Interviews | Security | Southeast Asia

Jeremy Douglas on Southeast Asia’s Drug Boom

“This is a region that is arguably now the largest epicenter of synthetic drug production in the world,” says the UNDOC deputy director.

A panoramic view of the Golden Triangle confluence, where the borders of Myanmar, Thailand, and Laos converge

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........

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