Burma Declares War on Opium, but Deep-Rooted Challenges Remain

20.02.2012

In Burma’s new war on drugs, meet the weapon of mass destruction: the weed-whacker.
Its two-stroke engine spins a metal blade, which is more commonly deployed to tame the suburban gardens of wealthy Westerners. But today, in a remote valley in impoverished Shan State, Burma police armed with weed-whackers are advancing through fields of thigh-high poppies, leaving a carpet of stems in their wake.
When the police are finished, their uniforms are flecked with a sticky brown sap harvested from these flowers for centuries: opium. Burma produced an estimated 610 metric tons in 2011, making it the world’s second-biggest opium supplier after Afghanistan, according to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime.
The area under poppy cultivation has doubled in the past five years. Now, emerging from half a century of military dictatorship, Burma says it wants to buck that trend. Since taking power a year ago, the nominally civilian government of President Thein Sein has launched a series of political and economic reforms.