Friday, November 22, 2013

North Korea Is In The Crystal Meth Business



Inside North Korea's Crystal Meth Trade -- Isaac Stone Fish, Foreign Policy

How shamed wives, rogue chemists, and crooked doctors move 'Ice' in the Hermit Kingdom.

I interviewed my first member of the North Korean crystal meth trade in the spring of 2011. My subject was a woman still living inside the country who was desperate to leave. Her family background was somehow shameful, hurting her husband's military career, she told me through an intermediary. And while she heard everyone in bustling, wealthy South Korea was "happy," she lived in a "small city, a dusty city."

Deeply in debt, the woman said she would travel across the border near the city of Yanji, a bleak and oppressing Tijuana, to smuggle contraband to a Chinese trader. They would meet in the middle of the Yalu, the river which runs more than half the length of the 890-mile border between the two countries, frozen during the winter and often laxly patrolled, and she would pass off the products, like North Korean antiques, that she said she carried.

Read more ....

Update #1: US busts North Korean meth smuggling ring -- Global Post
Update #2: Five Charged by DEA for Involvement in North Korean Meth Ring -- Washington Free Beacon

My Comment: North Korea is not the only country with a crystal meth problem .... this drug trade is booming throughout Asia. (see above video)

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