The Heroin King and the Junta

For three decades, the elusive Khun Sa was the opium king, running his lucrative empire from the poppy fields that carpet the mountains of eastern Myanmar. With a private militia of 20,000, he supplied nearly a third of the heroin on U.S. streets and, at the same time, waged a war for independence for his Shan state.

But when the outlaw suddenly surrendered to Myanmar authorities in December, U.S. drug agents were suspicious.

For one thing, the smiling 62-year-old posed for photographs with the “arresting” generals and they exchanged gifts, as if they were heads of state.

Government officials stopped calling him “the narco-terrorist Khun Sa,” and he became Mr. Khun Sa.

The agents were right to worry. First, Myanmar’s military regime flatly refused to extradite Khun Sa to the United States, where he has been indicted for drug trafficking. Then, last month, he was freed without being charged.

Many suspected a payoff. The generals, though, said it was enough that Khun Sa renounced his war for Shan independence.

“We must forgive him because he has surrendered and given us no problems,” said Lt. Gen. Kyaw Ba, a government minister.

Now international hopes of putting Khun Sa out of business have been dashed, and the wealthy drug lord’s hand has been strengthened. His expensive and distracting war with the Myanmar army is over. And although he insists that he wants to retire, to devote himself to his grandchildren and his beloved Angora rabbits, his drug business is operating at full speed.

“With this deal, everyone is being allowed to go on with their lives,” said a disappointed official with the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration in Washington. “That means Khun Sa won’t have to worry about fighting off the government anymore, and it will make it that much easier to grow poppies.”

Even Khun Sa admits that his retirement will not reduce the drug trade in his territory.

“On the contrary,” he told reporters a few months before his surrender, “there will be more opium. When I am no longer here, what will be left for the people if not opium?”

The release of Khun Sa reflects growing frustration among international drug agencies with the Myanmar government’s reluctance to crack down on drug producers.

About 60% of the heroin on U.S. streets comes from Myanmar, and Khun Sa is responsible for half the roughly 2,200 tons of heroin the country produces annually, U.S. drug officials say.

Moreover, the ready availability of cheap and pure heroin has created a rapidly growing addiction problem in Myanmar itself, where independent agencies count 1 million drug users, with an overdose rate five times that in the West.

Myanmar’s rulers remain ambivalent about their nation’s role in the world drug trade.

On one hand, they say they want to stop the export of illegal drugs and, to prove it, they recently torched a ton of confiscated opium and heroin in the capital. But at the same time, they routinely have granted quick amnesties to drug lords, ignored U.S. extradition requests and made no major effort to shut down drug production.

In fact, the junta, known as the State Law and Order Restoration Council, or SLORC, has little desire to cooperate with the West. It has been stung by a chorus of critics, mostly in the United States, who have campaigned to isolate Myanmar, which was formerly known as Burma. The critics want the SLORC to surrender power to its political opponents, who won elections that the regime annulled in 1990.

Furthermore, the military rulers see the drug trade as a problem created not by the suppliers in Myanmar but by the consumers in the United States and Europe.

“There are two sides to the story. Supply, yes, but also demand,” said Brig. Gen. David Abel, Myanmar’s minister for national planning and economic development. “If there’s demand, then there’s supply, and vice versa. But still, we feel drugs are a curse to humanity.”

The bottom line, a DEA official said, “is that they’re not going to help us with our drug problem. Their top priority is to consolidate the country, and if that means allowing opium to be grown, then that’s what’s going to happen.”

The Golden Triangle, the world’s drug breadbasket, is a lush, remote, mountainous terrain that spills over Myanmar’s border with Laos, Thailand and China. Much of the region is held by private militias under the command of warlords such as Khun Sa.

Drug production is dominated by two ethnic groups--the Shan, to which Khun Sa belongs, and the Wa. Like the Shan, the Wa once waged a war for independence against the Myanmar government. Despite a cease-fire six years ago, the Wa remain largely autonomous and the drug trade has boomed.

These days, Wa farmers produce 80% of the poppies in Myanmar, although they sell much of it to Khun Sa, who runs 15 to 20 laboratories and has a sophisticated commercial network.

The production process begins on the poppy farms. After the harvest in January and February, the poppies are turned into raw opium, which looks like molasses, and collected into 5-pound balls sold to brokers and, eventually, to jungle laboratories.

In the labs, the raw opium is turned into morphine, then a heroin base and finally into either Heroin No. 3, smoking heroin used by many Southeast Asia addicts, or Heroin No. 4, the pure white heroin smuggled into the United States.

One way to slow production would be to persuade farmers to grow something other than poppies.

The U.N. International Drug Control Program runs several small crop-substitution projects in the region. But it has been an uphill battle.

Most poppy farmers are primarily rice growers. But for the past century they have used poppies as a second crop after the September rice harvest. These are not rich people. They have, on average, about two acres. And a farmer earns less than $400 from the poppy harvest. But that money helps carry a family through the rice-growing season, which begins this month.

The United Nations has persuaded several hundred farmers to switch from poppies to wheat, which is a good substitute because people in the region prefer noodles to rice. But progress has been slow. Without nearby facilities to process wheat, the U.N. has had to bring in special machinery. Many of the farms also are inaccessible by road, making it difficult for field workers to make their sales pitch.

The biggest obstacle, however, has been the unstable political situation.

Farmers fear pressure from the local militia. One of the U.N.’s three projects, located in Khun Sa’s territory, was suspended last year because of local fighting. In addition, farmers are reluctant to cooperate with officials from the government.

“We have to work with the government, but when these officials come with us, the farmers get nervous,” said Toru Iwasaki, acting director of the U.N. drug program in Myanmar. “It’s a difficult situation.”

While the U.N. tries to break growers of the poppy habit, the combination of cheap heroin and weak law enforcement has created a nation full of addicts.

In rural areas, a gram of 90% pure heroin costs 10 kyat, or about 10 cents, a small fraction of the $100 street value of a gram of heroin in the United States.

As invited dignitaries applauded the drug-burning ceremony in the capital the other day, four new addicts were brought by their families to the Yangon Drug Treatment and Rehabilitation Center, a small clinic at the end of a dirt road on the outskirts of the capital.

Emaciated and ashen-faced, the arrivals ranged in age from 17 to 23. One had become addicted last summer while working at a jade mine in northern Myanmar. When he returned to Yangon, he encouraged three friends to join him.

In this country of 40 million, estimates of the number of drug addicts range from 300,000 to 1 million. In Khun Sa’s territory of eastern Shan state, about 20% of the population is addicted, experts say.

“We have plenty of demand for detox,” said Ba Thaung, a balding doctor in his 50s who runs the Yangon center. He has 135 patients; the youngest is 13. “We have a long waiting list. We could take 500 if we had the facilities.”

Drug abuse became a problem in the early 1970s, although it was limited mostly to rural areas, where opium is used to treat malaria and other maladies. Several years ago, cheap syringes began arriving across the border with China and heroin addiction rose.

“We are just starting to fight this problem,” Ba Thaung said. “In a way, our assets are also our problem. This is a country where you can get food and shelter wherever you go and the crime rate is very low. Drugs are very easy.”

In addition, the purity of the heroin results in what Ba Thaung calls “heavily addicted behavior” that is difficult to treat. The rate of fatal overdoses is high. In Myanmar, about 3% of the addicts die of overdoses every year. The rate in most Western countries is about half a percent.

The main breeding ground for addicts are the mines, which create boomtowns where drug peddlers prey on young workers with money.

But even rural villages have seen addiction rates soar. Government health workers have been running one-shot detox programs for all the junkies. In one opium-growing region, 5,000 addicts, about 12% of the population, recently were treated en masse.

The man many blame for Myanmar’s fall into drug addiction is Khun Sa.

The smooth, cheroot-smoking drug lord and leader of the Mong Tai Army was born and raised in Shan state. His mother was an ethnic Shan and his father was a wealthy Chinese tea farmer. Khun Sa became involved in the drug trade early, working first for Chinese soldiers who settled in the region.

He was arrested for drug trafficking in 1969 and imprisoned in the town of Mandalay, west of Shan state. Five years later, his cohorts broke him out of jail and, at the age of 41, he crossed into northern Thailand and went underground, where he began organizing his army.

When the Thais attacked his hide-out, he returned to what was then Burma and turned the town of Ho Mong, in Shan state, into his personal fiefdom. A key feature of that community is its “drug treatment center”--a 10-foot-deep hole in which junkies undergo withdrawal. Khun Sa reportedly detests addicts.

He built a large army to defend the autonomy of Shan state--as well as his drug business--from attempts by the government to bring it under central control. He wasn’t alone; at least 15 other militias in the far-flung border regions were demanding independence.

But by last year, the Myanmar government, having reached cease-fire agreements with everyone except Khun Sa, stepped up attacks on the Shan army. Then two of his generals defected, taking a third of Khun Sa’s army to form a rival faction. Suffering from diabetes and poor medical care, Khun Sa decided it was time to cut a deal with the government.

Late last year, he sent a tape-recorded message to the SLORC, in Yangon, offering to lay down his arms and surrender.

Delighted, the government sent a team of generals to accept. So far, 12,000 of Khun Sa’s soldiers have followed him, giving up 7,500 weapons.

It now appears that Khun Sa’s surrender was simply part of a deal.

In exchange for ending his war with the government, he has avoided jail and extradition--and kept his drug operation intact.

Although Lt. Col. Kyaw Thein, a senior Defense Ministry official, recently promised that “the amount of drugs produced in those areas will drop very significantly,” U.S. drug officials say they are doubtful.

After a small drop in drug exports following the surrender, they say production has returned to previous levels. And although many of Khun Sa’s soldiers have returned to their villages, he is likely to retain substantial autonomy in the area, including the right to keep his own police force.

“The situation hasn’t changed as far as drugs coming to the United States,” a DEA official said recently. “Khun Sa may no longer take an active role, but the drug business is driven by greed, and there are always plenty of people ready to step in.”

Scott Kraft was recently on assignment in Myanmar.