Asia

Record seizures fail to dent Southeast Asia’s booming synthetic drug trade: UN report

Methamphetamine and ketamine seizures in Asia reached record highs in 2025, but experts tell CNA that falling prices and expanding criminal networks suggest supply remains stronger than ever.

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BANGKOK: Despite record levels of seizures across East and Southeast Asia last year, the illegal synthetic drugs industry is thriving and growing, according to new regional findings.

Methamphetamine seizures reached 349 tonnes in 2025 – a 48 per cent increase from the previous year and more than five times the amount seized a decade ago – according to a report by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) released last Friday (Jun 12).

The seizure of ketamine also soared 185 per cent from 2024 reaching 52.5 tonnes in 2025.

Experts tell CNA the significance is not the seizures themselves but that despite record enforcement activity, supply appears stronger than ever.

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“Authorities may be catching more drugs, but traffickers are producing even more,” said Nualnoi Treerat, an economist and director of the Institute of Asian Studies at Chulalongkorn University.

As production capacity, trafficking networks and demand expand, the market for synthetic drugs is not contracting, but rather consolidating and expanding into new areas, the report, titled Synthetic Drugs in East and Southeast Asia: Latest Developments and Challenges 2026, found. 

It is a reflection of the scope and influence of organised criminal networks with aggressive expansion strategies, mainly based in Southeast Asia, and the lack of impact of law enforcement action, Inshik Sim, a lead analyst at the UNODC Regional Office for Southeast Asia and the Pacific who helped produce the report, told CNA.

“Seizure data, of course, represents law enforcement success, but at the same time, is more driven by supply,” he said.

“And increased supply clearly tells us that law enforcement action itself is not the only measure to deal with this. The indicator for success would be increases in the price of drugs, but I don’t see that happening.”

UNODC found that crystal meth prices continued to decline across key Southeast Asian markets. Myanmar remains the cheapest market in the region, with retail prices falling from US$6 per gram  to US$5.55 per gram in 2025.

Thailand experienced one of the sharpest declines, from US$20 per gram to US$13.50 per gram in a single year, while Indonesia saw prices drop more than 40 per cent, from roughly US$134 per gram to US$79 per gram.

The ketamine market largely mirrors that for methamphetamine.

“That tells you that whatever you’re seizing is a drop in the ocean, and it’s just being written off as the cost of doing business,” said Richard Horsey, senior Myanmar adviser for the International Crisis Group, a global non-profit organisation.

The vast majority of methamphetamine seizures occurred in Southeast Asia, “highlighting the immense volume of methamphetamine trafficked through land-based and maritime routes in Southeast Asia,” the report said.

Thailand alone seized more than 159 tonnes of methamphetamine in 2025, accounting for nearly half of all meth seized across East and Southeast Asia.

Much of the production originates in Myanmar’s Shan State, “an area traditionally known for the presence of organised crime and non-state armed groups involved in illicit activities”, the report said.

“Myanmar is at the heart of criminality in Southeast Asia, of transnational organised crime,” Horsey added.

The fundamental problem lies in the fact that production networks continue to operate in areas where state authority is weak and enforcement is limited, Nualnoi said.

“As long as these conditions persist, drug production can quickly recover even after major crackdowns.”

The synthetic drugs market is also consolidating and expanding into new areas, the report found, with advanced economies in East Asia a growing concern.

While drug demand was typically low in Japan and South Korea, it has been “rapidly expanding”, Sim said.

Methamphetamine continued to represent a “major drug threat in Japan” in 2025, although seizure quantities declined substantially from the exceptionally high levels recorded in 2024, the report found.

Customs there also seized approximately 1,531 kg of cannabis products in 2025, more than three times the amount the previous year.

“These two countries have higher price tags for these drug commodities, and it is likely that there will be some sustained supply to those two countries,” Sim said.

Because of those higher prices in both countries, traffickers may be targeting them as premium markets, particularly for the trafficking by air passenger couriers, according to the report.

Korea’s methamphetamine seizures involving such couriers rose to 199 kg in 2025 compared with 106 kg in 2024. Both countries also recorded elevated seizures of ketamine.

“Especially from the Korean side, they have always believed that they were relatively safe from the drug challenges,” Sim said.

“But now they see the implications of intensified supply from Southeast Asia as having a significant impact on their country.”

“A PERFECT STORM”

The biggest shift identified by UNODC is the emergence of an interconnected criminal economy stretching from meth labs to scam compounds, money laundering networks and cybercrime operations.

Drug trafficking is increasingly just one form of revenue inside a diversified criminal ecosystem, the report said.

It points to a “deepening convergence” between illicit drug production and the region’s scam industry and wider illicit economy.

Highly sophisticated criminal networks now operate across multiple countries. These groups control supply chains, logistics, money laundering operations, online financial systems and other forms of illicit business, Nualnoi said.

Production has become increasingly industrialised, transnational and diversified, allowing criminal groups to manufacture and distribute drugs on an unprecedented level, she said.

“The result is lower prices, wider availability, and access to new markets across Asia and beyond.”

Horsey compared the professionalisation of drug syndicates to regular technology companies, just with an illicit focus.

Business structures including clear vertical integration, innovation and easily accessible related services, such as money laundering services, franchise systems or IT support were now common, he said.

In northern Shan State, investigators found laptops and Starlink satellite internet terminals linked to suspected scam operations less than a kilometre from large-scale drug manufacturing facilities, evidence UNODC said points to a growing overlap between synthetic drugs, cyber fraud and illicit finance.

“Criminal groups do not restrict themselves to particular commodities. They are looking for ways to expand their financial stream,” Sim said.

Myanmar’s conflict is a major ongoing factor enabling the expansion of these sophisticated drug syndicates, the UNODC report found.

More state fragmentation has led to less control by the central government and less priority placed on cracking down on crime groups, Horsey said.

It means there is a lot of territory not controlled by the state, meaning it is not subject to normal regulatory controls, policing and criminal justice measures.

Shan State, which borders China to the north, Laos to the east and Thailand to the south, has become the primary source of methamphetamine in the region. It has been the epicentre of illicit drug manufacture for years, the report said.

“All paths lead to Shan State. It became a kind of perfect storm. They can do whatever they want there. The state cannot assert its authority,” he said.

Action is still being taken against such operations, however. 

In January, 16 clandestine methamphetamine laboratories were seized in northern Shan, the largest number of manufacturing sites ever reported by Myanmar authorities.

The experts agreed though, that given the sophistication of the criminal groups, isolated seizures would do little to disrupt drug production and movement.

“It’s increasingly more important to disrupt the ecosystem, like the illicit financial infrastructure, chemical supply disruption or online marketplaces,” Sim said.

“Of course, it will pop up again but still it will be some deterrence for organised crime.”

PEOPLE FIRST POLICIES

For public health advocates, the most important question is not how many tonnes of drugs were intercepted, but whether people’s lives are actually improving or not.

For Verapun Ngammee, the director of Ozone Foundation, a harm reduction and public health non-profit based in Nonthaburi, Thailand, record seizures do not necessarily mean that drugs are becoming harder to find.

In many communities, drugs remain widely available despite intensified law enforcement efforts, he said, leading to questions about whether enforcement alone is reducing demand or reducing harm.

“What we often see is that supply chains adapt very quickly. When one route is disrupted, another route emerges. As a result, many users experience little change in access to methamphetamine,” he said.

In some cases, he said users report greater purity or stronger effects than in the past. And that lower prices and higher potency can increase health risks, particularly among young people and vulnerable groups.

Success should be measured by reductions in overdose, improvements in health outcomes, fewer people entering the criminal justice system and stronger community wellbeing, he argued.

“One thing that is often missing is the lived experience of people who use drugs and their families. We also need to talk about mental health, stigma, family breakdown, unemployment, homelessness and barriers to healthcare,” he said.

Ultimately, drug policies have to end up in better outcomes for people including on education, the experiences of young people, and jobs and livelihoods, said Gloria Lai, the Asia regional director at the International Drug Policy Consortium, a global network that works collectively to promote person-centred, rights-affirming drug policies.

“It goes back to the principle of not just focusing on trying to reduce and suppress drug use or supply, but making sure that in everything that you do, you’re putting people first and you’re thinking first about the safety of communities and the health and the well-being of communities, even as you carry out these operations,” she said.

“If in the end all we’re doing is catching, arresting and convicting low-level dealers or people who use drugs and incarcerating them, then that’s not an efficient or a useful response overall.”

Sim agreed that demand reduction was equally important and rejected viewing drugs through a purely law-enforcement lens.

He described organised crime groups as sophisticated businesses that adapt to enforcement pressure and argued that responses must address both supply and demand.

The challenge, experts said, is that criminal groups have become highly adaptive and have gained strong footholds in communities right across Asia.

“Seizures are not what’s going to stop this. It doesn’t mean you give up on seizures,” Horsey said.

“They provide intelligence, they provide information, but it isn’t the answer.”

Additional reporting by Jarupat Karunyaprasit.

Source: CNA/jb(js)

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