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AP articles on drugs (or how to get



Subject: AP articles on drugs (or how to get many of the facts right  but the conclusions  all wrong!) from Asahi Evening News, June 13, 1997

Asahi Evening News 
Friday, June 13, 1997
Arrests fail to stem tide of heroin from Southeast Asia

Despite some high-profile arrests, more heroin and opium is flowing out of
the Golden Triangle than ever before

The Associated Press

BANGKOK?When Li Yun-chung, accused of arranging the biggest shipment of
heroin ever seized in the United States jumped bail in Thailand, he made a
beeline for neighboring Myanmar (Burma).

He ran, but he couldn't hide.

Li fled to the Golden Triangle, the rugged area where the borders of
Myanmar, Laos and Thailand meet that provides about 60 percent of the
world's supply of heroin and opium. Not so long ago, that would have been
the end of the story.

But in May, three months after Li fled, Burmese authorities handed him back
to Thailand. On June 5, he was sent to the United States to stand trial.

Li is just one of more than a dozen "big fish" from the Golden Triangle who
have been put out of action in the past three years by operations organized
by the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration and its Asian counterparts.
They have had striking but little-noticed success in busting, for the first
time, the kingpins of the heroin trade and bringing them to justice,
sometimes in U.S. courts.

Even China, which has very limited cooperation with U.S. anti-drug efforts
but a rapidly growing drug problem of its own, quietly deported a Burmese
national, Li Chiacheng, to U.S. custody in late April.

Li, under indictment in a federal court in New York for heroin trafficking,
was the 15th person rounded up in the DEA's "Operation Tiger Trap," which
targeted 20 top lieutenants of Burmese opium warlord Khun Sa.

The potential rewards of the narcotics business, however, continue to
outweigh the risks in the heroin business.

When Khun Sa, reputedly the Golden Triangle's biggest heroin trafficker,
surrendered himself to Burmese authorities early last year, rivals were
happy to take over his market share

Worldwide production of opium last year was estimated by U.S. officials at
nearly 4,300 tons, probably a record amount and enough to make 430 tons of
heroin. Myanmar was the biggest opium producer, turning out an estimated
2,560 tons.

The value of opium and heroin exports from Myanmar may be almost equal to
that of all its legal exports, about $1 billion in 1995, a report from the
U.S. Embassy in Yangon (Rangoon) said last year.

In Thailand, now primarily a transit point, two separate studies by local
scholars estimated domestic turnover in heroin and opium to be about $1
billion annually.

Small wonder that heroin has attracted entrepreneurs in Myanmar, China,
Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam, all of which have moved from centrally planned
economies to relatively free markets in the past decade.

Improvements in communications and transportation for expanded trade also
have made it easier for drug traffickers to operate, the annual report of
the U.N.'s International Narcotics Control Board said.

Myanmar poses the biggest problem for the drug fighters, said a report last
year by U.S. General Accounting Office, which audits the activities of
federal agencies for Congress.

The GAO praised anti-drug efforts in Thailand, where as many as 31 people
charged in U.S. courts with drug trafficking have been arrested in the past
three years, with seven extradited to the United States so far.

Those arrested include suspects in both the first and third-biggest heroin
seizures in the United States, as well as the 14 other Tiger Trap indicters.

Even a former Thai member of parliament, who previously would have been
untouchable, was extradited in January 1996. Thanong Siriprechapong, accused
of smuggling 50 tons of marijuana to the United States, became the first
Thai national to face such action.

Hong Kong extradited 64 fugitives

Important cooperation has come from authorities in Hong Kong, another
linchpin of the heroin trade. Since 1991, Hong Kong has sent at least 64
fugitives to the United States, most of them wanted for drug-related offenses.

One of them, a former major general in the Thai army, became the first
high-ranking military officer from Southeast Asia to be successfully
prosecuted in the United States on drug charges.

Thanad Paktipatt, 58, was convicted of conspiring to import 48.5 kilograms
of heroin from Thailand to the United States. He was sentenced in May in
Eugene, Oregon, to more than 30 years in prison.

The heroin trail begins in northern and northeastern Myanmar, where ethnic
minorities like the Wa, Kokang Chinese and Shan cultivate hillside fields of
red-and white opium poppies.

At harvest time, they painstakingly scrape off by hand the sap oozing from
cuts they make in the flower bulbs. Boiled into a gum, what isn't smoked
locally is sold for processing. In well-hidden, closely guarded jungle
laboratories, chemists turn the opium into morphine and then heroin.

The drug is then sent on its way to the addicts of the world, including an
estimated 600,000 in the United States alone.

Many more heroin and opium addicts are to be found in the region itself,
enough to make governments that might otherwise turn a blind eye to
trafficking take notice.

"Even China, which once had all but eliminated heroin addiction, is
experiencing a serious rise in teen-age addiction," a top DEA official,
James Milford, told the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee in April.

In Thailand, police can claim victories against both the ethnic Chinese
gangs who have dominated the heroin trade for more than two decades and the
West Africans who recently have secured an important market niche for
themselves.

Li Yun-chung, a Burmese-born Chinese with Thai residence, was wanted by U.S.
authorities in connection with the shipment of 486 kilograms of heroin
seized in Oakland, California, in 1991.  He and an alleged accomplice,  Cha
Chung-chang, were arrested in Bangkok last year.

In March this year, Thai officials announced the arrest of Liu Wen-ming,
wanted in connection with the third- largest shipment of heroin seized in
the United States.

A federal court in New York had indicted Liu for organizing a 168-kilogram
heroin shipment, concealed in a shipment of canned litchi nuts, which was
seized in New Orleans in 1993.

Another suspect in the New Orleans case, Anan Detnambanchachai, was arrested
earlier by Thai authorities and is also awaiting extradition to the United
States.

Li and Liu worked with the ethnic Chinese groups, who usually deal with
larger with larger shipments, ranging from fifty to several hundred
kilograms, hidden in maritime shipping containers and air freight cargo. 

West African gangs are known more for using "mules"?individual air
travelers?to smuggle heroin in smaller quantities, concealed in their
luggage, strapped to their bodies, or packed in condoms and swallowed.  

Nigerians work out of Thailand

The DEA's Operation Global Seas, which culminated in October last year,
rolled up a Bangkok-based, Nigeria-led network which brought heroin from
Thailand and Cambodia to Chicago and Boston.

But the biggest feather in the drug-busters' cap has been Operation Tiger
Trap, which helped lead to the virtual dismantling of Khun Sa's extensive
production and trafficking network.

Khun Sa, also known as Chang Chi-fu, led a personal army of more than 10,000
men ostensibly fighting for autonomy for the Shan ethnic minority.  But U.S.
authorities had long considered him the region's biggest heroin trafficker.

In January 1996, Khun Sa surrendered with most of his men to Burmese
authorities.  He now lives in seclusion in Yangon (Rangoon).

Khun Sa's fall was described by the State Department as "ending an era in
Southeast Asian heroin trafficking history."  But its more immediate effect
was to drive heroin refiners away from the Thai border.

Such a shift had been in the making for several years, as Khun Sa's control
was waning and members of the Wa minority, who live closer to Burma's border
with China and were already opium poppy growers, diversified their business
downstream.

The traffickers' ability to shift transportation routes to countries with
inadequate law enforcement capabilities was one of several problems noted in
two GAO reports last year.

The amount of Southeast Asian heroin transiting Thailand to world markets
has declined from 80 percent to 50 percent in recent years, the GAO said, as
new routes emerged through the southern provinces of China to Taiwan and
Hong Kong or through Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam.

India's remote northeast drowning in drugs

The Associated Press

IMPHAL, India - If you do drugs, you die. With a bullet in the head. 

Worried that heroin from neighboring Myanmar is wasting away the youth in
Manipur -- India's narcotics gateway - -- underground separatists began
enforcing this edict eight years ago.

Eighteen-year-old Ronen remembers the warning clearly. It was one night last
August. A militant knocked on his door and told him: quit doing drugs.

Ronen was scared. He knew the consequences of not heeding the order. He
tried to switch to alcohol, but he gave up quickly and went back to
mainlining heroin.

For weeks, Ronen stayed at home, venturing out cautiously once in a while at
night to meet a street peddler.

On Christmas, he partied with friends all night.

Two days later, three men with automatic rifles dragged him out of the house.

"They told me, 'This is your last warning.' then suddenly, one man shot me
in the thigh," Ronen said.

For a month, Ronen lay in bed, while his wound healed. Without drugs, his
body shook violently, his head hurt. He was desperate for heroin. But he was
also scared of the rebels. His parents took him to the Kripa De-addiction
Center, one of two dozen centers run by voluntary groups in Imphal, the
state capital.

At the center, at the start of a five-month residential program, a doctor
gave medicines to detoxify Ronen's body.

Rigorous detox treatment 

Like the other 30 young men undergoing treatment, Ronen is kept busy from
dawn to late at night: yoga, Tai Chi, meditation, singing, lectures on
drugs, discussion groups, daily checkups by a doctor.

In the last five years, half of those who underwent the program at Kripa
have given up drugs, Dinesh said. The
rest either died, went missing or relapsed into drug abuse.

Some addicts have been shot by the rebels. The guerrillas are a powerful
force here, and it is their writ  -- not the police's -- that runs in the state.

Yet, their threats have not reduced addiction drastically.

Manipur, with 2 million people, has 50,000 addicts, said R.C. Bhattacharji,
Narcotics Commissioner at the Central Bureau of Narcotics. AIDS is rampant
among the addicts, who share needles.

The dense forests and rugged hills of Manipur and adjoining Mizoram state
are popular routes for drug runners from the Golden Triangle -- the area at
the intersection of Myanmar, Laos and Thailand -- that grows 60 percent of
the world's opium poppies, the raw material for heroin and morphine.

The northeast is a cluster of seven states rich in minerals and forest
produce, but without the skilled labor or industries to exploit them. The
resulting unemployment and deep poverty drives thousands of youth to
desperation, drugs and disease.

"The youth are restless " said Hijam Dinesh, an official at Kripa. "Schools
and colleges are closed most of the year because of strike calls by
militants. There are no jobs or recreation."

Every day, at a newly opened border trading post 200 kilometers southeast of
Imphal, hundreds of Burmese women cross into India carrying baskets of
vegetables, meat and cheap Chinese household goods.

Often, tucked in their flowing sarongs is a 300-gram packet heroin, marked
"Eagle," "555," or "Lion And Glove," that they later hand over to a local
agent, who has already paid off officials at the checkpoint. The courier fee
is about 500 rupees (1,720 yen), about a week's earnings.

Police say they are incapable of stopping the traffic, claiming they are
hindered by government apathy, inadequate staff, poor pay and lack of funds
to pay informers.


West still skeptical about Myanmar's war on narcotics

The Associated Press

Bangkok ? They've spilled their blood fighting opium warlords in the jungles
of Myanmar.  Since 1988, Myanmar's military government says 700 of its
soldiers have been killed and 2,200 wounded battling drug barons.

But during that same period, its production of opium ? the raw material for
heroin ? has increased from less than 1,000 tons to 2,560 tons a year,
making it the world's largest opium producer.

So is Myanmar really fighting drugs?

Several Western governments are skeptical about Yangon's (Rangoon) attempts
to eliminate opium growing and fear drug money is becoming a serious
component in the country's economic growth.

Col. Kyaw Thein, a key figure in the government's efforts to eradicate
drugs, rejects those allegations, calling them politically motivated.  He
says it is his government's "obligation" to fight narcotics.

"But this is a complicated matter.  We need more time," he adds.

Yangon's most vocal critic has been the United States, which in April
slapped Myanmar with economic sanctions for the military's increased
repression of the democracy movement led by Nobel Peace Prize winner Aung
San Suu Kyi.

The U.S. State Department accused the military regime of lacking the
"resources, the ability or the will to take serious action against ethnic
drug trafficking groups."

It also says the military is allowing some major traffickers to attend the
country's constitutional convention as representatives of ethnic minorities.

Khun Sa, an opium warlord wanted by the United States on heroin -
trafficking changes, surrendered to the regime last year and now lives
comfortably in Yangon, where some reports say he still controls his
narcotics empire through intermediaries.

A recent State Department report said that 15 percent of foreign investment
in Myanmar goes through a company owned by relatives of Lo Hsing-han,
another major drug trafficker.

Nonetheless, the State Department says there is no evidence high- ranking
government officials are involved in the drug business.

And some paint a more positive picture of the regime's efforts.

"The Burmese are serious about fighting the drug trade," said Gerald Moore,
former director of the United Nations Drug Control Program in Yangon.  "A
lot of what you read about Burmese involvement in drug trafficking just
isn't justified."

Opium funds ethnic insurgencies.

In one of the world's most racially diverse nations, the Burmese military
has been fighting a host of ethnic insurgencies since the late 1940s.  Many
of them have funded their fight by selling opium.

Anxious to end the conflicts, the government began signing cease-fires with
many insurgent groups in 1989.

Opium growing was to be phased out in 10 to 15 years as the government
launched crop substitution and development programs, giving ethnic people
another means of income.

Instead, opium production skyrocketed.

Without permanent peace agreements, some ethnic groups won't agree to have
the army in their areas.  Without the army, serious eradication efforts are
unlikely.

At the same time, there are reports that corrupt lower-level army officers
encourage poppy growing, taxing the proceeds.

Myanmar also doesn't have the money for the development programs.  When the
military crushed a democracy uprising in 1988, most international financial
institutions and Western governments cut off aid and loans.

Aid isn't likely to resume because of the continuing clampdown on the
country's democratic activist.

"What's needed is a political solution that includes everyone," said Martin
Smith, a noted author on Myanmar.
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