North Korea's Got a Big Crystal Meth Problem
North Korean meth is the bomb—at least, according to US officials who tested two batches last year. The packages of sharp, ice-like crystals measured 98 percent and 96 percent for purity, respectively. According to an indictment against the suppliers, who were arrested in 2013, the drug was so pure that “people in New York, they went crazy… the places that we put it in the States, New York… Boston, all these places, I mean, they went crazy.”
According to a new report by Dr. Sheena Chestnut Greitens, an assistant professor of political science at the University of Missouri, the North Korean government has used drug manufacturing and a host of other nefarious activities to raise funds since the 1970s. The regime defaulted on its international loans in 1976 and Dr. Greitens describes how that same year “a dozen members of North Korea’s diplomatic corps, including the North Korean Ambassador to Norway, [were] ejected… for smuggling illicit goods" including "4,000 bottles of booze (mostly Polish vodka) and 140,000 cigarettes" in Sweden, and "400 bottles of liquor, 4.5 million cigarettes. and 147 kilos of hashish in Denmark.”
After the collapse of the USSR, North Korea lost its communist financers and that, combined with tough sanctions and disastrous policy decisions, resulted in the famine of the 1990s where an estimated one million people died. Factories were not operating and fishermen starved in the harbor, as they had no oil to power their boats. Desperate to survive, the Kim regime forced community farms to cultivate opium poppies and demanded as much as 132 pounds of raw opium per harvest. “We should be growing grain, not poppies,” said one defector quoted in Dr. Greitens' report. “But the instruction from the central government was that if we grow poppies we can sell the product for ten times as much to buy grain.”
After the famine ended in the 2000s, North Korean factories began to produce a more modern type of drug: methamphetamine. “Officials from North Korea’s various security agencies were reportedly involved in guarding the plants and factories,” writes Dr. Greitens. Within the factories, real-life Walter Whites were hired to school local chemists in the art of synthesizing pure, potent meth crystals. “Experts were brought in to advise on production."
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