The great 'Yaba' epidemic

Bangladesh is
the latest country to fall for this neatly packaged dose of stimulants that
includes caffeine, vanilla flavorings and bulking agents along with the meth.
It's usually smoked off tinfoil, as the pill melts and the user inhales plumes
of vanilla-scented vapor. A densely populated nation of some 150 million people,
Bangladesh is now on the front lines of the yaba epidemic, with Jane's
Intelligence Review, the respected journal on international security, asserting
that the trafficking organization in nearby Burma "is deliberately providing a
promotional rate for exports to Bangladesh."

Burma (also known as
Myanmar), by far the largest producer of yaba, is a country whose borderlands
are often beyond the reach of the government, which only recently became a
nominally civilian entity after almost 50 years of military rule. These
hinterlands are home to rebel outfits like the United Wa State Army (UWSA) -- an
armed ethnic insurgent group that is believed to have tens of thousands of
members -- which have found the lucrative yaba trade to be their new calling,
often in connivance with a corrupt central government.

Jane's notes that
"unconfirmed media reports of uniformed UWSA personnel seen in the [Burmese]
border town of Maungdaw in 2010 raise the possibility of a UWSA trading office
having been set up there."

According to Bertil Lintner, a veteran
journalist and author of Merchants of Madness, the seminal work on the trade:
"The United Wa State Army is by far the main player and controls large chunks of
territory along the Chinese frontier [with Burma] in the northeast, and a
smaller base area adjacent to Thailand in the south. Inside this area, yaba
producers can set up labs and pay 'taxes' to the UWSA."

More Profitable
Than Heroin

For generations, heroin was the most profitable drug produced
in the border area between Burma, Thailand and Laos known as the Golden
Triangle, with the profits often being used to fund various
insurgencies.

Professor Alfred McCoy detailed this trade in his book The
Politics of Heroin in South East Asia, in which he alleges that the
anticommunist Chinese nationalists known as the Kuomintang (KMT), in exile in
northern Burma, produced and sold heroin with the help of the CIA to fund their
operations. Indeed, he quotes one KMT commander as saying: "We have to continue
to fight the evil of Communism, and to fight you must have an army, and an army
must have guns, and to buy guns you must have money. In these mountains, the
only money is opium."

Over the course of several decades, however, a
complex series of political events led to the rise of the multibillion-dollar
yaba industry, which has largely supplanted the heroin trade. For one thing, in
1989, the Communist Party of Burma imploded in a coup. Chinese funding for the
country dried up and a new entity, the UWSA, was born. After years of
insurgency, the rebel group signed a peace deal with the Burmese military
government that had "business opportunities implicit in the agreement,"
according to Jane's Intelligence Review, which also states that "the leading
pioneer of the shift into methamphetamine was Wei Xuegang, a senior UWSA
commander."

Meanwhile, in Thailand in the late 1980s, a variant of
methamphetamine known as yama (horse drug) started to gain popularity, primarily
among truck drivers who needed to stay up all night. Yama's surge in popularity
came about, ironically, after the Thai government banned the sale of
conventional amphetamines in 1988. Soon Thai students also began using yama,
which was produced and sold illegally. In 1996, as the Thai police started to
encounter its effects on young users, they coined a new name for it -- yaba
(madness drug).

With the market in Thailand opening up, producers like
Wei Xuegang sensed an opportunity to shift from heroin, which had long been a
profitable export, to yaba because, as Jane's notes, it was a potent stimulant,
"far better suited to markets in a region embarking on rapid economic growth."
It was also easier to produce than heroin and less reliant on erratic
harvests.

Emerging Markets

Yaba grew slowly in the 1990s, with the
exports largely confined to Thailand. By the turn of the millennium, Thailand's
version of the DEA, the Office of Narcotics Control Board, estimated that one
billion of these small pink pills were being smuggled across the border
annually.

This situation could hardly escape the attention of Thai
politicians. In 2003, Thailand's prime minister, Thaksin Shinawatra, declared
war on the yaba trade. In a single year, Thai police killed 2,500 alleged users
and dealers of the drug, all without trial. It soon became clear to yaba
producers that they needed to open new markets.

That's when yaba started
to appear in Bangladesh. Tarique says his habit began in 2003, after he tried it
at his brother's wedding. "I used to take it to hang out with my friends and
roam around, just to have fun -- but after a while it changed me; it changed my
mentality. After having it, I didn't feel like talking to anyone. I was all
alone. I was freaking out because of a little pin drop of sound... I mean
paranoia," he adds.

Tarique is seated in the CREA rehab center in Dhaka,
the capital of Bangladesh. He says his honeymoon with yaba lasted four years --
and then things became increasingly desperate. "I took 300,000 taka [$3,750]
that was meant for my exam registration and spent that on yaba, and then I ran
away from home. That's when my parents knew I was into yaba," he says. "I spent
the money in seven days -- it's a lot of money."

He also started dealing
to fund his habit. "Once people become addicted, they have to," he says. "The
bigger dealers will give you yaba pills for free." Tarique would then sell them
to his friends. "My dealer was the biggest dealer in Dhaka -- he still is. He
takes them from Teknaf, near Burma, and then he brings it over here. He was not
from a wealthy family; he doesn't take drugs. He does it because of money -- to
survive." The dealer would give Tarique around 100 pills at 10 a.m.; by 5 p.m.
he would be sold out.

Tarun Kanti Gayen, the director of the CREA rehab
center where Tarique is being treated, says: "Before 2011, we were receiving
yaba clients, but the numbers were very low -- 80% of our clients were heroin
users... Since 2011, the numbers started rising, and right now around 60 to 70
percent are yaba users."

According to Shafiq Ur Rahman, the director
general of police in Chittagong, Bangladesh's second-largest city, which is
close to the Burmese border, they first noticed a growth in smuggling five years
ago. Since then, interdiction rates suggest an incredible growth in the yaba
trade. In 2008, the Bangladeshi authorities seized some 36,000 pills. One year
later, that number had risen to 130,000. By 2012, the exponential growth in the
drug's popularity led to seizures of nearly two million pills in a single
year.

Authorities in Thailand estimate that these seizures represent only
10 percent of what is actually being smuggled, since law enforcement in
Bangladesh has far fewer resources than in Thailand. Aiding the trade is rampant
corruption. Tarique alleges police connivance: "Even the police are dealers over
there [in his neighborhood]. You won't believe me, but it's true." He also
claims that his dealer set him up. Tarique was scheduled to receive a delivery
of 700 pills, but then the cops suddenly showed up, confiscated the drugs,
released his dealer and put Tarique in prison.

"I cried for days -- hell
is better than jail," Tarique says. In Bangladesh, ordinary criminals are mixed
with the lifers, who would "forcefully try and make love," as well as beat up
newcomers. The jail was also awash in drugs. He got out after three weeks, but
only because his family was able to bribe a judge.

"A Well-Organized
Export Drive"

Yaba is cheap to make, which means it's especially
attractive as a source of profits. One pill costs around nine cents to produce
in a lab in northern Burma. By the time the pills reach the town of Maungdaw on
the Burma-Bangladesh border, they fetch around 25 cents apiece. Once the
shipment crosses the border, the pills have been marked up to 60 cents each;
then the price virtually doubles at every step as the pills move closer to the
Bangladeshi capital. Once in Dhaka, a good pill will cost around $6.25 on the
street, with lower-quality pills going for around $3.

"Nowadays,
everybody is selling yaba -- you can find it across the street [from the rehab
center]," Tarique says. "Four to five years back, it was rare, but now it's
dangerous... you can find yaba everywhere." He adds that you can even have the
pills delivered to your house, often by poor young children enlisted as
couriers.

Despite the booming trade, CREA director Tarun argues that "the
demand is not created by the users. Yes, it is maintained by the users," he
adds, "but in the initiation phase, the demand is created by the peddlers or
dealers -- so it's all about the availability of the drug." His argument is
corroborated by the research conducted by Jane's, which notes: "The striking
surge since 2009 and the distance of the Bangladesh border from production
centers in Shan State [in northeast Burma] appear to reflect a well-organized
export drive rather than a more gradual growth in the user
base."

Bangladesh is indeed a fertile market. The country has a
population of over 150 million, almost three times that of Thailand. While the
majority of people are still very poor, the country's economy, like many in
Asia, is growing fast, at around five to six percent every year. This has meant
a burgeoning middle class. And since Bangladesh is also a Muslim-majority
nation, alcohol is banned and hard to come by, which means that students or
affluent young people are short on ideas for fun at weekends.

The
country's drug culture, meanwhile, is also evolving. Up until the 1980s, few
narcotics were consumed in Bangladesh except for marijuana. This was a
traditional, even spiritual practice that saw government-registered dispensaries
selling pot over the counter. Rural communities still grow their own bush weed
and relieve a hard day in the fields with a toke.

However, an official
ban on marijuana in the 1980s soon saw heroin flooding the market. "Ganja was
restricted from the 1980s under the military rule of Ershad," says Tarun,
referring to Hussain Muhammad Ershad, the Bangladeshi autocrat who ruled from
1983 to 1990. "After that, we saw a rise in the use of hard drugs -- so maybe
there is a correlation."

As a result of the ganja ban, Bangladeshis
replaced marijuana with heroin and, latterly, yaba. Many suspect that Ershad's
business associates were involved in the heroin trade. Moreover, Ershad was
staunchly pro-American during the Cold War. Bearing in mind that heroin in
Bangladesh has always been of Afghan origin, it certainly raises the question
why the sudden influx occurred at precisely the time that pro-American forces in
Afghanistan were producing heroin to fund the anti-Soviet
insurgency.

Heroin is still very cheap and prevalent in Bangladesh. Tarun
estimates that a small packet or hit retails for around 60 cents -- around 10
times less than the cost of a good yaba pill, despite the fact that yaba is
easier to produce. But heroin is considered "a low-class drug; it's not a drug
of the gentleman," Tarun explains. "Yaba is white-collar, so those who take yaba
are higher-class, because it's expensive."

The predominance of yaba is
also tied to the ascent of modern Asia. Much like the growth of cocaine use in
the West in the 1980s, yaba fits with the accelerated times. According to Tarun,
business executives and directors will take a break and bust out some pink pills
and tinfoil for a quick mid-afternoon meth binge and then "work beyond their
schedule."

While the Bangladeshi government is "not very sensitive" to
the issue, Tarun says, that is beginning to change. In August, the country
witnessed perhaps its most sensational crime involving the drug.

A
teenager named Oishee had become accustomed to going out and doing yaba with her
friends. Her policeman father became aware that something was up, so he grounded
her. So frustrated was Oishee with her punishment that she drugged both her
parents -- and once they were sound asleep, she stabbed them to
death.

Tarun says that he has seen a marked increase in psychiatric
problems in the people at his rehab center since the start of the yaba boom,
with as many as 64 percent of yaba users being afflicted, compared to only 10
percent of heroin users.

It is clear from across the region, then, that
not only have governments failed to stem the flow of yaba, but that they have
often also prepared the ground by criminalizing more benign substances. And in a
pattern familiar from our own War on Drugs, while interdiction rates have
reached record highs, the growth of yaba's popularity shows no signs of
slowing.

Tarique cites people he knows who "are frequently going to Burma
and coming back to Bangladesh -- from them we know the Burmese authorities are
not taking the appropriate steps." Likewise for the authorities in his own
nation: "For some unknown reason, they are not taking the appropriate
action."

Source: http://www.news.myanmaronlinecentre.com/2014/04/27/the-great-yaba-epidemic/