October was a stellar month for the Lao police. On the 27th an officer in Bokeo, a northern province, waved down a truck packed with Lao Brewery beer crates. Contained inside them were 55.6m methamphetamine pills and over 1.5 tonnes of crystal meth, a more potent version of the drug. It was Asia’s largest drug bust ever, according to the un. Just the week before, the police had seized 16m amphetamine tablets during two operations in the same area.
Law-enforcement agencies in South-East Asia have grown accustomed to breaking records. In almost every year between 2011 and 2020, the authorities seized more meth, as the drug is commonly known, than they had the year before. Between 2015 and 2019, the only other region to impound as much of the stuff as East and South-East Asia (which the un groups together) was North America—though the overall volume of drugs flowing through Asia is probably greater, because authorities there are more corrupt and less well-equipped to intercept traffickers, says Jeremy Douglas of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (unodc), an un agency. And recorded seizures are likely to be just the tip of the iceberg.
