Mekong countries and UN to fight growing drug menace in Southeast Asia

To tackle the ever-increasing drug menace in the Asia-Pacific, 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. 

The Golden Triangle, which consists of northern Myanmar and parts of Thailand and Laos, is known as the hub of illicit drug production and trafficking.

Opium and heroin production down

Though the cultivation of opium production and heroin refining have declined in the past few years, it has become the heart of Asia-Pacific methamphetamine trade. As per the UNODC estimates, the trade was worthed at a whopping $61.4 billion in 2018, up from an estimated $15 billion just five years earlier.

Organised traffickers

The trafficking groups seem to have become increasingly sophisticated due to the presence of groups like the Sam Gor syndicate, that can funnel tonnes of drugs from the Golden Triangle to countries stretching from Japan to New Zealand with the ability to adapt to law enforcement methods and able to shift trafficking routes to evade authorities.

According to Jeremy Douglas, the UNODC Cheif in Southeast Asia, the obstacle posed by groups such as these is massive because they traffic drugs out using multiple borders at any one time and are also involved in laundering money through numerous businesses across the Mekong.

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With this agreement, Douglas hopes that cooperation among nations will be more organised, systematic, and efficient.

The governments of the five southeast countries have also decided to work jointly on health services, preventive education and to intercept and keep up with the chemicals that are being used as precursors for the production of methamphetamine and other synthetic drugs.

The war on drugs has been ongoing in all the member nations as well as other countries in the Asia-Pacific. Most notably the war on drugs that is being waged in the Philipines under the reign of President Rodrigo Duterte.

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The Philipines President has been extremely harsh on his crackdown on all those in the drug trade, dealers, peddlers, and users. He has also been criticised for using extreme violence and extra-judicial killing in order to get results.