Burma Related News

NAYPYIDAW - MYANMAR officials on Thursday said the military-ruled nation was on track to be drugs-free by 2014 despite warnings from the UN that opium production here has again soared.

In a ceremony marking global anti-drugs day, Home Affairs Minister Maung Oo said their 15-year eradication programme was working, although he cautioned more work needed to be done to tackle new trends.

'The marked decline in the production of both opium and heroin is the outcome of this programme we have adopted and put into action,' he said in Myanmar's remote new capital Naypyidaw.

'However, synthetic drugs such as ATS (amphetamines) tablets, Ketamine, Ice and Ecstasy that are manufactured chemically are found to be replacing opium and heroin... drastic measures are being taken against the new production trends.'

Police chief Khin Yee told reporters that Myanmar would stop at nothing to meet its 2014 target.

'We will do what we have to do to be successful,' he said without elaborating.

Myanmar's mountainous and lawless border regions once hid swathes of poppy fields which fed most of the world's opium habit well into the 1990s.

Under pressure from governments including close ally China, Myanmar eventually began a campaign in the 1990s to eradicate the crop, and soon Afghanistan took its mantle as the world's top opium producer.

But after a few years of steep decline, opium production in Myanmar has risen once again, with the UN Office on Drugs and Crime reporting last year that it had gone up 46 per cent in 2006/2007.

The UN blamed high-level collusion and corruption for the rise, while activists across the border in Thailand say the crop substitution programmes for poor farmers have not been successful.

The military-ruled nation, meanwhile, has become a hub for methamphetamine production, with convoys of high-tech trucks ferrying chemicals and mobile laboratories under the cover of Myanmar's dense jungle, experts says. -- AFP