The Southeast Asian nation of Myanmar is now the world’s largest producer of opium, according to a recent report from the United Nations. Myanmar’s new dominance in the international opium market follows the decline of production of the drug in Afghanistan, which had previously been the largest producer of the crop worldwide.

Afghanistan’s drop in production follows a ban on opium farming issued by the ruling Taliban in 2022, although that year’s harvest was exempt from the ban. Since then, the South-Central Asian nation has seen a 95% decline in opium cultivation. The Taliban retook control of Afghanistan in 2021 as the United States military largely evacuated the country following two decades of American occupation and war. 

Before the ban, Afghanistan was the world’s largest producer of opium. According to a 2022 survey by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), Afghanistan’s opium cultivation increased by 32% over the previous year to 233,000 hectares (about 575,755 acres). The southwestern parts of the country accounted for 73% of the total area under cultivation and saw the largest crop increases. In Helmand province, one-fifth of the arable land was dedicated to growing opium poppies.

The report also states that the 2022 harvest was the most profitable in years, with prices soaring, even as a political and economic crisis engulfed the country. The income made by farmers from opium sales more than tripled from $425 million in 2021 to $1.4 billion in 2022. The primary markets for Afghan opium are Iran, Pakistan, and Central Asia. 

Decline of Opium Production in Afghanistan Leads to Surge in Myanmar

Earlier this month, a new report from UNODC showed that the drop in production in Afghanistan has led to a surge in poppy farming in Myanmar. The increase in poppy cultivation in Myanmar is also fueled by the social, political and economic distress following a 2021 military coup that drove many to poppy farming, according to the report.

“The economic, security and governance disruption that followed the military takeover of February 2021 continue to drive farmers in remote areas towards opium to make a living,” UNODC Regional Representative Jeremy Douglas said in a statement earlier this month.

Because of the decline in the opium supply brought about by the Taliban prohibition in Afghanistan, farmers in Myanmar can now earn about 75% more by farming opium than they could previously. The average price of a kilogram of opium flower has reached $355 per kilogram, according to the report.

The amount of land in Myanmar has increased from an estimated 40,100 hectares (about 99,000 acres) to 47,000 hectares (about 116,000 acres). The most growth in opium cultivation occurred in border regions in northern Shan State, followed by Chin and Kachin states. The UNODC report also noted that more sophisticated farming practices adopted by Myanmar’s opium growers have led to an increase in efficiency, with the average yield of the crop climbing 16% to 22.99 kilograms per hectare.

Myanmar, previously known as Burma, is an independent country in Southeast Asia. It shares borders with China, India, Thailand, Bangladesh, and Laos. Covering an area of 261,228 square miles, Myanmar is one of the largest countries in Southeast Asia. As of 2014, its population stood at about 51 million inhabitants, with estimates reaching 54 million people by 2017.

From 1962 until 2011, the country was ruled by the armed forces, enduring almost 50 years of oppressive military regimes. In 1989, the ruling military changed the country’s name from Burma to Myanmar.

In 2011, Myanmar transitioned away from full military rule, sparking hopes of democratic reforms. However, the military retained significant control over the government and, following the military’s proxy party’s defeat in the 2020 elections, a coup in 2021 returned power to military leaders. 

Douglas of UNODC said that an increase in armed conflict between ruling military forces and armed ethnic minority groups would likely further accelerate the growth of opium cultivation in Myanmar. The country’s ruling military junta did not respond to a Reuters request for comment on the report.

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According to a report from the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), “The COVID-19 pandemic had a disruptive effect on drug markets. With international travel severely curtailed, producers struggled to get their product to market. Night clubs and bars were shut as officials ramped up their attempts to control the virus, causing demand to slump for drugs like cocaine that are often associated with those settings.

“However, the most recent data suggests this slump has had little impact on longer-term trends. The global supply of cocaine is at record levels. Almost 2,000 tons was produced in 2020, continuing a dramatic uptick in manufacture that began in 2014, when the total was less than half of today’s levels.”

According to The Guardian, production “of coca, the drug’s base ingredient, spiked 35% in 2020-21, surpassing pre-pandemic levels.”

“The pandemic was a bit of a blip for the expansion of cocaine production, but now it has rebounded and is even higher than what it was before,” said Antoine Vella, a researcher at the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime and who contributed to the report on cocaine.

The UN report says that the “surge is partly a result of an expansion in coca bush cultivation, which doubled between 2013 and 2017, hit a peak in 2018, and rose sharply again in 2021.

“But it is also due to improvements in the process of conversion from coca bush to cocaine hydrochloride. In parallel, there has been a continuing growth in demand, with most regions showing steadily rising numbers of users over the past decade. Although these increases can be partly explained by population growth, there is also a rising prevalence of cocaine use. Interceptions by law enforcement have also been on the rise, at a higher speed than production, meaning that interdiction has contained the growth of the global amount of cocaine available for consumption,” the report continues. 

While the cocaine trade has long been concentrated in major hubs like Colombia, that might be changing. As Vella told The Guardian, “I think we need to shift away from thinking of cocaine as being a European/North American problem because it’s also very much a South American problem.” 

“The cocaine trade in Colombia was once controlled by just a few major players. As a result of a fragmentation of the criminal landscape following the demobilization of the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (FARC) in 2016, it now involves criminal groups of all sizes, structures and objectives. But, signs of consolidation of some of these groups have recently emerged. These developments have led to an increasing presence of foreign actors in Colombia. Mexican and Balkan criminal groups have moved closer to the centre of production to gain access to supplies and wholesale quantities of cocaine,” the report says. “These foreign groups are not aiming to take control of territory. Instead, they are trying to make supply lines more efficient. Their presence is helping to incentivize coca bush cultivation and finance all stages of the supply chain.” 

The report continues: “In established cocaine markets, the proportion of the general population using the drug is high. But these markets only cover around one-fifth of the global population. If the prevalence in other regions increases to match established markets, the number of users globally would increase tremendously because of the large underlying population. This type of market convergence has already been happening in the case of Western and Central Europe, where purity levels and prices have harmonised with the United States, although prevalence of cocaine use in Western and Central Europe has not yet reached the level in the United States.”

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The UN has just issued a report about cannabis that will no doubt in the near future look as alarmist as it is dated. Namely, the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) has issued its annual world drug report.

Here are the high level takeaways—which are hard to read with a straight face.

1. Legalizing cannabis appears to increase regular use of the drug. No kidding. When someone can buy something legitimately rather than risking criminalization via black market purchases, chances are that they will buy more of it. That said, even the UNODC had to admit that the prevalence of cannabis use among teenagers “has not changed much.” In fact, legalization (in Canada and the U.S.) not to mention the semi-legit markets in places like Holland, have not suddenly seen an uptick in use by underage individuals.
2. The Pandemic (unsurprisingly) also increased usage. The world has just gone through an unprecedented shock the likes of which had not been seen in a century. It is no surprise that the use of a drug that lowers anxiety and alleviates many kinds of mental stress and illness might increase.
3. Cannabis is “getting stronger” with regards to THC content. This is a bugbear. Yes, there are some strains available in the new commoditized market that might have a higher level of THC than outdoor guerrilla grown skunk by hippies back in the day. There are also widely used strains of cannabis with deliberately lower levels of THC. This is another aged spectre of prohibition that long ago outlived its shelf life.
4. Both cocaine production and U.S.-based opioid deaths hit new records. This may be true, but it has little to do with cannabis legalization or use. In fact, the association in the UNODC report is what is alarming. Cannabis is increasingly being seen in legitimate medical circles as a gateway drug off of other, more harmful substances. Not a gateway to them.
5. “The proportion of people with psychiatric disorders and suicides associated with regular cannabis use has increased.” Don’t let this kind of anti-cannabis propaganda scare you, even if it is emanating from the UN. There is no link between mental illness, much less suicides from regular cannabis use. In fact, for many people suffering from both physical and psychiatric disorders, like depression and PTSD, cannabis use considerably relieves the stressors that lead to self-destructive behavior.

The most recent study to examine such issues, emanating from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) last year had to concede that they could not “establish that cannabis use caused the increased suicidality we observed in this study,” and that “these associations warrant further research.” The same study also noted that cannabis use by adults more than doubled in the United States between 2008 and 2019—precisely the years that normalization became a multi-state campaign politically.

It is also worth noting that one of the most recent studies about cannabis and PTSD, which includes episodes of depression leading to suicide, found that cannabis use dramatically decreased PTSD symptoms to the point that many patients no longer met the diagnostic criteria for the condition.

Veterans are perhaps the population most at risk for suicide, even in the best of times. According to most national estimates, there are 22 veteran suicides a day in the U.S. Deployed veterans serving in either Iraq or Afghanistan had a suicide risk 41% higher than the average population. Even more intriguingly, non-deployed veterans had a 61% greater risk of committing suicide than the average person.

It is also worth noting that economic and other conditions since 2008 have actually worsened for many people—from the overhang of the global recession to a flat recovery.

COVID-19 was just a piece of icing on an already overburdened cake.

Using cannabis to help relieve some of these symptoms seems like a very sane, logical, and increasingly legal option.

Global Scare Tactics and Propaganda

While it is unsurprising that UNODC would produce this kind of report, even after the UN moved cannabis to a list of less dangerous drugs, including an apparent parroting of highly suspect U.S. government data, it is a telling development. This is the same kind of distortion and misapplied association that dragged prohibition out as long as it has.

Using a drug’s legalization combined with a disastrously disconnecting event like a global Pandemic to make unfounded associations about cannabis use is disingenuous to say the least.

To appear to parrot a U.S. national study which reached similar conclusions while being equally light on the data and association front is just another sign that the UN is still overwhelmingly influenced by U.S. policymakers—and anti-reform ones at that—who will stop at nothing to try and halt the green tide of change.

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