Agriculture

Pierre-Arnaud Chouvy / 2008 / Caucasian Review of International Affairs.

For almost two decades Afghanistan has been the world’s largest illicit opium producer. Decades of war, droughts, poverty, and political incapabilities have driven up the country’s opium production despite counter-narcotics programmes ranging from forced eradication to alternative development. In 2005, that is, a few years after the replacement of the Taliban regime by the Karzai administration, the licensing of Afghan opium for the production of legal medicines such as morphine and codeine was proposed as a solution to address illicit Afghan opium production. This proposal benefited from a very positive stance of the world press, in spite of its many inaccuracies and fallacies.

Pierre-Arnaud Chouvy & Joël Meissonnier, 2004, Singapore university Press - Irasec.

The abuse of methamphetamines in Southeast Asia has become a major problem over the past decade. Thailand has been particularly hard hit: methamphetamine abuse now affects all sectors of Thai society. In the early 1990s, methamphetamine manufacturers moved their laboratories across the border into Burma, and began large-scale production. The new cheaper product, yaa baa or 'madness medicine', flooded the local market and it has also been found in Europe and the United States.

The authors analyse the growth of methamphetamine production in Burma in its political context, which makes the book valuable. There are many books about opium and heroin production in the Golden Triangle, but this is the first about methamphetamines. This book fills an important gap in the literature about the Golden Triangle.

Licensing Afghanistan’s opium: solution or fallacy?

Yaa Baa: Production, Traffic and Consumption of Methamphetamine in Mainland Southeast Asia