Welcome to Foreign Policy’s Southeast Asia Brief.

The highlights this week: The meth business booms in Myanmar’s Shan state while its junta representatives march on Tokyo, Indonesia’s stock market plummets, and Vietnam’s To Lam visits Europe.

Welcome to Foreign Policy’s Southeast Asia Brief.

The highlights this week: The meth business booms in Myanmar’s Shan state while its junta representatives march on Tokyo, Indonesia’s stock market plummets, and Vietnam’s To Lam visits Europe.

Southeast Asia Breaks Bad

On Oct. 1, police in Laos raided a private jet that was headed for the Philippines with more than half a ton of crystal meth aboard.

The smuggling was a polyphonically international affair.

The jet was Malaysia-based, owned by a company run by two Malaysian and two Singaporeans. The man who allegedly chartered it is thought to be a politician in south Philippine city of Mindanao. Those arrested in the bust included a Singaporean, a Filipino, a Malaysian, and 10 Lao airport staff.

While scam centers now dominate headlines about crime in Southeast Asia, the region’s traditional illicit business—drugs—may well still be bigger.

For comparison, in 2023, criminal syndicates operating in the Mekong defrauded victims of some $43.8 billion worldwide, according to a conservative estimate by the U.S. Institute of Peace. Meanwhile, within Southeast Asia alone, sales of meth were worth between $48.1 billion and $74.8 billion annually, according to a report published this year by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC).

The UNODC found that compared with 2019, when it published its previous report on the topic, drug markets have grown larger—as have the criminal syndicates, which operate in ever more sophisticated ways, protected by state weakness and systemic corruption. For drugs, as with many licit commodities, Southeast Asia is now a major hub for production, transit, and consumption.

Drug manufacturing is now concentrated in just one corner of the Golden Triangle: Shan state, in northern Myanmar. Control of the province is split between the Myanmar military and a number of armed rebel groups. The production and sale of drugs has long been a major source of revenue for many of these groups, including the state military.

Meth—also known as yaba or shabu, depending on its form—is the key product. The drug is often popular with those working long hours in physically demanding jobs because of its energizing qualities.

Meth sales outside the region may also be substantial. Research by Jason Eligh at the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime (GI-TOC) suggests that Myanmar meth has now gone global. He describes a sophisticated system where manufacturers have worked hard to ramp up production in industrial-scale labs and diversified their raw materials to use precursor chemicals not subject to legal controls.

Production of other synthetic drugs in Shan state is also........

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