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 to launch mock raids on “Blue Force” units. With typical summer temperatures over at 100 degrees, it is not a good place for strenuous outdoor activity, nor is a good place to be a single guy.

Irwin, in the middle of the Mojave Desert, adjoins the southern boundary of Death Valley. Irwin is unusual for its lack of a camp town. It has no off-post assemblage of bars and used car lots, and your on-post entertainment is limited to a shoppette, a PX, and two bars. After that, there’s just a long, dull, dangerous 37-mile 2-lane road without a single house or building beside it. This ends at I-15 and an armpit of a town called Barstow. One of the major industries of Barstow is meth labs. I got to know the cops there, and they showed me their collection of photos — meths labs in garages, in kitchens, in semi-trailers; meth labs behind false walls; meth labs in attics. San Bernardino County, with its vast expanse of desert and death of economic bounty of any kind, produces tons of the stuff.

Like the rest of the county, Ft. Irwin had a meth problem. You’d see it when units that did piss tests. They’d show clusters of users in the barracks. For a while, meth users would be star performers. You’d be a star performer, too, if you had twice the energy and never slept. It would catch up with you, of course. Absent exceptionally good performance and rehab prospects, we’d separate meth users out on a Chapter 14-12b. The stuff was so addictive and contagious that we just wanted the problem gone, and by the time we could court-martial a user, he’d have hooked up three other people with the stuff. We’d court-martial dealers, of course, along with such special cases as users who stole and wrecked their roommates’ cars while AWOL. I had two of those. In those cases, we could put them in pre-trial confinement and let the judge credit them for time served.

As a prosecutor, I elicited testimony from experts, rehab counselors, and even one long-time user about meth’s effects: paranoia, episodes of dangerous euphoria, and eventually, psychosis. One user testified that he taped black construction paper over his windows so that he could sleep for days on end when he crashed. There are a lot of debates about what about meth is so destructive to the human body, and the debate about what causes “meth mouth” is a good example. But it’s clear that for whatever reason, meth is visibly destructive to the people who use it. Sometimes, you can actually spot a tweak just by his sunken cheeks and eyes and rotten teeth (unless the person simply happens to be British, of course).

Sad to say, it’s the West, the region I call home, where the impact is most visible. Meth is doing to the West, albeit more gradually, what crack did to Washington, DC in the 80’s.

After two years of this, I was ready to cool my eyes with the occasional sight of the female form and culture more exotic than AM/PM cheeseburgers. When a spot opened up in Korea, which wasn’t a popular assignment in the Army, I was ready to try living anywhere there be plenty of spicy grilled flesh and leggy, coquettish nubility. And no meth cases, either. Very few drug cases at all, in fact, unless you count the ones that began with soju bowls (if you do count those, then all of my cases in Korea were drug cases). We had occasional LSD cases, but most of the few drug cases we had were about ecstasy. And compared to meth, unless the recipe or dosage are off, LSD and ecstasy in particular are both pretty mild stuff.

So when GI Korea read my post about meth in North Korea and linked to this, I was gobsmacked. Meth in Korea? During my four years in Korea, I read the MP blotter almost every day and knew something about just about every Army court-martial on the peninsula. And although I allow for having forgotten or missed one or two incidents, I don’t recall one single meth-related arrest or prosecution during my entire four-year tour, which only ended in 2002. Whatever drugs the Koreans had, our soldiers would inevitably get in Hongdae. So how did meth go from being a non-issue in the USFK, and presumably for Koreans, too, to being Korea’s “drug of choice?” That’s definitely a recent trend, and it’s bad news for Korean society, North and South alike.

There are two answers to that question for which there’s some evidentiary support. The first involves smuggling by sea, and I note that Richardson links to a new report of North Koreans getting hard time for smuggling meth into Japan (you have to wonder how prison in Japan stacks up against ordinary life in Wonsan). There’s also that North Korean ship suspected of smuggling meth into Pusan, which has a truly seedy subculture around Texas Street. Once an American ghetto, T Street is now mostly a place where Russian sailors stagger the streets chundering on all else who dare tread there.

The other plausible answer comes from that 2008 State Department narcotics report:

The China-DPRK border region is the only area in the world where there are continuing reports of drug trafficking involving DPRK nationals. Most reports indicate small-scale trafficking by individual North Koreans who cross the border into China. In some cases there are reports of slightly larger-scale trafficking by locally prominent individuals living along the border who misuse their modest positions of local influence in the ruling party to traffic in methamphetamine. Also, there are indications that some foreign nationals from Japan and South Korea might travel to this area to purchase the stimulant drugs available there. [U.S. Dep’t of State]

So I guess not all South Koreans in Dandong are missionaries. Then there’s this documentary about human trafficking across the Chinese-North Korean border. A friend on Capitol Hill has seen parts of it, and tells me that one scene actually shows North Koreans smuggling meth into China. So can China blame its meth problem on North Korea? Not so fast:

Quantities of heroin and methamphetamine produced in North Korea continue to find their way into China’s northeastern provinces that border North Korea. Beijing claims that there are no heroin refineries in China. However, China is a major producer of licit ephedrine and pseudoephedrine which when diverted from licit uses can be used in the manufacture of methamphetamine. There is a widespread belief among law enforcement agencies, worldwide, that large-scale illicit methamphetamine producers in other countries use Chinese-produced ephedrine and pseudoephedrine, and there are numerous examples from criminal investigations to confirm this suspicion. Diverted Chinese precursor chemicals may sustain synthetic drug production in other countries as far away as Mexico, Belgium, and the Netherlands. Although China enacted enhanced precursor chemical control laws in November 2005 and is fully engaged in multilateral and bilateral efforts to stop diversion from its chemical production sector, Chinese efforts have not matched the size of its enormous chemical industry with sufficient resources to effectively ensure against diversion. [U.S. Dep’t of State]

Which is good news for South Korea, I suppose, since they can plausibly blame non-Koreans for at least a part of their meth problem. But make no mistake about this — meth may be Kim Jong Il’s problem today, but it’s going to be all of Korea’s problem tomorrow.