23536
Bluelight Crew
North Korea used to be an industrial powerhouse. Not anymore. Today, the country can't feed its own people. Its cities go dark every night for lack of electricity.
Yet helplessness wasn't the original plan. The original plan for the country's economy had a name. It was called "juche," or self-reliance. The idea was that all North Korean problems should be solved by North Koreans.
Every North Korean knows the concept of juche inside and out. The country takes self-reliance very seriously. And if self-reliance requires drug-dealing and the smuggling of counterfeit goods, then so be it.
. . .
Ma worked for Kim Jong Il's internal police force. Her job was was to track down drug smugglers. That sounds like pretty normal law enforcement, except for one difference. She was supposed to stop small-time Korean drug dealers in order to protect the biggest drug dealer in the country: the North Korean government.
Ma told us the North Korean government produced opium on a large scale. But it hid its poppy fields from most of the population. Ma only saw the fields because she was an insider.
After harvesting the fields, the government would put its empty factories to use. The government would turn on its production lines at night and process opium, Ma says. Then they would pack the product in plastic cubes the size of dictionaries and smuggle it out of the country through China.
This was in the mid-eighties, when opium was the big drug. These days the drug of choice for export out of North Korea is ice, also know as methamphetamine.
full http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2011...feiting-smuggling-how-north-korea-makes-money
Yet helplessness wasn't the original plan. The original plan for the country's economy had a name. It was called "juche," or self-reliance. The idea was that all North Korean problems should be solved by North Koreans.
Every North Korean knows the concept of juche inside and out. The country takes self-reliance very seriously. And if self-reliance requires drug-dealing and the smuggling of counterfeit goods, then so be it.
. . .
Ma worked for Kim Jong Il's internal police force. Her job was was to track down drug smugglers. That sounds like pretty normal law enforcement, except for one difference. She was supposed to stop small-time Korean drug dealers in order to protect the biggest drug dealer in the country: the North Korean government.
Ma told us the North Korean government produced opium on a large scale. But it hid its poppy fields from most of the population. Ma only saw the fields because she was an insider.
After harvesting the fields, the government would put its empty factories to use. The government would turn on its production lines at night and process opium, Ma says. Then they would pack the product in plastic cubes the size of dictionaries and smuggle it out of the country through China.
This was in the mid-eighties, when opium was the big drug. These days the drug of choice for export out of North Korea is ice, also know as methamphetamine.
full http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2011...feiting-smuggling-how-north-korea-makes-money
