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Episode #622: “We need to recognize that we really don't know as much as we think we do about what's going on,” Jason Eligh says. As senior expert on drugs and drug markets at the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime, Eligh argues that Myanmar’s methamphetamine economy has been misunderstood not only because it is hidden, but because governments and analysts have mistaken partial evidence for knowledge.
Myanmar’s Shan State sits inside one of the world’s major drug-producing regions, supplying opium and heroin while also forming one of the three major global methamphetamine production zones, alongside Mexico and the Afghanistan-Pakistan-Iran nexus. But meth is harder to measure than opium. Poppy fields can be seen from above; synthetic drugs can be made indoors, through multiple chemical pathways, with legal dual-use substances that move through ordinary commercial channels. Even seizures, Eligh warns, cannot tell us the size of the market. They can reveal enforcement activity, but not total production.
That caution reshapes how he reads the post-coup period. The 2021 coup intensified conflict and changed routes, but Eligh rejects the easy claim that it alone caused a sudden meth surge. Prices, seizures, chemical data, and trafficking flows all point in several directions at once. Conflict can disrupt business, but corruption, armed taxation, and state-linked protection can also keep illicit trade stable.
Eligh’s analysis moves from drug production to drug policy. If the goal is “to save lives,” he argues, punishment alone drives users underground and weakens the ability to understand what harms are spreading. Opium farmers face a different trap: eradication without real alternatives can destroy the only income available in remote conflict zones.
The Mekong meth trade is no longer a contained Golden Triangle story. It is a global synthetic drug platform, tied to chemicals, logistics, corruption, poverty, and demand across continents. “It's a global problem,” Eligh says. “We can't kid ourselves any longer.”
