Meth’s new frontier: The Islamic marshlands of Bangladesh

Rural Bangladesh is a sleepy, swampy sort of place.

At dawn, moms in burqas emerge from huts to scatter chicken feed in the dirt. On hot days, farm boys snooze under ficus trees. The evenings are punctuated by prayer calls that warble over the rice paddies.

Life here feels slow. And yet, improbable as it may seem, these Islamic marshlands have become one of the hottest emerging meth markets on the planet.

Bangladesh is the latest Asian nation to fall under the spell of “ya ba,” little pills made from caffeine and meth. The tablets, which look like baby aspirin, are dyed pink and smell like cake frosting.

In the past decade, meth pills flowing into Bangladesh went from a trickle to a tsunami. Just nine years back, police were seizing only about 35,000 pills per year. You could comfortably fit all of that inside a backpack.

Annual seizures have since swelled to 29 million pills, an increase of more than 80,000 percent. That’s enough meth to tweak out everyone in Texas — with plenty left over for Nebraska.

Bangladeshi authorities hardly know what to do with the mountains of meth piling up in their evidence rooms. In the far eastern borderlands — along the country’s busiest trafficking routes — anti-drug squads must dispose of their seized meth creatively.

“We have a system,” says Lt. Col. Abuzar Al Zahid, a bear-like man who commands a Border Guard Force base in a port city called Teknaf. “I tell my men to dig a hole.”

The colonel’s subordinates will dig a deep pit near the station. Then he’ll order them to dump buckets of hot pink pills down the hole.

Of course, you can’t just leave millions of pills buried in the dirt. That’s a tempting target for any addict with a shovel. Before the officers fill in the hole with dirt, Abuzar makes them round up all of the station’s confiscated whiskey — another illicit drug in Islamic Bangladesh. The men then smash hundreds of bottles and douse the meth in booze.

The result: a viscous, pink slurry of intoxicants, seeping into the soil. The colonel regards this spectacle as a morale booster.

“When they’re destroying these drugs, I want our soldiers to feel hatred,” he says. “It’s a psychological operation to make them hate this drug.”

How did this place, so languid and pious, get transfixed by dirty speed? At a glance, this phenomenon is baffling. Think like a meth trafficker, however, and it starts to makes sense.

Bangladesh is one of the world’s most crowded countries. Imagine forcing half of America’s population into an area smaller than Illinois. That’s a lot of potential customers squeezed into a confined place.

All of this teeming humanity is overseen by corrupt police officers, many of whom make roughly $25 per week. That salary doesn’t incentivize them to risk their lives taking down well-armed traffickers. If anything, it leaves them vulnerable to drug syndicates doling out bribes.

Bangladesh is also swimming in teenagers. Roughly one-third of its 160 million citizens is between 15 and 30 — a drug dealer’s demographic dream. Most of these young adults live in the impoverished countryside. There isn’t much to do out there but pray, work the fields and maybe play some cricket.

“The narcotics businessmen, they are relentless,” Abuzar says. “They spread stories that methamphetamine, it will increase your sex power. They also say it will improve your working ability.”

Both of these sales pitches are true — at least until the comedown turns the meth user into a clammy, lethargic mess.

In Bangladesh, as in much of Asia, meth is not always used as a party drug. Speed pills are often intertwined with hard labor. One addict named Yunus — a 45-year-old fisherman living in Ukhia, a lush province fronting the Indian Ocean — says he only uses the drug for marathon work sessions.

“Fishermen take meth to work harder. It keeps us warm out on the cold seas,” Yunus says. “Look at drunks. They always want to quarrel and make a scene. Not us. Meth smokers just want to work really hard.”

Twelve years of addiction have left Yunus rawboned and fidgety. He incessantly picks at his scraggly hairline. His eyes are covered in a yellow film.

Yet Yunus is convinced that meth pills are less harmful than alcohol. He says that booze, explicitly forbidden by the Quran, is seen by many in Bangladesh as more sinful than meth.

Bangladesh’s meth woes are, in part, an accident of geography. Its neighbor to the east just happens to be Myanmar, Asia’s top exporter of methamphetamine — a nation where the drug trade is protected by the powerful military.

In the highlands of Myanmar, more than 1,000 miles from Bangladesh, armed clans crank out meth with impunity. As a former US Drug Enforcement Agency chief previously told PRI, Myanmar’s army is “providing tacit approval for drugs to be produced in these areas.”

Privately, Abuzar says, Bangladeshi police keep confronting Myanmar officials about their deep entanglement in the meth trade. “We have concrete information about all this,” Abuzar says. “But they don’t like to talk about it.”

The meth surging into Bangladesh must pass through one of Myanmar’s most militarized zones. Just across the border, the state imposes apartheid conditions on the Rohingya, among the world’s most tormented minorities.

That means checkpoints galore. Trafficking anything through the Rohingya homeland — drugs, people, you name it — is extremely difficult without official complicity.

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Meanwhile, on the river border separating the two countries, Bangladeshi border guards stand watch with rusty Kalashnikovs and store-bought binoculars.

By the hundreds, dinghies and riverboats launch from Myanmar’s far shores packed with cargo. Most of it is legal. Some of it isn’t. These underpaid, poorly equipped border guards are left to sort out the criminals from the workaday boatmen.

The traffickers are now so flagrant that they’ve started stashing meth right on the riverbed — practically in plain sight.

They’ll pack the drugs into waterproof bundles, wrapped tightly in tape and plastic. Then they’ll attach weights so that the packages sink below the water’s surface. When the patrols ease up, the traffickers will scoop up the drugs and slip onto Bangladeshi shores.

“See how tightly they pack up the ya ba? It’s perfectly waterproof,” says Abuzar, ripping apart a freshly nabbed drug bundle back at the station.

Hours before, his river patrol units caught two men fishing the package out of the river. As the colonel tears open its plastic wrapping, the evidence room fills with the vanilla-sweet aroma.

“Almost every day, we catch more and more,” he says. The flow of meth is unrelenting, he says. “It’s a cat and mouse game.”