Narco-capitalism grips North
Korea By Andrei Lankov
In early March, the United States State
Department made a statement that attracted
surprisingly little attention worldwide,
estimating that government-sponsored narcotic
production in North Korea seemed to have decreased
considerably. At the same time, the statement made
clear that the private production of drugs was on
the rise.
This fits with what the present
author has heard recently - often from sources
inside North Korea; it seems that North Korea's
drug industry is changing, and this change might
have important consequences for the outside world.
The story of North Korea's involvement
with the international
narcotics trade began 35
years ago. In 1976, Norwegian police intercepted a
large shipment of hashish in the luggage of North
Korean diplomats. The same year, another group of
North Korean officials was found in possession of
the same drug by Egyptian customs; they had 400
kilograms of hashish in their luggage.
In
both cases, diplomatic passports saved them from
any formal investigation. Next year, North Korean
diplomats were caught trying to smuggle drugs into
Venezuela and India. In India, quite friendly to
North Korea in those days, the 15 kgs of hashish
was transported by the ambassador's secretary.
After that, such seizures became regular
occurrences, usually once every year or two, and
usually involving North Korean diplomats.
North Korea's narcotics program has always
appeared strange to outside observers - "strange"
even if judged by the standards of Pyongyang,
whose leaders do not care much about legal
niceties and international reputation, and
perceive international politics as a cut-throat,
zero-sum game. On balance, state-sponsored drug
production has done much more harm than good to
Pyongyang.
Available estimates agree that
the North Korean government didn't earn much from
pedaling illicit drugs. It is even possible that
these risky operations were largely waged to
sustain North Korean missions overseas - from the
mid-1970s such missions were required to pay for
their own expenses.
At the same time, the
existence of this program inflicted serious damage
on Pyongyang's international standing, which was
at rock-bottom anyway. Despite all denials of
official involvement, the program could not really
be hidden because seizures of narcotics carried by
North Korean diplomats and officials happened far
too often and sometimes in countries that were
relatively sympathetic to the North.
So,
if analysts at the State Department are to be
believed, North Korea seems to have come to its
senses and stopped or, more likely, significantly
reduced its narcotics production. Indeed, this
program seems to belong to the strange and
slightly bizarre world of the foreign policy of
North Korea in the 1970s. After all, those were
the times when North Korean agents were busy
kidnapping Japanese teenagers to become living
tools for the training of agents (and when US$200
million was spent propagating the
juche(self-reliance) ideology in the Third
World).
However, this doesn't mean the
world should heave a collective sigh of relief and
write off North Korea as a potential source of
dangerous narcotics. If anything, the situation
has become worse over the past five to six years.
But this time, the North Korean regime seems to
have little or no responsibility for the new boom
in drug production.
The change in the
North Korean drug industry essentially mirrors the
wider changes that in the past two decades have
occurred in the North Korean economy and society
at large. The state-run Stalinist economy
essentially collapsed whilst private business took
over - usually unrecognized by the state,
technically illegal in most cases, completely
absent from official statistics, but powerful
nonetheless. This happened in all industries, and
drugs production was not an exception.
The
author interacts with North Koreans quite
frequently and most of my contacts are people from
the northernmost part of the country, from areas
adjacent to the Chinese border. They are
unanimous: around 2005 to 2006, these areas
experienced a sudden and dramatic upsurge in drug
usage, hitherto almost unknown to the common
public.
It's true that some opium
productive capacity existed in the northeastern
parts of Korea since the early 1900s. This is also
the region where secret state-run plantations were
rumored to be located in the 1980s or early 1990s.
However, in the North Korea of the Kim Il-sung
era, surveillance was tight and exceptionally
efficient, so drug problems were for all practical
purposes non-existent within the country. The
drugs were produced for export and medical
purposes only.
Things began to change
around 2005; by that time North Korea had
undergone what is usually described as "grassroots
capitalism" or "marketization from below". The old
state-run economy had come to a complete
standstill, so most North Koreans started to make
a living through all sorts of private economic
activities - from cultivating private fields and
working at private workshops to smuggling.
Official corruption became endemic, so
officials became more than willing to turn a blind
eye to all sorts of illegal activities as long as
they received their cut. Arguably, North Korea
nowadays might be described as the most corrupt
country of East Asia: every interaction with
authorities requires payment, and if the payment
is sufficient, almost everything is possible.
This social and economic situation has
made the large-scale private production of drugs
possible. The new North Korean drug scene is
dominated by "Ice" (crystal meth), a synthetic
substance produced in numerous small workshops. It
is frequently mentioned by defectors, while
references to other drugs are quite rare.
Most of my North Korean interlocutors,
some former Korean People's Army officers, believe
that methamphetamines were initially produced
officially, but not so much as a drug in the
strict sense, rather as a stimulant for elite
military units. This seems to be plausible - after
all, it was used as such during World War II by
both the Axis and the Allies.
However,
after around 2005 private production of Ice began
and soon became large-scale. There are rumors
about occasional state involvement with illicit
production of drugs for export, but even if those
rumors are true, the state-sponsored labs clearly
produce only a small fraction of the total. Most
of the labs are private nowadays.
Raw
materials are often imported from China, and China
has also become a major market for North Korean
drug manufacturers. Since law-enforcement in North
Korea is so lax (at least when no political issues
are involved), it is easier and safer to run a
drug workshop there, on the southern banks of the
Tumen River.
The Ice-producing labs are
difficult to hide since the production is smelly.
Usually, such labs operate at some distance from
living quarters, somewhere in the mountains or at
a non-operational factory. (Admittedly, such
factories are not in short supply in post-crisis
North Korea).
In many cases, there are
joint operations of Chinese and North Korean
criminal groups: the Chinese provide the necessary
supplies while the North Koreans use their
territory as a safe haven to process drugs that
are later shipped to China.
However, some
narcotics remain in North Korea, where drug usage
has increased dramatically. My interviewees say
that at least in the cities of the borderlands a
significant proportion of younger people have had
some experience with Ice. A schoolteacher from a
borderland city of Musan recently told me that in
2008-09 most of the students in their final years
of high school tried Ice.
But the problem
is not limited to the borderlands. A few months
ago, a colleague of mine whilst visiting a
prestigious college in Pyongyang spotted a poster
that warned Pyongyang students about the dangers
of drug use. Merely a few years ago, such a poster
would be both unthinkable and unnecessary.
It seems this development has begun to
worry the Chinese. In the past few years, Chinese
media occasionally write about crackdowns on drug
dealers in China's northeast, often explicitly
mentioning their Korean connection. Last summer,
Chinese media reported that a fleet of high-speed
boats, operated by the Chinese police, had begun
to patrol the rivers on the border with North
Korea. The task of this squad is specifically to
fight drug smuggling.
The "new" North
Korean drug problem is relatively local and small
in scale, although it might have sufficiently
grave consequences for North Korea itself, as well
as for some adjacent areas of China and Russia. It
also might be seen as an indication of a new type
of problem that North Korea might create.
In the past, most troubles related to
North Korea were caused by the North Korean
government that demonstrated an inclination to
flout international laws and conventions
(sometimes this inclination was strengthened by
remarkable adventurism). Nowadays, problems are
increasingly caused by the inability of this
government to control what is happening in the
country - at least outside of Pyongyang and some
major cities. In the long run, the lawlessness of
uncontrolled private profiteers might prove more
dangerous than the Machiavellian adventurism of
dictators.
Andrei Lankov is an
associate professor at Kookmin University in
Seoul, and adjunct research fellow at the Research
School of Pacifica and Asian Studies, Australian
National University. He graduated from Leningrad
State University with a PhD in Far Eastern history
and China, with emphasis on Korea. He has
published books and articles on Korea and North
Asia.
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