By Inshik Sim, Shawn Kelley, Kavinvadee Suppapongtevasakul, Seong Jae Shin

This report shows that the production and trafficking of methamphetamine in Shan State, Myanmar, have significantly increased since 2021. Thailand remained the main transit and destination point for methamphetamine trafficked from Myanmar and recorded the largest quantity of methamphetamine seizures in the region. The report highlights the evolving nature of transnational drug trafficking groups operating in East and Southeast Asia. These groups have demonstrated remarkable agility in reacting to law enforcement pressure, as shown by the spread of production sites for ketamine and related precursor chemicals.

Vienna: United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime; 2025. 150p.

By Pascal Tanguay

Elections in 2023 have brought a new government to power, headed by Prime Minister Srettha Thavisin, who declared in late September that his government intends to achieve in the next six months a partial reversal of the reforms, recriminalizing recreational use and leaving the medical market as the sole legal arena.

Through a methodical data collection process involving key informant interviews and literature reviews, this report sheds light on the substantial impacts of such policy changes, especially on the illicit markets and organized crime networks. Informed by these insights, the GI-TOC has formulated preliminary policy recommendations to secure a resilient Thai cannabis market that is as balanced as it is sustainable.

Geneva, SWIT: The Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime (GI-TOC),  2024. 34p.

By Diana S. Kim

"Though today opiates are highly controlled substances and generally viewed as menaces to society, the opium trade was once licit and profitable, both for merchants and for the governments to which they paid taxes. During the late nineteenth century, British and French colonies in Southeast Asia drew up to fifty percent of their revenue from taxes on opium consumption. Given its profitability and European rulers' strenuous defence of opium as an integral part of managing an empire, how did both attitudes toward and laws about opium shift so dramatically by the mid-twentieth century? This book argues against the conventional understanding that opium prohibition was enacted as part of a wave of liberal humanitarianism or because doctors awoke to its dangers to users' wellbeing, and instead offers a more complex story. In examining the opium's fall from grace throughout British and French colonies in Southeast Asia from the 1860s to the 1940s, Diana Kim combines extensive archival research with her training in political science. This book reveals the key role minor colonial administrators played in the abolition process. Local administrators were players in intellectual debates and decision-making processes concerning opium, and the knowledge they produced-their records and observations-influenced the empire's revenue policies. The author's analysis of these processes challenges notions that states implement policies based on maximizing their revenue. By observing how opium prohibition was implemented differently and at different times across the region, Kim argues against the idea that the push for prohibition came from the metropole. Further, she reflects on the lasting legacies of prohibition and the implications for present-day politics and public regulation of vice crimes and illicit markets, making a statement about how vice is defined and how its regulation affects processes of state formation, colonial and otherwise"

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  region, Kim argues against the idea that the push for prohibition came from the metropole. Further, she reflects on the lasting legacies of prohibition and the implications for present-day politics and public regulation of vice crimes and illicit markets, making a statement about how vice is defined and how its regulation affects processes of state formation, colonial and otherwise”

Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2020. 336p.