"Five Southeast Asian countries, China, and the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) agreed on Friday to improve intelligence sharing and law enforcement operations to fight drug trafficking in the region by transnational crime groups. Southeast Asia's Golden Triangle - northern Myanmar and parts of Thailand and Laos - has long been a hub of illicit drug production and trafficking. More: Asia's Meth Boom Golden Triangle's drug production surges amid opioid worries Has the decade-old war on drugs in Asia succeeded? While opium cultivation and heroin refining have fallen in the past decade, the area is now at the heart of the Asia-Pacific methamphetamine trade, which the UNODC estimates to be worth as much as $61.4bn in 2018, up from an estimated $15bn just five years earlier..."