Thailand’s big, bad meth boom, in the middle of a pandemic | VIDEO
Caitlin Ashworth reports on Thailand’s burgeoning drug trade and the futile attempts to try and control it. 72 tonnes of a chemical called propionyl chloride arrives in a remote region of Laos. All professionally packaged and loaded ready for shipping. The containers full of the obscure chemical had made their way from Jiangsu, a coastal Chinese province north of Shanghai in China.
The huge shipment was destined for an obscure location in north west Laos, about a 2,000 kilometre road trip. But instead it was sent, by ship, on a much longer journey to arrive at Laem Chabang, the main shipping port in Thailand, for a road journey of a similar length, north from Bangkok and across the Laos border. Although the paperwork showed that it would be delivered to Laos, the eventual destination was northern Myanmar. This all happened in July last year.
