes place in Shan, until that takes place, there will be a continuous flow.

And that’s going to require the region getting their heads together around actually doing it. Because currently that’s not the case. I don’t see pressure building on that.