Inside meth's ‘golden triangle'
A European public-health problem is becoming a supply-chain and organized-crime problem, which changes where enforcement has to look.
The drug that Europeans are turning to in a world of late capitalism Inside meth’s ‘golden triangle’
Europe’s crystal meth trade is changing. In the Czech Republic a long-established cottage industry has given way to industrial-scale ‘kombilabs’, as international organised crime groups push into a growing market.
Flashing blue lights punctured the darkness on an industrial estate on the outskirts of Ostrava in the east of the Czech Republic. At around 5am armed officers forced open a metal door and inside found drums of chemical precursors stacked to the ceiling along with distillation pipes. The acrid smell of ephedrine cooking hung in the air. Another clandestine laboratory had been dismantled.
This police raid was just one incident in Czechia’s never-ending war against this nation’s drug of choice. They don’t call it crystal meth here, but pervitin, the name of the stimulant given to Wehrmacht troops on a massive scale in the second world war. Eighty years on, it’s still widely available in Central Europe’s industrial margins. It’s also referred to as the ‘poor man’s cocaine’ as a gram of methamphetamine sells for around $35, a fifth of the price of the real thing, cocaine.
Pervitin is everywhere, from school playgrounds in Bohemia to Prague’s main railway terminus. The country’s largest women’s prison in the town of Světlá nad Sázavou is in a former communist-era holiday camp among fields and farmland; 60% of its 950 inmates are here for drug-related offences and more than half have meth addiction problems.
Gabriela, 33, was wearing a prison-issue grey tracksuit. She first tried meth at 16 in the school playground. Soon she left education, became pregnant by her dealer and started working as a care assistant in a nursing home. At weekends her two daughters went to their grandparents while she continued injecting. ‘It’s like flipping a light switch,’ she told me. The drug made all her problems disappear: poverty, anxiety, even time itself.
Unlike the image of ‘crystal’ being smoked or snorted, which has been popularised by US shows such as Breaking Bad, in Czechia the drug is mainly injected: over 90% of high-risk users take it this way. When Gabriela ran out of veins – and money – someone offered to teach her how to ‘cook’ – to (…)
(1) Singapore government press release, 25 December 1994.
(2) South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore are the ‘Asian dragons’; they preceded the ‘Southeast Asian tigers’: Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia, the Philippines and Vietnam.