Thailand: Drug Runners Get Creative As Crackdown Intensifies

Customs officers manning the border post in this small town, on the international boundary with Burma, are on the lookout for people with unusual gaits because the chances are high that they are carrying packets of drugs concealed in their rectums.

“The most popular method is to put the drugs in a condom and stick it into the rectum,” says Arun Sangsithorn, a customs inspector in this town, separated by a narrow river from the Burmese town of Tachilek. “They think they can walk by easily”.

Runners, hired to bring into Thailand small packets of narcotics such as methamphetamines, or ya ba, can be extraordinarily creative and are known to conceal the stuff in cosmetic bottles, chocolate boxes, toy pianos and even in the gasoline tanks of vehicles.

Sangsithorn often makes strange requests of travelers crossing the border, like asking them to play what may look like a perfectly ordinary stereo player and then listening intently for sound distortions that may reveal drugs concealed in the speakers.

Other Thai officers, who man the distinctive blue-roofed border checkpoint in this town, have nabbed men with the dark pink ya ba pills in plastic packets wrapped around their knees.

Last December, they even apprehended a Thai Buddhist monk with packets of speed pills concealed under his saffron robes in a delicate operation because of the high status that monks enjoy in this deeply Buddhist country.

But such arrests are important because they have helped customs and border police to crack large trafficking syndicates, trying to ship contraband through this otherwise unremarkable town of low-rise buildings and narrow streets.

One such operation led to the confiscation of 500,000 tablets and the unraveling of a hidden trafficking network that stretched across the country to a province in southern Thailand.

“Two policemen were part of that drug network,” said police colonel Soontorn Chantharangkool, who leads investigations into drug running in the area. “Five people got the death sentence for their involvement in that drug ring.”

These revelations have made Mae Sai a testing ground for the success or failure of the Thai government’s over two-year-old “war on drugs” that has now narrowed down to a proliferation of runners being used to move contraband in small but steady streams rather than large consignments.

Stalling the flow of drugs into this northern-most region of Thailand has been a daunting challenge because of the mountainous terrain and the porous borders that extend over 446 km in the Thai provinces of Chiang Rai, where Mae Sai is located, and the neighboring tourist destination of Chiang Mai.

The region is already notorious for being part of the Golden Triangle, an area encompassing parts of northeastern Burma, northern Thailand and northwestern Laos, where substantial quantities of opium, heroin and methamphetamines are produced and traded.

Yet, officers of Thailand’s Narcotics Control Board believe that the drug lords have been shaken up by the country’s “war on drugs,” launched in February 2003, and point to changing drug smuggling patterns to illustrate their point.

“They are breaking the supply into small packets to get it across and getting more people to do it than before,” says Prasong Rattanapan, the Chiang Rai representative of the NCB. “Even children are being used to bring drugs, some as young as seven years.”

A small plastic packet of the type often used for smuggling contains close to 200 small ya ba pills and could be worth 60,000 baht (1,500 US dollars).

From October 2004 to August of this year, an estimated 1.4 million methamphetamine pills were seized by the authorities here, in addition to 12,642 kg of heroin and 26,414 kg of opium.

Across the country, the number of these speed pills seized by authorities has been just as high. In 2003, 71.5 million tablets were confiscated and in the following year 31 million tablets, according to the NCB.

However, these numbers also suggest that Thailand has much more ground to cover before finally declaring victory in its battle against drugs.

According to a UN report, between 500 and 700 million methamphetamine pills, produced in Burma, were smuggled annually into Thailand before 2003, and records show that Thailand is the world’s biggest user of the drug.

In fact, the government of Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra was prompted to declare war on the country’s narcotic syndicates in the wake of reports that as many as one in 17, or 5.9 percent of Thais aged 15 years and above, were addicted to ya ba.

Shockingly, that included the over 600,000 students, from primary schools to universities, hooked on drugs.

But the government’s drug war has come at a heavy price, particularly the first phase in 2003, which was directed at eradicating drug networks in northern Thailand. An estimated 2,500 people were killed during the first three months of that brutal campaign, according to human rights groups.

The Thaksin administration, however, chose to play up its achievements following that crackdown. An estimated 52,374 suspected drug dealers and producers were arrested, and schools were declared drug-free zones.

Yet, even today police officers like Soontorn admit that methamphetamine remains a problem in Thailand. “The customers for ya ba are Thais, but Thailand is also used as a transit point for heroin which moves on to Malaysia or Taiwan.”

The Thai government’s plan to launch the fourth round of its drug war in October lends weight to that view. Mae Sai, according to the anti-narcotic officers, is expected to be very much in the picture again.

And an army camp located some 15 km from Mae Sai, on a rain-swept mountain slope, reveals why. From one of its fortified bunkers Thai soldiers have a clear view of ya ba factories on the Burmese side of the rugged terrain.

A village directly below the camp produces about “100 pills a day,” said Lieutenant Dusit Melab. “Last December, we seized 40,000 pills being smuggled across”.

Inter Press Service (IPS)

Newshawk: http://www.napnt.org/amphetablog.html
Pubdate: Tue, 13 September 2005
Source: The Irrawaddy (Burma)
Author: Marwaan Macan-Markar/Mae Sai, Thailand
Contact: http://www.irrawaddy.org/aviewer.asp?a=3509&z=123
Website: http://www.irrawaddy.org/
Copyright: 2005 Irrawaddy Publishing Group (IPG)