Bertil Lintner and Michael Black. Merchants of Madness: The Methamphetamine Explosion in the Golden Triangle. Chiang Mai: Silkworm Books, 2009, xii+180p.

Abstract

Merchants of Madness: The Methamphetamine Explosion in the Golden TriangleBERTIL LINTNER and MICHAEL BLACKChiang Mai: Silkworm Books, 2009, xii+180p.In recent years, amphetamine type substances (ATS) have become the most widely used illegal narcotic drugs in Mainland Southeast Asia. These substances contain the medicinal alkaloid ephedrine which amply found in Asiatic species of the Ephedra Family. Ephedra known in Chinese as ma huang (), Yellow Cannabis. The plants themselves are mostly deciduous shrubs growing in arid areas in the middle and north of China and points westward.As Bertil Lintner and Michael Black show clearly in Merchants of Madness, production and use of ATS in the region has exploded in recent years, far surpassing the total number of opiate users. Because ATS in this region essentially a local phenomena with little exported to Europe or North America, much less known about it outside Southeast Asia.However, within Thailand and Burma as well as its neighbors, ATS has become a serious problem. As long ago as 1996, UNDCP officials (the United Nations International Drug Control Programme, forerunner of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, UNODC) were becoming aware that ATS production in the region was accelerating even as opium poppy cultivation and use was stagnating if not actually declining. In its 2010 Situation Assessment on Amphetamine-Type Stimulants (UNODC Global SMART Programme 2010), UNODC noted that 50-80 percent of the world's ATS users are in East and Southeast Asia, that almost 100 million tablets were seized in 2009, and that production increasing mostly in border areas in North and East Shan State.As with opium, ephedrine has both positive and negative properties. It stimulates the brain, increases the heart rate, and expands the bronchial tubes. It also increases the metabolism. Ephedrine has long been used in China to treat asthma and other ailments. In the United States ephedrine the active ingredient in pharmaceutical preparations such as Benzedrine which was an inhalant for the treatment of asthma. However, when it was learned that ephedrine had a euphoric effect, people began removing the paper strip inside the inhaler and swallowed it. Bennies grew so popular that Ian Fleming had 007 using them in three of his novels. There are websites that claim that ephedra is a plant with a PR problem, has a reputation as a troublesome herb, and can contribute to weight loss and other benefits (i.e. http://www.diagnose-me.com/treat/ T327930.html).The Asiatic ephedra plants are not native to the countries of Southeast Asia but to Mongolia and the north of China, where the substance was formerly known as ma huang. In Thailand it was called ya ma. Probably ma originally was derived from the Chinese ma huang but when used in Thai it came to be pronounced with the same tone as ma, meaning horse. As Lintner and Black well explain, this horse medicine became widely known after World War II among long distance truckers as useful for staying awake on long drives with an estimated 300,000 users in Thailand.As for negative side-effects, Lintner and Black, as well as the Thai Government, UNODC, and other involved agencies point out that the drug can cause aggressive behavior leading to murder, kidnappings, and other violent crime. Unlike opiates which generally sedate the user, ATS can lead to conflicts and much harm to innocent bystanders.Ya ma remained something of a niche drug for decades until the 1990s when groups in the northeast of Burma, such as the United Wa State Army and other breakaway groups from the Communist Party of Burma, began producing large quantities of ATS.It was at this time, and through a marketing process not fully understood (but discussed in depth by Chouvy and Meissonnier [2004, 81-103]), ATS use spread rapidly and particularly among school children-mostly boys in their second year of secondary school (grade 8 in the 12 year Thai pre-university educational system). …