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The Golden Triangle: Inside Southeast Asia's Drug Trade, By Ko-Lin Chin. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2009. Softcover: 280pp.
Myanmar's drug trade has been eclipsed in recent years by the surge of opium cultivation in Afghanistan. Even though Myanmar is now a distant second in global heroin production and exports, it has during the same period become the largest producer of methamphetamines in Asia. Ko-lin Chin's new book provides the most complete, balanced and insightful study of the Southeast Asian drug trade in twenty years, investigating the dramatic market shift from opium to methamphetamines in the "Golden Triangle", that confluence of the Mekong River where Myanmar, Laos, Thailand and Yunnan province all meet.
Chin, a renowned criminologist from Rutgers University, has previously written about Chinese street gangs in America and transnational human smuggling networks. Fluent in both Chinese and Burmese, he is uniquely experienced to conduct fieldwork in places like the former headhunter communities of the Wa hills of Myanmar, often out of bounds to Western researchers. The author does admit the local authorities gave him permission to conduct his research, "but did not completely trust me nor were they always truthful when I interviewed them" (p. 6).
The book starts with an excellent literature review of the Golden Triangle drug trade before moving into a sociological, anthropological, economic and political analysis of drug production in northern Myanmar, its export, use and impact on China in particular, and on Thailand and Myanmar to a lesser extent. Most of the chapters are thematic, looking specifically at the opium trade, heroin production and trafficking, methamphetamines, drug abuse,...