From Opium to Methamphetamines

The following sections are included:

• About the Author
• Contents

The fight against organized crime and especially the drug mafia is surprisingly reminiscent of Hercules’ fight with the Lernaean Hydra in the old Greek mythology. The Hydra was a poisonous monster living in Lake Lerna in the Peloponnes, described as a water-snake-like creature with nine heads. If one head was cut off, two new heads immediately emerged from the fresh wound. This ancient story seems to describe rather well the unsuccessful worldwide efforts of fighting the criminal drug gangs with policing methods and the available legal instruments. But the Greek mythology also had a positive ending for the fight. Hercules, the superhero of antiquity, eventually managed to defeat the Hydra with the help of his nephew Iolaus, who cauterized the hydra’s wounds with a torch and thus prevented the growth of new heads to eventually kill the monster…

Southeast Asia, geographically situated between India and China, has been influenced by these two ancient superpowers long before the arrival of traders and colonizers from Europe. The long coastlines and the reliable monsoon winds, alternating their direction from northeast to southwest, facilitated the maritime trade between the two giants for millennia and, at the same time, left their marks on the local populations. It is noteworthy, though, that this influence was accepted and incorporated into the local customs and traditions and often altered by the recipients into a new form, not simply copied from the original, including the spread of religious traditions. India’s cultural and religious influence brought Hinduism, Buddhism, and Islam to the region, Hinduism from the 1st century, Buddhism from the 3rd, and Islam from the 8th, with a more intense period during the Mughal Empire between the 16th and 18th centuries…

Starting with the 16th century influx of European long-distance traders, increasingly all countries with sufficient marine infrastructure followed the Portuguese pioneers and tried to get a share of the rich trading opportunities with the marvellously prosperous Mughal empire and China. In this race to riches, India, China, and Southeast Asia turned out to be no match for the greed and the aggressiveness of the European invaders. While the Mughal rule was already politically in decline and could be subdued step by step by the British East India Company, the Southeast Asian smaller polities including their less developed hinterlands were even easier to be colonized. In many places, there was military resistance but even in Mughal India which could flex its muscles with technically advanced armament and defended itself accordingly, the technical fire power and the determination of the colonial adventurers prevailed in the long run. As much as their determination is concerned, it is on hindsight more than obvious that the age of discoveries had generated ideas and ideologies of a natural hierarchy among ethnic groups, with “whites” on top and different “coloured” people below. The colours were pure inventions, except for the dark-brown and black Africans who had been victimized by the profitable transatlantic slave trade from the early 1600s, and with the help of “brown” Arab slave traders. Early classifications by Swedish botanist and physician Carl Linnaeus in 1735 distinguished four types of the homo sapiens, namely Europeans, Africans, and (native) Americans, as white, black, and red, and the “homo asiaticus” as “fuscus”, Latin for brownish or dark. In a later version in 1758 “fuscus” was replaced by “luridus”, a pale yellowish colour. Earlier travellers had described the Asians as “white”, even “white like us” but the “yellow” increasingly dominated the Western discourse which deteriorated to the metaphor of the “Yellow Peril” until today (see Keevak, 2019)…

Since the East India Company was also dominating the tea export to the British colonies in North America, the innovative ship building industry on the American East coast gave an easy starting position to shipping and trading entrepreneurs from there for participating in the Far East trade, starting soon after the declaration of independence in 1776. The first American ship arrived at Canton in 1784, and the important trading company from Boston, J. and T. H. Perkins, established a branch there in 1803. Fast American ships, the legendary clippers, participated in the opium business practically from the beginning. The journal for a Far East voyage 1789–1790 of the cargo ship Ruby from Boston shows, among the goods carried on board, the highest value for opium at 150 “pagodas”. The pagoda was a gold coin used by the British, Dutch, and French in the India trade of the era. Comparing that with the long list of other items being taken on board, the opium was equivalent in value to about “16,000 lbs of 1st quality table rice”…

After the opium wars which forced China to legalise opium, the country was flooded with Indian opium but also produced more and more herself. The main poppy growing areas were Sichuan and Yunnan which produced 19,100 tons in 1906, more than half of the whole country’s harvest. During this period, China had 13.5 million addicts, 27 percent of the adult male population, probably the highest level of mass addiction ever worldwide (see McCoy, 2020a)…

During the 19th century, three developments increased the consumption as well as the trade of opium. The first was an accelerated Chinese immigration fuelled by a growing demand for wage labourers who were regarded as cheap and hardworking by the employers and loyal on top when the employers were Chinese themselves. The second driving force was the ever-increasing opium production in China, and the third, of course, the consolidation of the colonial empires in the region after Britain, the Netherlands, France, and the United States respected their claims and acquisitions among themselves and did not compete for more territory anymore. Instead, they implemented opium control mechanisms known as “Opium Regie” or “Régie de l’Opium” in French Indochina and “opium farming”, in the British and Dutch colonies, meaning a centralized production with bureaucratic bookkeeping and distribution of the end products via licenced wholesale traders and decentralized distribution nearest to the users and addicts. In a more general economic perspective, opium played quite an important role in increasing Chinese overseas capital and in the economic modernization of Southeast Asia. At the end of the century, the franchise systems were more and more replaced by state-licenced opium dens which was de facto ending all the earlier attempts on reducing the drug abuse. As usual, financial considerations were stronger than moral scruples. The French opium regie in Saigon, established in 1881, was a monopoly of the colonial administration and was accommodated in an imposing building taken over from a rich Chinese opium trader. There, local opium refinement techniques were improved with the newest technical machinery from France to prepare smokable opium in small doses for sale. The boxes carried the official seal of the regie to guarantee the quality and discourage smuggling. The prices were fixed but adjustable to the regional differences in purchasing power, and for many years, the regie system contributed about a quarter of the overall colonial budget in French Indochina…

Traditionally, the different populations in the mountainous forest areas between Yunnan, Thailand, Laos, and Myanmar, often called “hill tribes”, grew poppies and produced opium for their own consumption and as a cash crop to buy all the supplies they could not find in the jungle. The supply and marketing of opium being reliably organized, there was no pressure to increase the relatively low level of local poppy cultivation in Southeast Asia. Burma, Thailand, and Indochina even managed to reduce it to about 15 tons per year in the 1940s. The interruption of the maritime traffic during WWII, though, cut the opium supply as well for French Indochina coming from the Middle East, namely Turkey and Persia. To avoid a substantial drop in colonial tax income, the French legalized the opium production in their territories. The Hmong populations in Laos and Tongking in Northern Vietnam increased their opium output by 800 percent, from 8.4 tons in 1940 to 60.6 tons in 1944 (McCoy, 1972, p. 115)…

Colonialism has left decisive marks in this part of Southeast Asia which Britain has dominated increasingly between 1786, when the East India Company took over Penang, 1819, when Singapore became a crown colony, 1824 with the acquisition of Malacca, and ending only with the independence of Burma in 1948 and the Federation of Malaya in 1957. Among the main ingredients of the colonial heirloom were the English language, a functioning civil service, the judicial system, and mixed populations as a result of labour migration according to the necessities of the economic exploitation. All of these came in different intensity but the overall cultural influence, which had attracted the respective local elites to British universities, continues until today. English language media continue to thrive in the former colonies, and with the economic development in Malaysia and Singapore, Britain not only invested there but could attract sizeable investments in industry and property from there and remains an important trading partner. Probably based on traditions in the educational systems and culture-oriented curricula like literature and history, many citizens, though no longer being British subjects, feel closer to the former colonizer than the anything but painless separation process might have suggested. In the opposite direction, similar emotional bonds are common as well. The former colonizers have positive or nostalgic feelings for their lost empire and tend to invest there more money and more often there than in countries less familiar to them. This, of course, is not a phenomenon typical or exclusive for Britain’s former colonies, it happens as well in former French Indochina and former Dutch Indonesia or in the formerly American Philippines…

It is a common truism that Thailand has never been colonized. That was due to a balancing act throughout the late 18th and the 19th centuries between the British empire’s tentacles from the West over the uncontrollable and 2,416 km long border with Myanmar, the British incursion from Malaya by taking over the Sultanates of Kedah, Perlis, Kelantan, and Terengganu under the Anglo-Siamese Treaty of 1909. From the other side it was the growing advances of the French in Indochina in the East, where Thailand shares another 1,845 km long border with Laos, and 817 km with Cambodia. Until recently, large sectors of these borders have been either in rugged mountainous or densely forested areas with limited road access, so that controlling the smuggling with caravans of mules was close to impossible…

After witnessing the profitability of their long-distance trade and the colonial expansion of Portugal, Spain, and rival Britain, France was the next big player in the globalization drive of the 16th to the 19th centuries. Several of their acquisitions, especially in North America, India, and the Caribbean were lost or sold after the country was decisively weakened at the end of the Seven Years’ War (1756–1763). One of the spectacular losses was the “Louisiana Purchase” in 1803, in which France, after actively supporting the independence from Britain, sold more than 2 million square km to the young United States for 15 million dollars. Today, this early period is known as the First French Colonial Empire. Starting from the conquest of Algiers in 1830, France acquired their Second Colonial Empire, predominantly in North and West Africa and in Southeast Asia. Relations with Indochina had a much longer incubation period, though, pioneered by the Jesuit missionary Alexandre de Rhodes in the early 17th century. Missionary support for the Nguyen dynasty in Vietnam, which later turned into an anti-Catholic movement, provided the justification for a French military intervention, starting in 1858 in Da Nang and a year later in Saigon. Meeting with fierce resistance, the French had to reinforce their troops, until, in 1862, Vietnam signed a peace treaty and ceded three provinces, which France formally acquired as the “Colony of Cochinchina” in 1864 and enlarged it by another three provinces three years later. The Sino-French War, 1884–1885, ended in a stalemate but France could take over Tonkin in the North of Vietnam from China…

After nearly seven decades of a bloody independence war, the Netherlands freed the part of their country which was under Spanish-Habsburg rule and were recognized as an independent state in the Peace of Westphalia in 1648. They developed fast into a European economic powerhouse of sorts. As brilliant ship builders, running with a small population of 1.5 million inhabitants a fleet of over 2000 ships, more than Britain and France had together at that time, they soon joined the Far East maritime trade so far dominated by Portugal and Spain. As a competitor and business model for the British EIC, the establishment of the “Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie” (VOC) or Dutch East India Company, equipped by a Royal Charter and a 21-year monopoly on the East India trade in 1602, turned out to be the basis for a huge colonial empire, roughly 46 times bigger than the motherland. The Dutch influence on what is now Indonesia lasted a total of 347 years, from 1602 to 1949, and even today, the Netherlands are among the biggest investors in the former colony…

Long before the archipelago which is now the Philippines was “discovered” by the Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan in 1521 and claimed for the Spanish crown, several commercial centres like Manila, Cebu, Mindanao, or Sulu had already trade relations with Song Dynasty China, Japan, Siam, India, Cambodia, Borneo, and the Moluccas. Magellan did not survive his discovery; he was killed by the local population in the battle of Mactan. The Spanish colonization started with the arrival of Miguel López de Legazpi in 1565. In 1571, Manila became the capital of the “Spanish East Indies”, which encompassed all Spanish territories in Asia and the Pacific. The new colony was governed from Mexico as part of the Viceroyalty of New Spain, and after Mexico became independent in 1821, directly from Madrid. The Catholic mission played an important role throughout the Spanish rule and transformed the archipelago into a predominantly Christian nation, except on Muslim majority Mindanao Island. Being attacked by the Dutch and the British and having to quell numerous local anti-colonial uprisings, the Philippines were not yielding sufficient economic gains for Spain. On the contrary, during the time the administration was run from Mexico it had to be regularly subsidised with tons of silver from there. The port of Manila was closed to all ships except for the “Galleon Trade” between Acapulco and Manila, implemented to support the Spanish rule over the archipelago. This trade was a state monopoly which ended only after 1821 with the loss of Mexico…

Southeast Asia has been a market for drugs since the early 1800s, a hub for the British opium trade between India and China, and a heaven for drug users. The region was force-fed with opium by the colonial powers, thus generating funds for their masters, and eventually becoming a big producer of opium in the Golden Triangle. On this historical background, it does not come as a surprise that the mechanisms and side effects of the drug subculture, namely smuggling, secret society traditions, corruption in the civil service, in the military and in the police, money laundering, and also political involvement in unlawful money flows, are all surviving in different forms in the region…

All over the region, drug use and drug abuse have increased and continue to do so. The following tables are condensed figures from the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) World Drug Report 2020. One of the most dramatic findings is that UNODC estimates the Asia-Pacific methamphetamine market at 61.5 billion USD with Southeast Asia being by far the biggest consumer…

As a theoretical concept, political economy has been eclipsed by a series of modern economic schools and theories. However, especially with regard to the role of drugs as a basically unnecessary product for the survival of humankind, analysing the connection between policies and economic outcomes, who gains and who loses, is a worthwhile approach. For the historical opium trade and especially its industrialization by the British East India Company, the gains and losses were distributed in an excessively unbalanced way. The British profits exploded at the expense of India and China and shifted the centre of economic power from Asia to Europe. Despite moral considerations discussed at Westminster, like the debates about slavery, the drug trade remained without policy changes for more than a century. Only during the international anti-opium movement at the beginning of the 20th century and the development of a kind of moral shaming between the participating colonial nations, first measures to abolish this official drug trade were reluctantly implemented…

More than probably, there is no such thing as a drug-free society. The history of humankind, and of course the history of drugs in Southeast Asia as described in this book, suggest that “chemical escapism” or the wish for self-optimization with the help of drugs is universal and part of the complex wiring of our brains. The variations of method and medium are endless, from worldly and religious types of elation, rapture, exultation, euphoria, and ecstasy to mind, attention, as well as body enhancing and intensifying aphrodisiacs, nothing has been untested and hardly anything has escaped commercialization. One of the central problems for attempts at eradicating dangerous drugs is the enormous market value which most of them can reach, and which is rather being increased by cracking down on users and traders and driving them into the underground. Trading in addictive and finally life-threatening drugs is definitely criminal, there is no excuse possible. On the other hand, a lack of legal employment opportunities or lack of employability in connection with fast and hefty profits will always drive enough desperados into the illegal drug trade. The magnitude of the turnover, dozens of billions per year, also attract people from the higher ranks and from different hierarchical levels of the underworld supremos, and, as the scandals and detentions show, even from areas where they should not be expected, namely customs, police, army, and finally politicians who think they are above the law…

The following sections are included:

• Chapter 18 (Annex 1) The Main Drugs Used in Southeast Asia
  • Overview from the UNODC World Drug Report 2020
  • Opium and Opioids
  • Heroin
  • Fentanyl
  • Cocaine
  • Amphetamines
  • Methamphetamines
  • MDMA/Ecstasy
  • Ketamine
  • New Psychoactive Substances (NPS)
  • Yaba or Shabu
  • Cannabis/Marijuana/Ganja
  • Kratom
  • LSD
• Chapter 19 (Annex 2) Anti-narcotics Plans and Strategies in Southeast Asia
• Chapter 20 (Annex 3) Drug Information Sources
• Chapter 21 (Annex 4) A “Remarkable” Source for Drug Purchases

The following sections are included:

• Bibliography
• Index