'Our society is being destroyed by drugs': Myanmar's frontier towns see addiction go hand-in-hand with illicit jade-mining
Drugs are rife in areas that supply the lucrative market for precious stones, prompting residents to expose official complicity and pay-offs.
Isolated by a lack of paved roads or other modern transport and by fighting between rebel insurgents and government forces, Hpakant is a frontier region marked by huge jade-mining operations that have spoiled the environment and left most local residents destitute, with scant options for jobs or other means of survival.
Young people shoot up from dawn to dusk near the mines surrounding Hpakant, some 720km north of Yangon, Myanmar's biggest city.
Residents have resorted to becoming their own drug investigators out of frustration with authorities' failure to keep heroin and methamphetamine addiction from consuming their villages.
But they now say they can explain officials' poor performance, thanks to a woman charged with drug-dealing who kept careful track of her expenses.
When the community-based Kachin Anti-Drug Committee made a citizen's arrest of the suspect, it found two notebooks listing a combined US$500,000 in pay-offs to authorities in Kachin state, including an army commander, top police officials, anti-drug officers, township officials and others.
The group Global Witness, which campaigns against corruption and for transparency and protection of people's rights in use of mining, logging and other resources, viewed the document and agreed with the committee's description of its contents.
"This book is useful for negotiating to try to get government officials and police involved in our project," said Naw Lawn, the committee's secretary. "Our society is being destroyed by drugs. We have many young people who are addicts, and this is destroying our future."
Addicts, their arms dotted with needle marks, squat under makeshift tarp shelters or sometimes shoot up in broad daylight. Overdoses are increasingly common, and crime is rising among addicts desperate for money.
Read more: Revealed: Myanmar’s US$31 billion jade mining industry and its 'ties to country's elite'
Committee members said they were attacked by drug dealers in a raid earlier this year, and now conduct operations only in groups of 300 or more, with one or two police officers accompanying them. They said they have been threatened and harassed by some police who view them as interfering.
They also said the woman arrested with the notebooks in June was among Hpakant's most prominent drug dealers. Naw Lawn said the group confiscated US$3 million in cash and a "huge amount" of drugs during the arrest. The suspect is awaiting trial.
The financial ties to local officials allegedly revealed in the notebooks tell only part of the story of the Myanmar drug trade's ties to the powerful.
Myanmar trails only Afghanistan in producing opium, heroin's main ingredient. Its opium poppies are grown mostly in Kachin and Shan states, where the government has long fought rebel groups seeking more autonomy for their respective ethnic groups. All have used the opium trade to further their causes.
In Kachin, drug use is especially common among the young and migrants who work on the margins of the mines, hoping for lucky finds of jade. A single shot of heroin goes for 2,000 kyat (HK$12), or the equivalent of the lowest price of a small piece of jade, Global Witness said in a report on jade released Friday. It said itinerant miners take up to five such shots a day.
Naw Lawn said that despite threats and intimidation, the Kachin community in Hpakant was determined to fight drug use.
"We really want the drug addiction and dealing to end soon," he said. "We don't want our society to be broken. That's why we stood up and started doing this on our own."
