"There will likely be few public celebrations of World Drug Day today in northern Shan state, home to one of the world’s most rampant and lucrative narcotics production zones. But there may be some smug satisfaction expressed among the region’s assorted gangsters and others cashing in on the post-coup disorder in Myanmar. This year’s theme for the United Nations International Day Against Drug Abuse and Illicit Trafficking is “People first: stop stigma and discrimination, strengthen prevention.” Myanmar’s coup-installed military regime, the State Administration Council (SAC), and the Myanmar Police Force (MFP) revel in these opportunities to promote their domestic drug suppression efforts and exaggerate their commitment to international cooperation. In a post-truth Myanmar, the promotion of fallacious seizure statistics has been the methodology for years to fool the world into believing central authorities are serious about drug eradication. The Central Committee for Drug Abuse Control (CCDAC) of the Ministry of Home Affairs claims that since the February 2021 coup d’etat, seizures of narcotics including opium, heroin, stimulant tablets (ya ba), crystal methamphetamine, marijuana, kratom and kratom powder have all increased. The regime claims it nabbed US$462 million worth of narcotics in 2021; $533 million in 2022; and $179.53 million up until end of May this year. These are exacting figures: in 2021, the security forces claimed to have seized 198,188,715.5 ya ba tablets, precise right down to the half of a pill. But exactly what is the scale of drug production in Myanmar? The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) estimates that opium cultivation has increased 33% in its 2022 Opium Survey, with an alarming increase in potential yield of 88%, potentially producing 790 metric tonnes. Whilst the obvious conclusion is post-coup uncertainty and insecurity driving expanded cultivation, these upward trends may have preceded the coup. UNODC regional director Jeremy Douglas claimed at the launch of the survey in January that “the Golden Triangle is back in the opium business.” The borderlands of Myanmar, Laos and Thailand have never been out of the drug business. Crystal methamphetamine production has surged over the past decade to an estimated $50-60 billion. From unreliable but indicative seizures data, East and Southeast Asia seizures in 2011 amounted to 20,000 kilograms, reached a record of 172,000 kgs in 2021 and fell to 151,000 in 2022. Yet the price for methamphetamines has reduced across the region despite the higher seizures. The UNODC and many international states and actors are stuck on the manta that that is all mostly the fault of transnational criminal organizations partnering with armed groups opposed to central authority in Myanmar. This is accurate and has been for decades. But it omits key partners in the drug consortiums: the Myanmar military and police. The 2023 UNODC survey did note that; “A small number of methamphetamine laboratories have been detected in drug-producing regions under the regime’s control. However, there is a sizable discrepancy between Myanmar’s seized methamphetamine laboratories and the total supply of methamphetamine, with the only laboratories seized by Myanmar authorities between 2022 and early 2023 being smaller tableting operations in South Shan, near the Thai border, which does not reflect the reality of the market.” The drug trade in Myanmar thrives because of the complex network of security arrangements between the Myanmar military, its local militia allies, ethnic armed organizations (EAOs), the hosting of transnational criminal actors and an entrenched culture of corruption and entwined criminal industries. The post-coup descent into internecine chaos and increased illegality is simply a contemporary chapter of decades-long dynamics that have made domestic production unproblematic. But exactly how much is being done to stem drug production and how much is the international community cooperating with this charade? In Myanmar, access to drugs has surged since the coup, with police seemingly spending more time on extortion rackets than genuine drug suppression. Drugs are reportedly openly offered and consumed at karaoke joints (KTV) throughout major cities. The powerful drug ketamine is supposedly readily available, but to what extent is hard to measure. The SAC Minister of Home Affairs who has the CCDAC in his portfolio, the army Lieutenant-General Soe Htut marked this year’s World Drug Day with a statement pledging to be more people-oriented. “Reviewing the current drug problem, law enforcement and judiciary measures could not separately solve the problem. A balanced approach also requires a focus on public health care, improving living standards, promoting humanity, supporting development, and protecting basic human rights. Instead of punishing drug addicts as criminals, the government and civil society organizations have worked together to amend laws and regulations to promote drug addiction as a health issue rather than a crime.” Yet that has been the main deficiency of Myanmar official approaches for many years, giving syndicates almost free rein to establish production zones while cracking down on small-scale producers and punishing drug users with long prison terms. The 2018 National Drug Policy is actually an effective approach to the challenges of drug use, but has not been in line with repressive drug laws first drafted in the early 1990s under a previous military junta. Nevertheless, Soe Htut claimed the SAC is instructing regional and state authorities to “draft action plans consistent with their localities to implement drug control activities in a practical manner.” Given the general breakdown in law and order across Myanmar, drug suppression will either be an extremely low priority or else officials will use it as an extra feature of control to combat armed and non-violent resistance. World Drug Day also provides a platform for the military to signal its cooperation with the United Nations, the Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN), regional law enforcement bodies such as the Australian Federal Police (AFP), the American Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA), and the Thai Office of Narcotics Control Board (ONCB). Much of this cooperation hums along in a depoliticized environment of professional niceties, never mentioning that some of the worst offenders in protecting the drug trade that floods the region with crystal methamphetamine are Myanmar security officers who have a long and sordid lineage of double standards. Nevertheless, regional partnerships are a necessary fiction. ASEAN’s Narcotics Cooperation Center’s (with the delightful acronym of ASEAN-NARCO) “Golden Triangle 1511 Operation” involves China, Myanmar, Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam and Thailand and has been cooperating since 2019 on intelligence-sharing on drug precursor flows and drug shipments. Yet taken over a longer time frame, it’s evident that Myanmar gains some measure of legitimacy for regional cooperation while not having to do much to crack down on production zones in Shan state. It’s one of the Myanmar regime’s diplomatic “bait and switch” tactics, in which it crows over joint drug suppression efforts while rebuffing ASEAN’s Five Point Consensus to address its political crisis. The Australian Federal Police continues to liaise with the MPF on drug trade intelligence-sharing. In Senate Estimates hearings in November of 2022, AFP Deputy Commissioner Ian McCartney told the committee:“There has been engagement with Myanmar police, not in relation to training and capacity-building, but in relation to matters of interest to the AFP, particularly in relation to drug trafficking. In terms of context, 70% of the methamphetamine that ends up in the streets of Australia comes from Myanmar. So there has been some engagement. It’s been restricted. It’s been under the auspices of an agreement that we’ve entered into with DFAT (Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade) to ensure that whatever engagement is strictly restricted to those issues.” In the decade spanning 2012 to 2022, Australia seized 9.9 million tons of crystal methamphetamine, most of it sourced from Myanmar’s Shan state. Taking stock of the production timelines and the surge in output over the past decade, it’s obvious that the Myanmar drug trade grew during the decade of conditional civilian government, when the world was supporting a so-called “democratic transition.” Given the current post-coup disorder, what hope is there that regional cooperation will have any positive effect? And how much is international assistance, even intelligence-sharing, assisting the SAC with domestic control while it maintains complex relations with multiple armed and illicit actors involved in the narcotics trade? As Christopher Hitchens once remarked of the American “war on drugs,” “this isn’t a war, it’s a misuse of the word, it’s an apparatus of control.” Any credible or humanistic drug reform from the SAC is highly unlikely, condemning another generation of Myanmar people to cheap and easily available drugs with few harm reduction programs and continued punitive sentencing approaches..."