The political economy of the opium trade: Implications for Shan state

Abstract

Abstract This article is about the Shan opium-heroin problem which figures largely in many journalistic and academic accounts of political events in Burma, but which has, paradoxically, been neglected. Rather, it has been “hollywoodized” with images of “opium” armies, heroin “empires,” colorful drug “kings,” and warlord-princes, etc., to the extent that it has more or less become but a dramatic backdrop, an “exotic unknowable.” This article is a more mundane account of the opium-heroin phenomenon. I will deal with it from the economic-political perspective, with particular focus on the basic mechanism of the Shan opium-heroin industry. Specifically, I will deal with the actors involved and their role in what is the only viable and integrated (locally and internationally) industry to emerge from Burma in the over three decades of military rule. My contention, in sum, is that the Shan opium-heroin issue constitutes only a part of the regional and global informal complex of investment, trade, and profit, in which are involved a host of non-Shan actors, whose interests are primarily economic; that basically, it is a transnational/global agro-business, no different, in substance and dynamics, from any other lucrative agro-business; and that Shan peasants, and to some extent, rebel armies, cannot be in any way regarded as “winners” in, or the main beneficiaries of, the “illegal” and “unregulated” informal economy of investment, trade, and profit, that spans borders, regions, and oceans.