Bangladesh's Drug Crisis Runs on a Meth Pill Made in Myanmar
More than 8 million people are affected, and the pills travel the same crowded routes used by Rohingya refugees.
Global News Podcast · France halts protests with curfew crackdownIn Bangladesh, the drug that worries officials most is a small tablet called Yaba. It combines methamphetamine, a powerful stimulant that keeps users wired and awake, with caffeine, the stimulant found in coffee and tea. It is taken as a pill.
Those tablets are made in large factories just over the border in Myanmar, to the southeast of Bangladesh. Bangladesh sits near the Golden Triangle, the mountainous area where Myanmar meets Laos and Thailand that has long been a center for drug production and smuggling.
From the labs, the pills follow people. Members of the Rohingya, a Muslim minority fleeing persecution in Myanmar's Rakhine state, travel back and forth across the border into Bangladesh. Those same crowded crossings also carry Yaba into southeastern Bangladesh, an area the BBC's correspondent described as a drug den. From there, the tablets are moved to different parts of the country.
The scale is large. More than eight million people in Bangladesh are affected by drugs of some kind, in what Ambarasan Ethirajan called "a huge social and public health problem."
A couple of years ago, Bangladesh ran a large anti-drug operation similar to the one in the Philippines. More than 200 people were killed in the operation, drawing criticism.
At the same time, officials say they face another flow from the other direction, a cough syrup formulation brought across the border from India. One supply line runs overland from the west, and the other rides the refugee routes in the southeast.
Questions people ask
What is the Golden Triangle?
The Golden Triangle is where the borders of Myanmar, Laos, and Thailand meet. It became famous for opium and heroin, and in recent years large-scale labs there and in surrounding areas of Myanmar have shifted heavily to methamphetamine, which is easier to make synthetically and smuggle as tablets.
Why mix caffeine with methamphetamine?
Caffeine is cheap, legal, and itself a stimulant, so it lets makers stretch a smaller amount of methamphetamine into a pill that still feels strong. It also helps bind the mixture into a tablet and keeps the price low enough for mass sale, which is part of why Yaba can spread so widely.
Why did Bangladesh's earlier drug crackdown draw criticism?
Police anti-drug campaigns that result in large numbers of deaths raise concerns about extrajudicial killings, meaning people are shot by security forces without trial. Critics of both the Bangladesh and Philippines campaigns argued that suspects were denied due process and that the violence fell hardest on poor communities.