Indian pills fuel drug boom in Myanmar
Five years ago, when cold pills first trickled across Myanmar’s untamed border with India, many local officials were baffled. Where was this medicine going, and why were smugglers so interested in it? Today, the cross-border trickle has become a torrent and everyone knows why the Indian-made pills are so valuable: they are bound for secret laboratories in lawless eastern Myanmar that churn out most of mainland South-east Asia’s methamphetamine, or “meth”. Cold pills contain pseudoephedrine, the main ingredient of meth, a highly-addictive drug whose ever-soaring popularity is rattling governments across Asia.
