Phuket man arrested with over 10,000 meth pills

There’s been another methamphetamine bust in Phuket’s main city district this week. Border Patrol Police arrested a man in the Rassada sub-district. They seized 10,504 meth pills from him, in addition to crystal meth.

The police arrested Ban at the entrance of Soi Bang She Lao on Thep Kasattri Road, The Phuket Express reported. They then brought him to Phuket City Police Station to face charges of illegal possession of Category 1 drugs with intent to sell.

This news comes after police found some meth pills in a man’s minivan in Patong earlier this week. Items found in the vehicle included nine meth pills, a gun, 10 bullets, a knife, and an axe in a man’s car in Patong.

Phuket has had a few meth busts this year. In August, police seized 2,770 meth pills, along with roughly 1,293 grammes of crystal meth, from a man in the main city district. He was allegedly part of a larger drug network, which included dealers in other provinces. He admitted to police that he was paid 20,000 baht every time he transported drugs and that he had done so three times. This was on top of a few other meth busts in the same month.

Meth continues to be the most popular, cheap, and readily available illicit narcotic in Thailand and all over Southeast Asia, where the synthetic drug trade is booming.

Last year alone, more than one billion meth pills were seized in the east and Southeast Asia, according to a report released by the United Nations. It is considered the “drug of greatest concern” in the region by the UN.

In April, Thai police arrested more than 120,000 drug suspects in the past six months. They had seized more than 2.4 billion baht in assets and confiscated more than 260 million pills of illegal substances, including meth.