Phnom Penh, Dec. 28, (dpa/GNA) – Drug traffickers in South-east Asia are amongst a select group of workers not worried about job loss, even as employment uncertainty brought on by the coronavirus pandemic strikes many other sectors.
Their businesses seem to have survived the pandemic largely unscathed, despite supply chains being disrupted worldwide. But while their jobs may be safe from business disruption, the same can’t be said about the risks they face due to the region’s heavy-handed drug wars.
“Drug trafficking has continued at high volumes in South-east Asia despite Covid-19, particularly in the lower Mekong, where methamphetamine production has surged and prices per kilo and on the street have dropped again,” Jeremy Douglas, regional United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime representative, told dpa.
“2019 was a record year for supply, and 2020 has broken those records,” he said.
South-east Asia has long grappled with cheap and available drugs. The Golden Triangle – the area where the borders of Laos, Myanmar and Thailand meet – is one of the most intense drug-trafficking hubs in the world. Drug production and trafficking are estimated to have brought in profits of at least 71 billion dollars in 2019.
And the expansion of drug production and smuggling routes poses a grave secondary danger: a series of brutal drug wars has already killed tens of thousands and resulted in many times more imprisoned, during a pandemic in which imprisonment often means being vulnerable to a greater risk of catching the deadly new coronavirus.
In May, for example, a couple of months after Covid-19 had been declared a global pandemic, police in Myanmar announced they had made one of Asia’s largest drug busts in history.
Fast-forward six months and drug crackdowns are still going strong. In a historic bust in mid-November, neighbouring Thailand reportedly seized ketamine worth nearly 1 billion dollars, amounting to a total of 11.5 tons.
“I haven’t seen anything to suggest that the number of people arrested and the number of anti-drug measures by governments in the region have decreased,” Gloria Lai, regional director of Asia for the International Drug Policy Consortium (IDPC), told dpa.
“For example, even in times of [Covid-19 related] lockdown, more police checkpoints are set up, resulting in people being stopped and sometimes searched for drugs,” she said.
But while governments insist drug wars decrease dependency, they have done little to staunch the drug flow.
“There is no solid evidence that increasing the intensity of enforcement raises the actual costs for drug traffickers,” the Global Commission on Drug Policy noted. “Moreover, even if costs do rise, consumer demand has proven to be highly resilient in the face of price increases.”
According to Douglas, street price for meth tablets in Bangkok had fallen to about 3 dollars, down from 5 or 6 dollars three years ago.
“Similar drops have occurred across the region as supply has surged,” he said. The region “is experiencing a sustained flood of meth despite the pandemic.”
While the coronavirus has barely hindered drug trafficking, the continued arrests of offenders pose immense risks for prisoners in the region, who already face rampant skin diseases and infections in overcrowded facilities.
This is exacerbated by the coronavirus pandemic.
While some governments have made efforts to reduce prison populations and improve hygiene during the Covid-19 pandemic, conditions seem to have improved only little.
For example, Thailand suspended about 8,000 jail sentences to mitigate risks by the coronavirus pandemic in April; in the same month, Myanmar announced it would release 25,000 prisoners.
In the wake of a new outbreak in a Malaysian prison, some drug-related inmates were moved to temporary prisons.
“In Thailand, it almost seems to be business as usual, with frequent news about new prison measures, but not in relation to Covid,” Lai said.
In Indonesia, Malaysia and the Philippines, coronavirus transmission rates were high, she said, also mirrored in increasing rates of Covid-19 cases in prisons.
According to Justice Project Pakistan, which monitors cases in prisons worldwide, at least 611 prisoners have been infected with the coronavirus in Indonesia and 1,156 in Malaysia. The Philippines recorded 1,023 cases in prisons, with 14 deaths, according to the organization.
By comparison, Germany recorded seven cases in prisons.
While Cambodia has not officially announced any cases, the lack of cases could be attributed to a lack of testing: although the director of prisons and his family members tested positive for the virus in December, none of the prisoners were tested for the virus.
Already in March, severe overcrowding prompted Amnesty International to call prisons a “ticking time bomb,” ill-equipped to deal with a pandemic.
GNA