Transplanted Trouble.(the Burmese drug syndicates)

Hill 1200 is a long way from Afghanistan. But the view from the Thai military outpost, which sits along the Burmese border, is awfully familiar. Until the Taliban banned its cultivation last year, the fields of arid Afghanistan were filled with opium poppy--75 percent of the world's supply. The elimination of this year's crop has naturally driven up prices for opium paste and its derivative, heroin, across the world. Down here along the Thai-Burma border, where ethnic Wa militias have been churning out ya ba ("crazy drug"), or methamphetamine, pills for the Thai market, the locals are rushing to fill the gap.

From Hill 1200, Thai soldiers keep an eye on a ramshackle collection of green-roofed buildings that goes by the name of Muang Yawn Mai; they say the hills around the hamlet are carpeted in new poppy plants. "These people used to grow opium before," Lt. Gen. Wattanachai Chaimuanwong, the straight-talking commander of Thailand's Third Army, says of the Wa, who have moved to Muang Yawn Mai and surrounding villages from their homelands farther north. "Now they've come down here to grow opium openly again."

Thai military-intelligence officials believe the Wa have planted more than 3,000 hectares of opium poppy along the border in the past few months. To keep the new crop hidden from view, farmers plant poppies between rows of other plants such as corn. From his observatory atop Hill 1200, local Thai commander Col. Sampun Srirajbunpan points at the base of a mountain just north of Muang Yawn Mai, where, he says, a new heroin laboratory has been set up near a waterfall. Recently, one of his night patrols ambushed a column of five armed couriers inside Thailand. His men killed two Wa soldiers, arrested two, captured five AK-47 rifles and seized 16 kilograms of heroin and 50,000 ya ba tablets from the gunmen's backpacks.

Such mixed seizures are becoming more and more common. In January the Thai Navy intercepted two drug-laden Thai fishing trawlers in the Andaman Sea, one filled with 7.8 million ya ba tablets, the other with 126 kilograms of heroin, which would now be worth $1.26 million; officials say both ships received their cargoes from the same Burmese freighter. In April a fire fight broke out between Thai soldiers and a column of drug couriers guarded by some 30 armed escorts along the border; the smugglers fled, leaving behind five kilos of heroin and 6 million ya ba pills.

Heroin, which has traditionally been the backbone of Southeast Asia's narcotics trade, had been largely forgotten over the past three years as a result of the unprecedented boom in methamphetamine production in Burma and ya ba consumption in Thailand. According to estimates from the United Nations Drug Control Program and the U.S. government, the harvest of raw opium in Burma, the source of 90 percent of Southeast Asia's opium, declined by some 40 percent from some 1,700 tons to 1,000 tons annually over the past four years. (Ten tons of opium are needed to refine one ton of heroin.)

That sharp reduction has much to do with heavy rains and cold winters in the Wa heartland around Pang Sang and in the Kokang region near the border with China's Yunnan province. But at the same time, Chinese authorities have been cracking down on the trade, demanding in 1998 that the Wa move their poppy fields and heroin labs away from the border and seizing 19,000 kilos of heroin, mostly in Yunnan, in the past three years. Rangoon, which depends on China as its only ally and source of $2 billion worth of military hardware, complied by moving the Wa south; the Wa quickly discovered the benefits of ya ba, which is both easier to produce and more profitable than heroin. And much more popular: ...