Police find 1 million meth pills in Chiang Mai pickup truck

In yet another mass drug bust in Thailand’s north, police found 1 million methamphetamine pills in a pickup truck they stopped at a drug checkpoint in the Chiang Dao district of Chiang Mai. The police arrested four people who were in the truck on Monday. After investigating, they then got a warrant to arrest another man, and another woman.

The police managed to track down the woman, but the man remains on the loose. Police have so far arrested 5 people in total. The four people arrested at the drug strop include two men and two women. The suspects are 29, 31, 33 and 38 years old. The ages of the woman arrested later, as well as the man still on the loose, have not yet been reported.

Just last week there was a massive drug bust where 8 suspected drug traffickers were shot dead in a firefight with Thai drug and border police. The incident took place in the early hours of the morning in a Chiang Rai jungle on May 2. According to a Thai PBS World report, security forces also seized around 6.7 million methamphetamine pills in the operation.

Another major drug bust happened in northern Thailand in March when the Department of Special Investigations seized nearly 1.4 billion baht in assets after searching three houses in Chiang Rai province. The houses belong to suspected members of a drug network. The assets included 246 bank accounts, 155 cars and motorcycles worth about 130 million baht, and land title deeds for 232 blocks of land worth about 1.3 billion baht.

In the past six months, Thai police have arrested more than 120,000 drug suspects, seized more than 2.4 billion baht in assets and confiscated more than 260 million pills of illegal substances like methamphetamine, aka “speed”. Besides speed, the most common drug was marijuana, with some 53,000 kilograms confiscated. Next was crystal meth (ice), with more than 7,552 kilograms found, followed by quantities of heroin and ketamine.

SOURCE: Bangkok Post