Oceans of dirt-cheap meth headed to Australia from war-racked Myanmar

Armed groups and organised crime syndicates are pumping out drugs at an industrial scale in Myanmar, where there is no one to stop them. Their main target is Australians, who are willing to pay more for their drugs than anywhere else in the world.

Crystal meth packaged in tea bags and believed to come from Myanmar is intercepted by Indonesian police on its way to Australia. Picture: Supplied

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“Industrial” volumes of cheap methamphetamine are surging out of conflict-racked Myanmar – now the world’s most concentrated production centre – as organised crime groups take advantage of record-low prices and new maritime transit routes to reach one of the globe’s most profitable drug markets, Australia, the UN has warned.

Methamphetamine seizures jumped by a massive 24 per cent to 236 tonnes in Asia in 2024 on already sky-high volumes, with 85 per cent of those seizures occurring in Southeast Asia, indi­cating an unprecedented increase in production.

And yet even those extraordinary volumes represent only what is intercepted, not the actual quantities of drugs flowing into and through the region, a startling UN Office on Drugs and Crime ­report on Asia’s synthetic drug market has revealed.

“While these seizures reflect, in part, successful law enforcement efforts, we are clearly seeing unprecedented levels of methamphetamine production and trafficking from the Golden Triangle, in particular Shan State (in Myanmar),” UNODC acting regional representative Benedikt Hofmann said in a statement.

“Malaysia is a major transit route from Myanmar to Australia, with drugs being first trafficked through the Strait of Malacca and South China Sea into Malaysia, where drugs are stored and sometimes repackaged, for further trafficking to Australia,” the report noted.

The region’s spiralling drug problem poses a “huge challenge” to Australian law enforcement agencies “because the incentive is so high given Australia pays so much for drugs”, warned UNODC chief of staff Jeremy Douglas.

“Armed groups in Myanmar that work with organised crime syndicates are just pumping it out and there is no one to stop them.

“It’s a free territory for organised crime and the ability for Australian authorities to intervene is very limited.

“I know the (Australian Federal Police) have people on the ground there, but their counterparts don’t have control of the country. The (Myanmar) junta government in theory controls maybe 25 per cent of the country at this point, and corruption levels in the country and along its borders are extremely high.”

In Thailand alone a record 130 tonnes of crystal meth – including one billion meth tablets – was intercepted in 2024, an amount almost equal to that seized at the US-Mexico border by US enforcement authorities with far greater policing capacity and far lower corruption levels.

“The US government’s intelligence and operational capabilities to seize drugs at the border is incredibly high, so for the amount seized in Thailand to be similar to that on the US-Mexican border basically means the volumes moving through are likely larger than that moving into the US,” Mr Douglas said.

“The volumes moving are much higher than before in Southeast Asia, which is saying a lot because it has been at ridiculous levels for years.”

An AFP spokeswoman told The Australian the agency worked with Thai law enforcement agencies through their Joint Taskforce Storm to target transnational, serious and organised crime (TSOC) groups, money laundering, child sexual exploitation, human trafficking, people smuggling and ­terrorism.

Since May 2016, the taskforce had seized $45.8m in assets in Australia and $5.2m in assets in Thailand as well as more than 13.5 tonnes of illegal drugs and precursor chemicals bound for Australian markets – just a drop in the bucket of what is now a multibillion-dollar-a-year industrial criminal enterprise.

A Myanmar official stands in front of a pile of seized methamphetamine in Yangon. Picture: AFP

“Over the last two years, joint Australian/Thai operations have resulted in over 220 seizures – 152 in Australia, and 70 in Thailand – totalling more than four tonnes of methamphetamine and heroin,” the spokeswoman said.

Just last December Thai authorities operating under Taskforce Storm seized 90kg of methamphetamine and 30kg of heroin en route to Australia.

The AFP also worked closely with international and Thai partners “to make the Thai and Mekong region environment hostile for TSOC networks”, she added

Thailand is the main transit and destination point for regional drug traffickers, with police just last month seizing 2.4 metric tonnes of crystal meth from a tourist boat in eastern Rayong province where smugglers were preparing to ship the drugs to an undisclosed destination.

Increasingly, however, traffickers are also exploiting under-policed maritime routes through Cambodia and Malaysian Borneo, where shipments are divided into smaller lots and sent through The Philippines and Indonesia to increase the odds of reaching Australia, New Zealand and Japan – the world’s most profitable drug markets.

Indonesian authorities seized two tonnes of methamphetamine off the coast of Sumatra in May from Myanmar, a haul described by authorities there as the “biggest drug discovery in the history of drug eradication in Indonesia”.

A month earlier, Indonesian anti-narcotics officers seized almost two tonnes of meth and cocaine worth $425m in the same area.

“But that is not where the criminals want to get the drugs to,” Mr Douglas said. “They want to get them to Australia because of what Australians pay for synthetic drugs, particularly methamphetamine.”

The vast majority of crystal meth – also known as ice – is being produced in super labs in Myanmar’s Shan State, an area on the Chinese border controlled by rebel groups with deep links to sophisticated organised crime syndicates.

An explosion in drug production in Shan State since the Myanmar coup has driven down the wholesale cost per kilogram to record lows of just $US450, while the street value of a kilogram of crystal meth in Australia can fetch as much as $US180,000 – a payday driving smugglers to use increasingly tech-savvy transit solutions.

Thai authorities have reported traffickers in neighbouring countries are using drones to monitor law enforcement activities across Thai border towns, while in Indonesia, TSOC groups are increasingly using fishing vessels and targeting remote islands for maritime drug trafficking.

“These groups often recruit ­Indonesian fishermen as transporters, many of whom are unaware of the true nature of their assignments,” the report noted, adding hired fishing boats were used to collect drug shipments at sea and deliver them to coastal ­regions.

Some Chinese traffickers have also established legitimate pharmaceutical companies abroad in order to buy precursor chemicals undetected.

The high-pressure chemical reactors and mixers used for manufacturing illicit drugs that were seized by Myanmar police and military near Loikan village in Shan State in 2020 in what the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime described as Asia's biggest-ever drug bust. Picture: Myanmar Police/UNODC via Reuters

Just what effect the recent regional drug surge is having on the Australian population, however, is masked by a lack of recent statistics.

The Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission, which produces a wastewater drug monitoring report every four months, has not released one since November.

That one showed still rising consumption levels across the country of methamphetamine and ketamine, another synthetic drug whose production is now on the rise in Southeast Asia.

The Australian has been told the commission’s March report – traditionally released between late February and mid-March – was held over because the government was in caretaker mode, despite the fact the election was not called until March 28.

In response to questions from The Australian over the delay, just weeks before the election being called, an ACIC spokesperson said there had been “no change to the frequency of sampling”.

A new drug monitoring report – the first in almost nine months – is expected to be released at the end of this month.

Australian Strategic Policy Institute head of strategic policing and law enforcement John Coyne told The Australian the overwhelming scale of Myanmar drug production was undermining the premise of drug seizures as a means of reducing supply and driving up prices to discourage drug use.

“Seizure rates are going through the roof but the price is dropping because the cost of production has reached such a low point that seizures as a means to dry up supply is simply not working,” Dr Coyne said.

“If you can buy it even in transit countries for a wholesale price of $US5000 a kilogram (the going rate in Thailand), you can afford to lose a lot of shipments.”

Compounding the problem has been the Trump administration’s closure of USAID, which had been leading regional programs to improve policing capacity, as well as the closure of a number of regional Drug Enforcement Agency bureaus.

“That’s going to spell big trouble for the Mekong, broader Southeast Asia and certainly for Australia, which proportionately uses more methamphetamine more often than many other countries in the world,” he added.

“Even when the market is relatively flooded, Australians seem to be price-insensitive – we pay more for our drugs than anywhere else in the world and price doesn’t seem to impact usage,” Dr Coyne said.

He said that while Australian meth use was now so sky high as to be close to saturation point, a “worst case scenario” in which a continued flood of the drug drove down the street price in Australia could see a further surge in usage.