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Asia's Golden Triangle was once the opium capital of the world. Now the drug of choice is meth
The soldiers drop to the forest floor as their lieutenant barks an order and the men quickly meld into the lush hillside's dense foliage, weapons poised.
'This part is about patience,' says Lt Ketsopon Nopsiri, as he inspects his men's drill positions on a misty Saturday morning. 'Once we have the intel, we scout a place for the ambush. Sometimes it's hours before the smugglers come. But then everything happens very rapidly.'
In these mountainous pine forests in the heart of the Golden Triangle, Thai soldiers are embroiled in a sometimes deadly standoff, as they struggle to stem the surging flow of illicit synthetic drugs flooding across the unmarked border with Myanmar.
In 2024, Thailand seized a record 130 tons of methamphetamine, according to a report last week from the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), which uses confiscated drugs as a proxy for the scale of production and trafficking. That's close to half of the 236 tons seized in East and Southeast Asia as a whole – itself a record figure, and 24 per cent higher than 2023.
'While these seizures reflect, in part, successful law enforcement efforts, we are clearly seeing unprecedented levels of methamphetamine production and trafficking from the Golden Triangle,' says Benedikt Hofmann, the UNODC's acting regional representative for Southeast Asia and the Pacific.
'We are looking at the world's most active synthetic drug production zone, here in this region,' he adds later.
The vast majority of these drugs come from Myanmar's Shan state, where jungle labs are turning precursor chemicals from India and China into an 'almost never-ending' stream of synthetic drugs.
While production pre-dated the military coup in 2021, these workshops have gone into overdrive since the country descended into a brutal civil war.
The heavily sanctioned military regime is increasingly reliant on proceeds from criminal activities – as are the armed groups fighting with and against them – while crime syndicates have exploited rising lawlessness to cement their influence.
According to the Global Organized Crime Index, Myanmar now ranks as the world's top destination for organised, transnational crime – including human trafficking and scam centres, wildlife smuggling and illegal rare earth mines. And, of course, the drugs.
The opium trade that first made the Golden Triangle notorious has made a comeback, but there is now also 'industrial-scale production' of synthetic drugs, says UNODC.
Alongside methamphetamine tablets, crystal meth (ice) and yaba (a very cheap combination of methamphetamine and caffeine popular in Southeast Asia), labs are also manufacturing ketamine, plus concoctions of various synthetic drugs known as 'happy water', 'party lollipops' and 'k-powdered milk'.
These are eventually transported across Asia and the Pacific, to countries as far away as Japan, Australia and New Zealand, via trafficking networks operated by what experts say are 'agile, well-resourced' criminal gangs.
But often, their first port of call is Thailand – and the porous border that spans either side of Mae Sai town, where Lt Ketsopon and his unit are among the troops attempting to intercept smugglers.
'People cross the border on foot with backpacks full of drugs,' says Lt Ketsopon, as we trudge along a remote stretch of the 22km border which his unit at Doi Changmub monitors. 'The paths are not easy, and we don't have enough manpower in comparison to the region we have to cover.'
When the unit does encounter smugglers – usually in night time ambushes, organised with intelligence from a network of informants on both sides of the border – the clashes can be deadly.
Across Chiang Rai and Chiang Mai provinces in northern Thailand, there were 37 confrontations between October 1 and April 30, and 13 smugglers died, according to military data from the Pha Mueng Taskforce.
Lt Ketsopon's unit was involved in one of these deadly clashes, at 5am on a Sunday morning in February.
'We never fire a weapon before the other side. In our playbook you don't do that. But we said we were officers of the law – and soon, 15 to 20 people were firing at us in the dark … with handmade guns and AK47s,' he says.
The clash, which he thinks lasted no more than 10 minutes, did not bring arrests – the surviving smugglers fled back into Myanmar, where Thai soldiers cannot follow. But the troops seized 15 rucksacks of drugs, with three million methamphetamine pills inside.
Despite record low prices amid a flooded market, this haul would still have been worth as much as $8.1 million (£5.9m) if sold in Thailand, where a single tablet costs between 80 cents and $2.7 (between 50p and £2), according to the UNODC report. Prices are as low as 60 cents in Myanmar, but jump to $19.3 per tablet in China, and $50 in South Korea.
In another incident in March, soldiers and police at one of the countless checkpoints dotted across Chiang Rai region intercepted 1,500kg of crystal meth concealed inside oil barrels in a military-style vehicle with a fake number plate. In Thailand, the average per gram price is $24 – making this shipment alone worth some $36 million.
At the Pha Mueng Forces' military headquarters in Chiang Rai, Colonel Anywach Punyanum says drug trafficking 'has grown exponentially' in recent years – with 52 million methamphetamine tablets, 723kg of ice, 20kg of opium and 5.3kg of heroin seized between October and April.
'In the past, to catch like 100,000 methamphetamine tablets was a big deal. Now we catch more than a million pills, and it's just a normal day,' he says. 'It's getting a lot worse.'
It's like a game of whack-a-mole. Military units constantly patrol chunks of the border, working with informants to ambush supply routes, often in collaboration with the police. But it's a long, porous border and the smugglers are smart. No matter how much authorities confiscate, the drugs keep coming.
'Countries in the Mekong, especially Thailand, are seizing about the same amount of methamphetamines as we are seeing between Latin America and the United States,' says UNODC's Mr Hofmann. 'But if you look at the capacities, at the resources available to make those seizures, it's very different.'
Experts note that there are significant overlaps with the criminal syndicates running scam compounds and illegal online casinos in the region, and there is no obvious way of stopping production of the drugs at source in war-torn Myanmar.
'The volume of drugs being produced and coming across [the Thai-Myanmar border] is almost never-ending. The nature of synthetic drugs means that they're very easily producible, easily replaceable, and relatively cheap to manufacture,' says Mr Hofmann.
Two changes could help tackle the issue: cutting off the chemicals going into Myanmar that are used in the production process; and resolving the insecurities plaguing Myanmar. But neither seem likely.
'It doesn't matter how well you organise a response on the Thai side, it is very difficult to see the same happening on the Myanmar side. So finding a solution to the situation in Myanmar needs to be part of the solution for the drug issues this region faces,' says Mr Hofmann.
'But at the end of the day, this is a supply driven market – drug traffickers steer the supply, but people somewhere are using these vast volumes of synthetic drugs,' he adds.
Exactly how drug use has shifted across the region is not yet well understood, but UNODC says it seems to be increasing in countries along the trafficking routes. In Thailand, for instance, household drug use surveys between 2016 and 2024 suggest methamphetamine tablet use is 'rapidly expanding', the UN agency said.
Many of the soldiers on patrol in northern Thailand's mountains have witnessed these issues first-hand. Troops say the damage wrought by drugs at home and abroad is a major motivation for them as they spend long nights hiding in the forest's undergrowth.
'I've seen people in my communities using drugs and hallucinating, or starting to hurt their own family members,' says Lt Ketsopon, as we climb the hill back towards the military trucks after a successful set of drills.
'When I was growing up, I thought being a soldier would be about fighting and battling,' he adds. 'But I think this is an important thing to be a part of; to stop these drugs getting into the country.'
