Following a confrontation in northern Thailand near the notorious “Golden Triangle” region, the Thai military has killed five alleged drug traffickers and seized about 500,000 methamphetamine tablets. In the early hours of Thursday, a military patrol in Chiang Rai province in the Golden Triangle—where the forest borders of Thailand, Laos, and Myanmar converge and have long been a profitable hub of the illegal drug trade—encountered suspected smugglers carrying bags.
The Pha Muang Task Force of the Thai military released a statement on Friday saying that a group of five people refused to be searched and then opened fire, starting an armed confrontation that lasted for about five minutes. The task force reported that all five suspects were murdered and that no Thai troops were hurt; they also noted that over half a million methamphetamine tablets and a revolver were recovered from the suspects’ possession. “Narcotics have been quite widespread [near the border], but now there has been an order from the commander to increase up law enforcement measures,” Premchai Premkamol, an officer with the Pha Muang Task Force, told the AFP news agency. Six suspected drug traffickers were killed earlier this week in neighboring Chiang Mai province, and 15 people were killed in a similar event in December. Anti-drug specialists claim that since the military takeover in Myanmar in February 2021, methamphetamine and opium production and trafficking have skyrocketed in the region known as the Golden Triangle. Chiang Mai News, a local Thai news source, claimed on Tuesday that a fight with suspected traffickers in Chiang Mai province resulted in the deaths of six suspects and the recovery of 19 bags containing hundreds of kilograms of ketamine.
A new study on opium cultivation in Myanmar, which the UN says had been in decline for over a decade until output rebounded slightly in 2021, is forthcoming from the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC). Last year saw a further rise in farming. The UNODC stated in a brief statement on Thursday that the country is seeing a “dramatic transformation in the opium economy” during the first full opium planting season “after the February 2021 military coup.”
