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NY TIMES: Crystal Meth Is North Korea's Trendiest Lunar New Years Gift

neversickanymore

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Crystal Meth Is North Korea's Trendiest Lunar New Years Gift
MIKE IVES
2/12/2019


HONG KONG - Like many across East Asia, North Koreans have been exchanging presents this month to celebrate the Lunar New Year. But rather than tea, sweets or clothing, some in this impoverished, isolated country are giving the gift of crystal meth.

The gifting and use of methamphetamine, a powerful stimulant that has been blamed in health and addiction crises around the world, is said to be a well-established custom in North Korea. Users are said to inject or snort the drug as casually as they might smoke a cigarette, with little awareness of its addictive qualities or destructive effects.


North Koreans visiting the statues of two former leaders, Kim Il-sung, left, and Kim Jong-il, his son, in Pyongyang last week. In the 1990s, North Korea?s cash-poor government began manufacturing methamphetamine for export.
HONG KONG ? Like many across East Asia, North Koreans have been exchanging presents this month to celebrate the Lunar New Year. But rather than tea, sweets or clothing, some in this impoverished, isolated country are giving the gift of crystal meth.

The gifting and use of methamphetamine, a powerful stimulant that has been blamed in health and addiction crises around the world, is said to be a well-established custom in North Korea. Users are said to inject or snort the drug as casually as they might smoke a cigarette, with little awareness of its addictive qualities or destructive effects.

?Meth, until recently, has been largely seen inside North Korea as a kind of very powerful energy drug ? something like Red Bull, amplified,? said Andrei Lankov, an expert on the North at Kookmin University in Seoul, South Korea, who directs the news site NK News. That misconception, he said, highlighted a ?significant underestimation? within the country of the general risks of drug abuse.
Methamphetamine was first introduced to the Korean Peninsula during the Japanese colonial period, in the early 20th century, and defectors have reported that the North Korean military provided methamphetamine to its soldiers in the years after World War II. Since the 1970s, many North Korean diplomats have been arrested abroad for drug smuggling.

In the 1990s, the North?s cash-poor government began manufacturing meth for export, about two decades after it began sponsoring local opium cultivation and the production of opiates, according to a 2014 study by Sheena Chestnut Greitens, a University of Missouri political scientist. Finished meth was typically sent across the northern border into China, or handed off at sea to criminal organizations like Chinese triads or the Japanese yakuza.
But around the mid-2000s, meth production that was ?clearly sponsored and controlled? by the government began to decline, the study said. That left a surplus of people with the skills to manufacture meth, many of whom created small-scale meth labs and began selling to the local market.
Amid a chronic lack of health care supplies and medical treatments in North Korea, many people take opiates and amphetamine-type stimulants as perceived medicinal alternatives, Ms. Greitens, the political scientist, said in an email. ?Methamphetamine is highly addictive, so it?s easy for casual users to develop more dependence and addiction over relatively short amounts of time,? she said.


continued https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/worl...nar-new-years-gift/ar-BBTtOcj?ocid=spartandhp
 
The North Korea-meth story has been popping up for a few years now. It's impossible to tell how much is truth and how much is sensationalism.
 
It sounds like this "Radio Free Asia" is a democratic propaganda machine originally set up by the CIA.

Radio Free Asia


So i'm not putting much stock into the validity of these claims. I didn't even realize this sort of thing was still going on.

Its interesting to see a respected paper like the Times fall for and reprint this propaganda. I think America has really slipped into scary and scummy territory by allowing the shadier parts of her government to be privatized, but still funded by the tax payers. It creates a space where undesirable government behavior can hide behind laws intended for private companies; They still enjoy full government funding, but little or no government oversite or public scrutiny. It allows the government to avoid accountability for its behavior.
 
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