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UN world anti-narcotics day: Drugs burnt down in an act of defiance

Current legislation means anyone found with even small amounts of drugs can be jailed for years.

By :  amrit sadhana
Update: 2017-06-28 07:56 GMT
Myanmar, Thailand and Cambodia torched nearly $1 billion worth of seized narcotics on Monday, a defiant show of force as police struggle to stem the rising flow of drugs in the region.
Experts say yaba use has exploded as ethnic armed gangs switched from exporting all the pills abroad to increasingly targeting domestic users. Buddhist monks and military officers were among 13,500 people prosecuted for drugs crimes in 2016, up 50 percent from the previous year, according to data seen by AFP.
The huge seizures are often touted as proof these countries are making inroads into the vast regional drug trade. But law enforcement agents say they are just the tip of the iceberg as producers ramp up production to meet growing demand across Southeast Asia and increasingly in Bangladesh and India. And unlike their Latin American counterparts, cartel leaders in the Golden Triangle are rarely ever arrested or killed.
On an industrial estate on the outskirts of Bangkok, Thai authorities incinerated some $589 million worth of drugs including 7,800 kilogrammes of yaba pills and 1,185 kilogrammes of the more potent crystal methamphetamine.
At the biggest bonfire in Yangon, huge clouds of smoke filled the sky as authorities set fire to stacks of opium, heroin, cocaine and methamphetamine tablets worth almost $220 million.
Armed gangs churn out vast quantities of opium, heroin and cannabis and millions of caffeine-laced methamphetamine pills known as \"yaba\" which are then smuggled out across Southeast Asia. An estimated $385 million was burnt in three official ceremonies around Myanmar on Monday, according to a senior police officer in the capital Naypyidaw.
Myanmar in particular remains one of the world's great drug-producing nations, a dark legacy of decades of civil war in its frontier regions where troops and ethnic rebel forces have vied for control of the lucrative trade.
The burnings, to mark the UN International Day Against Drug Abuse and Illicit Trafficking, follow another year of record seizures of narcotics from the remote borderlands of Myanmar, Laos, southern China and northern Thailand.
Current legislation means anyone found with even small amounts of drugs can be jailed for years.

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