Search Results for: methamphetamine

August 26, 2016

To prevent war, talk to North Korea’s soldiers about rice, peace & freedom (updated: it happened again)

When the U.S. Army wants to breach a minefield, it deploys a Mine-Clearing Line Charge to blast a path through it with 1,750 pounds of C-4. The procedure looks like this: Obviously, the North Koreans know this, so they can’t possibly think that planting a few more anti-personnel mines along the DMZ – right where U.S. and ROK forces will be watching and marking them – will do anything to stop an invasion that isn’t coming. I’m mildly surprised, by...

Categories Border Control/NK Military
August 24, 2016

If North Korea can make fake Viagra for export, why can’t it make TB drugs for sick North Koreans?

Since the collapse of North Korea’s nominally free public health system, contagious diseases have spread widely, but only a lucky few North Koreans have been able to find medicine and medical care. Most of its people get by on whatever health care they can afford and whatever drugs they can find. A lucky few use retired doctors or doctors who moonlight after regular working hours. Some pay steep bribes to get access to care and medicine in state hospitals and...

Categories Famine & Food Aid/Health & Disease/Media Criticism
November 10, 2015

North Koreans need food & medicine, not Guus Hiddink’s “futsal” stadium

South Koreans remember Dutch soccer coach Guus Hiddink as the man who led their team to a successful performance in the 2002 World Cup. But when the history of a united Korea is written, North Koreans are likely to remember him less fondly. Hiddink has just returned from Pyongyang, where he signed a deal to help Kim Jong-Un build yet another expensive leisure facility that falls low on the average North Korean’s hierarchy of needs — a new “futsal” stadium:...

Categories Class Warfare/Famine & Food Aid/Sports
September 28, 2015

A guerrilla health care system for North Korea’s poor

Gullible leftists and U.N. nincompoops who take North Korea’s claims of socialist equality at face value love to bleat about the wonders of its free universal health care, but those bleats have little basis in reality. A 2010 study by Amnesty International found that Pyongyang provides less for the care of its non-elite citizens per capita than almost any other nation on earth: The North Korean government has failed to adequately address the country’s ongoing food shortages since the 1990s....

Categories Health & Disease
August 28, 2015

Brit pleads guilty to smuggling North Korean meth into U.S.

The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York has issued a press release announcing the guilty plea of Scott Stammers, for conspiring to smuggle 100 kilograms of 99% pure North Korean meth from the Philippines to New York. The press release implies, but does not directly state, that the North Korean government itself knowingly sold the meth to Chinese gangsters, who sold the drugs to Stammers. As Tan Lim explained, his criminal organization was the only one currently...

Categories Drugs & N Korea
May 22, 2015

“Arsenal of Terror,” 2d ed.: N. Korea paid dope dealers $40K to kill Hwang Jang Yop

South Korean prosecutors have indicted three South Korean nationals, identified only by the surnames “Bang,” “Kim,” and “Hwang,” for “bringing in methamphetamine from North Korea and attempting to assassinate” Hwang Jang-Yop, North Korea’s highest-ranking defector until his death in 2010. Let’s unpack these two criminal conspiracies one at a time, starting with the meth: The 69-year-old, identified only by his family name Bang, and two others have been detained for producing 70 kilograms of methamphetamine at a North Korean factory...

Categories Drugs & N Korea/Terrorism (NK)
August 7, 2014

Open Sources, August 7, 2014

~   1   ~ NORTH KOREA, WHICH WAS REMOVED from the list of state sponsors of terrorism on October 11, 2008 for promising to give up its nuclear weapons program, is quietly expanding its uranium enrichment capabilities, and not-so-quietly threatening to test more missiles and a nuclear weapon. ~   2   ~ HACK NORTH KOREA has chosen a winning technology for breaking down North Korea’s information blockade: The winning team, which featured a pair of teenage siblings who flew in from...

Categories Anju Links
November 24, 2013

Was Kim Jong Un behind the plot to smuggle meth into New York?

Last week, the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York released an indictment of five men for conspiring to smuggle North Korean methamphetamine to New York. The meth was of exceptionally high quality — between 96% and 99% pure, depending on the source — and in large amounts. An initial “dry run” transaction consisted of 30 kilograms, later seized by Thai and Filipino authorities. The next shipment would have weighed in at 100 kilograms, for which the dealers...

Categories Anju Links/Drugs & N Korea
January 17, 2013

Open Sources, Jan. 17, 2012

NORTH KOREA PERESTROIKA WATCH:  First it was lipstick, now it’s bicycles.  Where are Christine Ahn and Christine Hong to defend North Korean women against sexism? *          *          * I’VE HAD A LOT TO SAY ABOUT NORTH KOREA’S METH PROBLEM, but this article on North Koreans smoking pot was interesting.  You wouldn’t think pot would catch on in a place without freely available snacks, and where being mellow is strictly forbidden.  *      ...

Categories Anju Links
February 1, 2011

North Korea’s Medicinal Methampetamine

Open News reports that North Korea has launched another crackdown on drugs: A source in Hyaesan, Yanggand Province reported on the 11th, January that “Kim Jong-eun has ordered the army and security forces to combine and form a task force dedicated to cracking down on the abuse of drugs in North Korea in the years “first battle. The new body began its activities on the fifth of the month.” I think they meant to say “Yaggang,” aka “Ryanggang.” Referring to...

Categories Drugs & N Korea
August 30, 2010

At Last, Plan B

This afternoon, the Treasury Department finally announced its long anticipated sanctions against North Korea, in the form of a sweeping new executive order. The order, pursuant to the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, authorizes the blocking of assets of “any person” providing what Treasury calls “material support” for North Korea’s WMD proliferation, money laundering, counterfeiting, trade in luxury goods, bulk cash smuggling, and pretty much everything North Korea does that violates UNSCR 1718 or 1874, or the U.S. Criminal Code....

Categories Cheonan Incident/Counterfeiting/Money Laundering/Sanctions
July 15, 2010

WHO Knew? North Korea’s health care system is nothing to envy.

So, aside from stultifying political repression, famine, forced labor, criticism sessions, neighborhood spies, propaganda speakers in every home, prison camps for dissenters, and the occasional public execution, what has Kim Jong Il ever done for us? Ask any Chomsky-parroting career grad student in the East Bay and she’ll say, “universal health care!” Alas, those neocons at Amnesty International have come to crush their tiny, misshapen hippie souls with this extensive report: The North Korean government has failed to adequately address...

Categories Health & Disease
March 5, 2010

The Decline of North Korea’s Dope Industry

According to the Treasury Department, North Korea is still printing fake dollars, but no major North Korean meth and heroin shipments have been intercepted in recent years, leading it to believe that the regime is out of that business: “There is insufficient evidence to say with certainty that state-sponsored trafficking by the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (North Korea) has stopped entirely in 2009,” the 2010 International Narcotics Control Strategy Report released by the department said. “Nonetheless, the paucity of...

Categories Drugs & N Korea
March 17, 2009

17 March 2009

INTOLERABLE SUFFERING, STARVATION, torture, almost universal suffering, yada yada: Thai jurist Vitit Muntarbhorn told the world body’s Human Rights Council that the situation in the communist-ruled country was “dire and desperate” with the population living in fear and pressed to inform on each other. “The country is under one-party rule. At the pinnacle there is an oppressive regime, bent on personal survival, under which the ordinary people of the land undergo intolerable and interminable sufferings,” he said. Diplomats said his...

Categories Anju Links
March 5, 2008

North Korea Has a Meth Problem, Part 2

After I wrote here recently about North Korea’s growing meth problem, it occurred to me that I never talked about how, as a prosecutor, I learned how awful meth really is. I spent just shy of two years of my Army time assigned to Ft. Irwin, California, home of the OPFOR. During most of that time, I was the prosecutor, or Trial Counsel. Irwin is a great place to drive a T-72, shoot AK’s, or go out on field exercises...

Categories Drugs & N Korea/Korean Society/UCMJ & SOFA
March 2, 2008

North Korea Has a Meth Problem

North Korea’s government has long been suspected of producing illicit drugs for export. In 2003, a high-level defector testified that the goverment is deeply involved in producing and exporting opiates, including heroin, and amphetamines. North Korea’s official ideology, really “crude, race-based nationalism” thinly veiled in socialism, would have had no problem justifying the poisoning of Japanese and Australian kids, but it was just a matter of time before North Korean drugs found their way into North Korean society. Until recently,...

Categories Drugs & N Korea/Inside NK/Regime Change
September 20, 2007

We must be smoking what they’re growing

North Korea was dropped from the U.S. list of countries producing illicit drugs, a sign of further relief of tensions between the two countries. “North Korea is not affecting the United States as much as the requirements on the list,” Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Christy McCampbell said on Sept. 17 in Washington, according to a transcript of her speech on the State Department Web site. [Bloomberg] And that decision is based on what? On absolutely nothing but the interests...

Categories Appeasement/Axis of Evil/Drugs & N Korea/Six-Party Talks
June 7, 2007

True, But Would It Sell Papers?

At the Marmot’s Hole, R. Elgin notes that the Korean press is trying to  make foreigners the scapegoats for  South Korea’s drug problems.  I agree with R. Elgin.  The article notes a “huge increase” in drug smuggling into Korea, and then proceeds  to  indirectly blame Americans, Canadians, and Chinese for it.  Prosecutors believe the rising number of American drug offenders correlates to a rising number of English teachers coming to Korea, prompted by the recent trend for English education. The...

Categories Drugs & N Korea/Korean Society/Media Criticism