Abstract
The border regions between China and Burma and between Thailand and Burma (also known as Myanmar) constitute the Golden Triangle. This area of Asia is often considered the ‘breadbasket’ of the heroin trade, supplying much of the world’s heroin. While much criminological research has been dedicated to drug use in the United States and other western countries, little attention has been given to the regions of drug production and trade and its political, economic, and social context. With the descriptive goal of examining ‘how heroin produced in Burma is transported into China [and] the changing patterns of heroin trafficking’ over the last 20 years, Chin and Zhang conducted on-the-ground research in several countries in the Golden Triangle of Southeast Asia, focusing particularly in the border areas of Burma and China (p. ix).
Representing a significant data collection project, they utilize surveys, formal and informal interviews, and ethnography over several years. Although their study was based on convenience sampling, they gathered data from multiple people involved in the heroin trade or its enforcement: drug enforcement authorities, drug traffickers, street-level drug dealers, drug users, armed group leaders, and their personal community contacts. In addition, they incorporated secondary data from news articles, weekly magazines, scholarly journals, and the police. These efforts alone make a significant contribution to the literature on the international drug trade and drug markets.
Chin and Zhang are mostly concerned with how individuals entered the drug trade and how they dealt with law enforcement. Drawing from a framework that includes the corporate model and the enterprise model of organized crime, as well as network theory, Chin and Zhang suggest that the drug trade resembles all of these modes at one time or another. In particular, social networks are key in understanding the specific roles that individuals play and their connection between the local and global context.
Chin and Zhang rightly argue that the sociopolitical and geographic history of the region is crucial to heroin production and trafficking. Countries such as Burma and Afghanistan are often considered non-enforcement countries. In these instances, opium cultivation and drug production is illegal, but these laws are not strictly enforced. Most opium production in the region occurs in northern Burma, where the Burmese government made agreements for a cease-fire while allowing opium trade after the collapse of the Communist Party in the late 1980s. On the other hand, China has an authoritarian government with a strict, harsh criminal justice system. Surprisingly, the drug trade in China began to boom in the late 1990s, even though China has incredibly draconian drug policies. Chin and Zhang identified two main factors that caused the drug trafficking in China to thrive. First, likely due to economic growth, a large domestic drug consumption market was established. Second, the trafficking route through Thailand was disrupted. The China–Burma route is more suitable for trafficking due to geographical proximity, road conditions, and cultural similarities.
Chin and Zhang find two interesting characteristics of the drug trade different from more traditional drug markets. First, the drug trafficking occurs in what the authors classify as an ‘ants-moving house’. There are ordinary people in border towns that will transport small quantities of drugs to the next location rather than large volumes. Unlike most legal professions, there were not many requirements or specialized skills needed to enter the drug trade in Southeast Asia. The individuals generally enter through close social networks such as friends, family members, or intimate partners. They also possess entrepreneurial characteristics to succeed – such as risk-taking and innovation. Even though these are small quantities of a drug, China has strict laws that included the death penalty for as little as 50 g of heroin. Chin and Zhang wondered why these citizens would risk being sentenced to death for a relatively small amount of drugs. They found that many of the individuals involved in such high-risk drug trafficking were doing so to maintain their own drug use habits or pay off past debts, primarily gambling debts. Additionally, the vast majority of the individuals were desperate for money or were struggling to financially support themselves and their families. Trafficking, therefore, occurs in response to real structural economic strains and opportunities.
Another characteristic noted was the lack of violence in the Southeast Asian drug trade. They hypothesized that the lack of violence is because of the strict enforcement in China and that any extra attention from violence would be detrimental. In addition, there is not any designated ‘turf’ or areas of control for them to compete over. While not discussed in the book, these trends invite interesting comparisons to the transformation of drug markets elsewhere in response to changing contexts. For example, one of the explanations for the ‘crime decline’ in New York was that open air drug markets moved to a more decentralized delivery system after targeted policing efforts. This decentralized system relied more heavily on personal networks for drug deliveries rather than the impersonal open air market. These factors likely led to a decrease in violence associated with the market. While the drug trade in each context is certainly different, it may be an interesting comparative idea to consider how multiple facets of the production and distribution have perhaps adapted in similar ways to structural and enforcement conditions.
Moving forward, it would also be worthwhile to better understand how China’s growing drug using population will impact both its drug policies and the trafficking patterns. A future complementary study could easily focus on this population, who serve as one of the main drivers of the change in heroin trafficking. More broadly, it is unclear as to how the growth of China’s middle class and access to drugs, and in particular, amphetamines, might change attitudes toward drug treatment. Moreover, it is unclear as to how this drug using population overlaps with the traffickers themselves; there is passing mention of drug use problems in border towns, but more research could be done on how trafficking has impacted use in these areas and vice versa.
Overall, however, Chin and Zhang provide an excellent description of the drug trade in the Golden Triangle and its sociological context, making it a good case study for undergraduate classes on drugs and society. This discussion is important because drug scholarship often discusses the characteristics and trafficking patterns of drug organizations with little focus on how the social, economic, and political context influences these patterns.