North Korean Meth
4–1–17
Alright team, the craziness that happens within the North Korean borders have been fairly extensively documented within this publication before, and I’m about to add to the list. This fact is based heavily on the initial work of the Vice article cited in the sources.
Because it is so isolated from the rest of the world, North Korea has maintained a very delicate economy for most of its existence. Everything seemed to be going okay until 1976, when the country defaulted on all of its international debts. After this point, most North Korean embassies in various countries were told to sit on a cactus and “self-finance.” This sudden need for hard cash somehow seemed to legitimize all kinds of absurd fraud and criminal schemes by North Korean diplomats.
One of the most famous cases from 1976 involves a dozen members of North Korea’s diplomatic corps, including the ambassador to Norway, being ejected from four Scandinavian countries. Why, you ask? They were “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” (ha-sheeeeeesh, indeed). That wasn’t the only case either — earlier in that same year, a couple North Korean diplomats were expelled from Egypt after having been caught with 400kg of hashish in their luggage, and Malaysian authorities claim a similar story in their territory. Some other absurd North Korean criminal activities to bankroll their embassies?: “the creation of the world’s best counterfeit currency [100$ USD, to be specific); trafficking of endangered species products; and the reported production of counterfeit goods ranging from cigarettes to pharmaceuticals to brand-name watches and shoes.”
Importantly, around this time we are seeing a trend toward drug resale, with multiple instances of North Korean diplomats attempting to purchase drugs and “transport them to market destinations for buyers, relying on diplomatic immunity and protected diplomatic pouches to avoid confiscation, arrest, and prosecution.” While the two examples I gave were of hashish, most other transactions were focused on opiates. Somehow, the North Korean govt. was able to use this money to putter along, barely surviving, all the while telling the international community that these people were working as lone wolves and were being punished for their actions (often, they were just given promotions).
Sure, North Korea can claim they didn’t actually have anything to do with these folk, but evidence has shown there was entire bureau within the Kim regime (Office 39, Bureau 39, Room 39 are all synonymous for this bureau) that was dedicated to organizing everything from the counterfeit USD to running a ridiculous chain of North Korean novelty restaurants to launder the money that they were now raking in (some estimates claim bureau 39 brought in as much as 1$ billion per year in illicit money)
Aside: These restaurants are a story of their own — they are pretty much the only place in the world to get “authentic” North Korean cuisine (outside of NK, of course). You can enjoy such goodies as “ice noodles,” sea cucumber alcohol, stringy dog meat soup, and ginseng wine. If you’re looking for other homeopathic remedies (which, if you are, please don’t…go see an allopathic/osteopathic doctor) to various *ahem* problems, they offer some sort of bear-based pills which are supposed to improve your sexual virility and 120$ secret pills that “cure anything.” Evidently, all the servers are women and one of the restaurant’s attractions is their heavily synchronized, traditional north Korean dances, complete with robes and emotionless smiles (think “The Interview,” only more dreary). Anyway, everything about these restaurants is laughably overpriced. Somehow, they’ve gathered a devout South Korean fanbase whose currency is then use to launder their drug money.
So, back to the drugs. The Soviet Union collapsed in the mid 1990s (wow, that’s weirdly close to my birth year). North Korea suddenly lost its communist financiers, and facing tough sanctions and really poor policy decisions, the country encountered a famine. Nearly 1,000,000 people died. Desperate for the country to survive, and confident that he could do so with cash, the Kim regime forced farmers to grow opium poppies (despite still being low on food) which they then sold illegally.
Between agricultural disaster and major flooding, the regime struggled to keep the opium business afloat. They needed to pivot.
They realized that they needed to pivot to something that could be produced in a lab. They also quickly came to the conclusion that methamphetamine was the answer: it was worth a lot of money, and, if they distributed it to the general population, it would literally kill their hunger, as stims do.
The government began building factories to produce meth. High-end chemists were brought in to train lower level chemists to produce the most potent crystals possible — with huge success. US officials tested recently confiscated North Korean meth at 98% purity. Absolute Walter White status.
North Korean meth took the black market by storm, with Triad and Yakuza gangs competing to sell the goods, and they would go to crazy lengths to do so (reports claim that the North Koreans would literally drop bags of meth into the ocean for the gang members to come find late at night in boats).
Wait, why aren’t the North Koreans using their established diplomatic fraudsters? Apparently they were still getting kicked out of their respective countries en masse. “As well as drugs, North Korean officials have been caught smuggling such things as rhino horns and ivory, 500,000 counterfeit cigarettes and counterfeit $100 bills so convincing that US treasury officials dubbed them “supernotes.”
Beginning in 2005, the Kim regime wanted to make a statement to the world that they were scaling back on their meth manufacturing: they began burning down most of the obvious meth labs. In reality, they ended up just moving the labs around and burning the old ones down for a show. That being said, it’s become more difficult to get “real North Korean product,” and you’ll only find it being sold by real North Koreans.
This proved to be a turning point for North Korean methamphetamine production, however. By closing down many government meth labs, there was a surplus of talented meth cooks who were now unemployed and looking for ways to expand their business. Suddenly, meth went from a government regulated business to a gray area somewhere between public and private. Naturally, politicians found a way to monetize this — they would use their power to protect the rogue meth cooks from being busted in their labs (which were now placed in abandoned houses and school buildings) and would take a share of the profits in return.
Without the old supply chain of diplomats abroad, meth chefs resorted to domestic expansion, and local North Korean methamphetamine abuse soared. I really can’t describe it any better than Vice did:
Suited elites in Pyongyang restaurants offer each other a “nose” after dinner, the middle classes take it as a cold cure or remedy for back pain, and the poor take it to ease the emptiness in their stomachs. The drug is apparently so common that the attitude of North Koreans has become blasé. “When meeting people we not infrequently swapped drugs to see whose ice was more potent,” said one defector in Dr. Greitens’s report. “We just did it naturally as if we were exchanging cigarettes.” Another defector said, “If people in the countryside take ice, their back pain is cured… And if you give it to people who have had a stroke, they recover.”
This is a continuing problem. The regime denies exporting meth, but Chinese authorities regularly seize millions of dollars worth of smuggled drugs from North Korea every year (in 2011 alone the seized more than $60,000,000). Further evidence? The Chinese province of Jilin, bordering NK, had 44 registered drug abusers in 1991. Today there are ~10,000.
TL;DR North Korea has a meth problem.
Sources:
https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/north--crystal-meth-drugs-diplomats-nathan-thompson
http://kimsinnk.blogspot.com/2015/11/oct-2015-nkorean-diplomats-caught.html
