THE Thai military witnessed a surge in the number of narcotics entering Thailand’s border amid renewed clashes between Myanmar’s military junta and ethnic armed militias.
Known locally as “yaa baa”, about 15 million methamphetamine tablets were seized by the Thai military, the police, and anti-narcotics officials on Monday alone.
The narcotics were seized in three provinces.
Thai military sources said cases of cross-border drug smuggling have increased as anti-junta ethnic forces desperately look for money to fund their activities.
In Chiang Mai province, a brief gunfight ensued after Thai forces from the Third Army Region encountered a group of six men carrying backpacks that contained a total of 1,2 million meth pills.
The smugglers successfully escaped the border but abandoned the backpack full of narcotics.
In December, Thai authorities seized 50 million methamphetamine tablets near the country’s border with Myanmar.
The seized narcotics, estimated up to 1.5 billion baht in street value, was the second-highest meth bust in Asia, according to the Southeast Asia regional representative for the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime.
Myanmar became the world’s largest producer of opium in 2023 and has smuggled billions worth of drugs to neighboring Thailand.
Together with Laos, the three countries sit at the so-called Golden Triangle which has been named one of the world’s largest opium-producing areas since the 1950s.
