Merchants of Madness: The Methamphetamine Explosion in the Golden Triangle

#268
Title: Merchants of Madness: The Methamphetamine Explosion in the Golden Triangle
Authors: Bertil Lintner and Michael Black
Publisher: Silkworm Books
Year: 2009
176 pages

Also available here. I picked up my copy at the airport in Bangkok.

Merchants of Madness is a brief but densely-packed overview of the history of methamphetamine production and distribution in Burma/Myanmar, and the military/governmental/criminal systems that support it. To explain why yaba ("crazy medicine") is the substance of choice for regional manufacture and sale, the authors describe the former opium/heroin operation and show the comparative ease of methamphetamine production, as well as the overlap in personnel. Many pages are spent introducing the reader to the key players and the progression of events, as well as marshaling the evidence to support the authors' assertions. For this reason, the book often reads more like a background briefing than like a history. At times it is repetitive, and while the glossary of major actors is interesting, it may not be necessary since the authors go into such depth in the text each time one of these people is mentioned. What is missing is much description or analysis of the social effects on the country and region of so much methamphetamine traffic. While this is clearly not the focus of the authors' inquiry, it strikes this social scientist as a large omission.

***
Answer to the reader who asked why methamphetamine production would be lucrative given the opium fields of Afghanistan: Opium has to be grown, so it's subject to the vicissitudes of weather, eradication by outside authorities, and the effort of transporting it to a refinery, whereas methamphetamine can be made in a lab with great ease. Part of what's missing from this book are questions like "where do the toxins from meth manufacture wind up?" and "does the populace see meth as a drug of abuse, as a medicine, or is it simply off the radar of most subsistence farmers?"

I'll add too that the world's tallest mountains are between Afghanistan and Southeast Asia.