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Drug Dealersrecruit foreign chemist



THAILAND 
Friday, February 27, 1998


Drug dealers recruit foreign chemists 


By CRAIG SKEHAN, Herald Correspondent in Bangkok

Drug syndicates have recruited foreign chemists to manufacture a new more
potent generation of amphetamines and methamphetamines in remote jungle
laboratories, according to Thai police.

And a representative of the United Nations Drug Control Program, Mr Richard
Wilkins, told a Bangkok drugs seminar it was inevitable such new supplies of
"speed and ice" would be smuggled to countries such as Australia.

Mr Wilkins identified a growing market in South-East Asia for these vogue
drugs, noting that their production and trafficking went hand in hand with
the heroin trade.

The Assistant Commissioner of Thailand's Narcotics Suppression Bureau,
Police Major-General Virat Jutimit, told the seminar that heroin refiners in
northern Burma had already increased their wealth and power by producing
amphetamines and methamphetamines.

Intelligence sources had established that chemists had been recruited from
Europe to come and pass on their techniques and formulae to people working
in mobile laboratories already in use in border areas, General Virat said.

"We are sure this stuff is going to flood into the nation," he said.

Thailand has been significant in the trans-shipment of drugs, notably
heroin, to Australia.

However, Thai sources confirmed that southern China was now a major link in
supply routes to the West from Burma, northern Thailand and Laos and to meet
a growing demand for heroin in Asia itself.

A fear is that the phenomenal rise in the use of, and profits from, speed
and ice will make it even harder to challenge those also involved in the
heroin trade, as higher earnings give greater scope for bribery.

And in Thailand itself, the economic crisis has resulted in funding cutbacks
for both drugs interdiction and the destruction of poppy fields as well as
for co-operative cross-border regional responses.