The Golden Triangle: Inside Southeast Asia's Drug Trade

by Ko-Lin Chin

The Golden Triangle region that joins Burma, Thailand, and Laos is one of the global centers of opiate and methamphetamine production. Opportunistic Chinese businessmen and leaders of various armed groups are largely responsible for the manufacture of these drugs. The region is defined by the apparently conflicting parallel strands of criminality and efforts at state building, a tension embodied by a group of individuals who are simultaneously local political leaders, drug entrepreneurs, and members of heavily armed militias. Ko-lin Chin, a Chinese American criminologist who was born and raised in Burma, conducted five hundred face-to-face interviews with poppy growers, drug dealers, drug users, armed group leaders, law-enforcement authorities, and other key informants in Burma, Thailand, and China. The Golden Triangle provides a lively portrait of a region in constant transition, a place where political development is intimately linked to the vagaries of the global market in illicit drugs. Chin explains the nature of opium growing, heroin and methamphetamine production, drug sales, and drug use. He also shows how government officials who live in these areas view themselves not as drug kingpins, but as people who are carrying the responsibility for local economic development on their shoulders.

Genres: Crime, Nonfiction

296 pages, Paperback

First published January 29, 2009

Reviews

[Kimba Tichenor · Rating 3 out of 5]

Meticulously researched. However, the book's effectiveness is hampered by its poor organization and its failure to provide sufficient historical context for the interviews contained in the volume. As a result, the big picture is often lost amid a sea of details.

[Servabo · Rating 2 out of 5]

It wasn't as scandalous as I thought it would be, not enough stories on how people were addicted to drugs and died.

[Nick · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ko-Lin Chin book on the golden Triangle is one of those, “you think you have figured it out, but you really haven’t” kind of books. As the title makes clear it is a book on the drug trade in south-East Asia but that is not really true, the book is 9/10 on the Wa state (northern and southern both autonomous zones in Myanmar) it’s inhabitants and leaders part of the united Wa State army and their relation to the international multimillion dollar trade in opium, heroin and amphetamines and their relations with state authorities in Thailand, Myanmar, China and to lesser extent the US.

The book is accessible and engaging with a lot but never needless testimonies from people interviewed in the field and Ko-Lin Chin takes a dynamic open-minded approach to the sensitive subject and gradually makes across his point while being honest that on some issues he is unsure off. What will stick with me is that the popular militaristic repressive approach to combatting the drugstrade is futile when the dynamics off the trade are not fully understood and even counterproductive when not taken into account the reality of those directly involved with the drugstrade. I also suspect this book is trying to balance the image being created by those in the west condemning the Wa political leadership (naming them the most powerful narcotics crime organisation) with a sobering look on the ground in Myanmar. I personally was quite shocked to discover how decentralised and open the drug trade is in this region when compared to the Latin American cartels and their extremely violent competition for a larger share of the market. The level of participation in the Wa region is quite astounding as well as the openness in which it is done with farmers planting a bit of opium on the side, local merchants selling drugs as if it were banana’s and local politicians being ok with it all as long as it helps to their plan to develop the region.

But it would be too easy to blame the Wa people and their leaders for everything for Ko-Lin Chin does make a strong case when pointing out that without Chinese know-how, capital, connections and equipment the Wa state would have never become a world leader in production of amphetamines and for a while heroin (even if the Opium trade would still have flourished). If anyone Ko-Lin Chin blames the influx of high risk taking Chinese traders and their networks arriving in the region after the Chinese change of policies on trade who believe drugs are but another (even if more risky) product to invest in. Investors who struck gold when arriving in an autonomous region with a long history of both low and high societal levels of involvement in international drugs cultivation and trade in a highly corrupt governing system where political leadership/family relations/business organisation and military service are considered logical mixes. Even if he does not consider the Wa leaders to be victims for they did choose to continue and control the region’s drug trade and expand to new markets and products by means of opium taxes, connections to heroin producers and active promotion of export to specific countries as part of their political strategies and Public relations. But this clearly is not a story of bad guys who run evil shadow organisations while nose diving in a pile of drugs like scarface, it is rather a story of many levels of involvement in a multilevel international commerce for various rational reasons few of which seem to be plain greed and most of which seem related to survival as a household, self-employed freelancer, small time trader or leader, few of whom in the Wa region itself seem to reap a lot of cash for their involvement.

“What we fail to see is that the drug trade can be, in certain parts of the world, a legitimate and logical endeavour for many people to simultaneously improve their living conditions and built a state.” A line in the introduction that neatly summarises the book except for the detailed analysis of the impact of drug use in the origin Wa region (a dimension often neglected in the study of drug production) . It is definitively a worthwhile book to read if one is interested in Myanmar, the international drugtrade and in particular if one is interested in a new approach that goes beyond a moralising discourse and instead utilizes an anthropological method of decoding a system and set of rules and relations related to the drugtrade from South East Asia. In any case it did challenge my views on decentralised autonomous rule and horizontal economic systems as positive only societal organisation and I will be more sceptic towards such policies in the future.

[Camille]

Gets a 3.5 for being well researched, but poorly written/organized. Chin offers an extensive amount of research, including some studies and interviews he has conducted with the Wa people (but he does admit that his own research is limited in scope, and therefore not to be taken as authoritative or representative of conditions everywhere in the Wa area/Shan State).

However, Chin organizes the information pretty haphazardly and his writing tends to wander. He could have incorporated his personal research in a more focused manner; his research tends to sound like a rattling off of facts.

He gets points for being one of the more recent books to cover the Golden Triangle; the topic has been pretty dead since eradication was somewhat successfully carried out. Afghanistan dominates the media's current view of heroin (And it's reasonable, since Myanamar is responsible for about 5% of global heroin production while Afghanistan is responsible for more than 90%).

If you're looking for a general primer and a good introduction to the drug situation in the Golden Triangle, you would be better off reading Trouble in the Triangle edited by Martin Jelsma (2005).

[DowdyGUMP · Rating 5 out of 5]

Perhaps my review is too high because I’m definitely bias towards the subject matter and of Ko Lin Chin as an author.
Still, this book is not for everybody because the information is raw and straightforward. It wasnt as “dry” (i.e boring) as some of his earlier titles. Of anything, he could have written MORE about Wa Culture, the UWSA, and the relationship(s) between the Wa/UWSA and other ethnic groups/armies.
It also goes without saying that the book could have been expanded to triple its size if he combined it with The Chinese Heroin Trade, and further detailed the methamphetamine trade.

Either way, the information is largely outdated now, and only useful in a historical sense.