Thai police seize 50 million Ice tablets, one of region’s largest hauls in years

Name: How Thailand is trying to reverse a festival’s waste problem
Uploaded: 2023-12-14T01:50:38.000Z
Duration: 3 min 34 s
Description: How Thailand is trying to reverse a festival’s waste problem

The crackdown comes after the region’s biggest seizure involving 55 million methamphetamine pills in Laos in October 2021

A man and a woman have been arrested by Thai police after the 50 million tablets were found hidden in a truck

2-MIN READ2-MIN

Thai Deputy Prime Minister Anutin Charnvirakul holding a microphone and standing behind a pile of 50 million confiscated methamphetamine pills on Tuesday. Photo: EPA-EFE

Associated Press

Published: 9:50am, 14 Dec 2023

Thai police have seized what is being called a record haul of methamphetamine tablets in the western province of Kanchanaburi, close to the Myanmar border.

Officers found an estimated 50 million tablets hidden in sacks in a six-wheeler truck they stopped at a joint police-military checkpoint on Tuesday. The occupants of the truck – a man and a woman – were arrested.

The quantity of methamphetamine - also known as Ice - tablets seized is a record for Thailand, Jeremy Douglas, the Southeast Asia regional representative for the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, said Wednesday. The region’s biggest known seizure took place in neighbouring Laos in October 2021, when a consignment of 55 million pills was discovered.

“We’ve not seen major cases here in Kanchanaburi for a couple of years, and never anything like this,” Douglas said. “But it’s also not a surprise given the extreme supply being produced by militias and traffickers in northern Myanmar.”

Myanmar has historically been the region’s main drug production area in part because of lax security measures in border areas where minority ethnic groups have long been fighting for greater autonomy. Some of the powerful ethnic armed groups there have been heavily involved in narcotics production for decades.

A 2021 military takeover in Myanmar that unseated the elected government of Aung San Suu Kyi triggered armed resistance nationwide, further destabilising the country.

03:34

How Thailand is trying to reverse a festival’s waste problem

The UN drug agency’s June 2023 report on synthetic drugs in East and Southeast Asia warned that the huge trade in methamphetamine and other illegal drugs shows no signs of slowing down.