Bangkok – The UN said on Monday that the number of methamphetamine tablets seized in East and Southeast Asia exceeded a billion last year for the first time, highlighting the scale of illegal drug production and trafficking in the region and the challenges of fighting it.

The 1.008 billion tablets — which would weigh about 91 tons altogether — were part of a regionwide haul of almost 172 tons of methamphetamine in all forms and was seven times higher than the amount seized 10 years earlier, the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime said in a report.

“I think the region is literally swimming in methamphetamine,” said Jeremy Douglas, Southeast Asia regional representative for the U.N. agency, at a news conference in the Thai capital Bangkok unveiling the report on “Synthetic Drugs in East and Southeast Asia.”

“So there’s going to have to be a radical policy shift by East Asia to address this problem or it’s just going to continue to grow,” Douglas said.

The drugs are largely consumed in Southeast Asia but also exported to New Zealand and Australia, Hong Kong, Korea and Japan in East Asia, and increasingly to South Asia.

“Production and trafficking of methamphetamine jumped yet again as supply became super concentrated in the Mekong (River region) and in particular Thailand, Laos and Myanmar,” Douglas told The Associated Press in an email.

According to Douglas, when he first worked in the region in 2002-2007, a meth tablet cost five to six times what it costs now.

Methamphetamine is easy to make and has supplanted opium and its derivative heroin to become the dominant illegal drug in Southeast Asia for both use and export.

The Golden Triangle area, where the borders of Myanmar, Laos and Thailand meet, is historically a major production area for opium and hosted many of the labs that converted it to heroin. Decades of political instability however made Myanmar’s frontier regions largely lawless, to be exploited by drug producers and traffickers.

Given the problem of limited governance and low attention to the issue, the UN. agency said organized crime syndicates have the means to continue to produce more meth and to sell it to a growing population of young people with increased spending power.

The report also called Laos one of the countries most impacted by methamphetamine trafficked out of Myanmar. One of Asia’s biggest-ever drug busts was made in Laos last October, with police there seizing more than 55.6 million methamphetamine pills in a single raid. They also seized about 1,500 kilograms (3,300 pounds) of crystal methamphetamine, state media reported.
-AP