About a week ago, officers stumbled across the suspect packages of confiscated ice as they carried out an inventory of seized narcotics at a police station. The inventory was done ahead of an annual burning to mark an international day against drugs on June 26.
A Myanmar policeman has been arrested after switching 64 kilograms (140 pounds) of seized crystal meth with salts loosely resembling the party drug known as "ice", according to officials.
"Sixty-four packages out of 103 were fake," Deputy Police Colonel, Myint Swe, chief of Kengtung district police force in Shan State said. He added that each package weighed one kilo (2.2 pounds).
Each kilo of ice is worth around 20 million kyats ($13,000) locally. This values it at $830,000 inside Myanmar. The drug fetches higher a price, the further it travels from the source.
Police-sergeant Myint Naing was arrested on Sunday, several hours drive away, and had been flown back to Kengtung for interrogation, police said.
"We found that he substituted the ice with alum (crystallised potassium) salt and other things which look similar to ice," a senior drugs police officer in the capital Naypyidaw said, requesting anonymity. According to drug experts, with jungle labs in ungovernable areas, Myanmar could be the world's biggest meth producer. Jungle labs in areas of Shan state are churning out tonnes of ice and hundreds and millions of meth pills that are also known as 'yaba'.
Made-in-Myanmar yaba is pouring west into Bangladesh and east into Laos, Thailand and beyond in record amounts.
High-grade crystal meth — or "ice" — is smuggled out of Myanmar via sophisticated networks to lucrative developed markets as far away as Japan, South Korea, and Australia.
In late March, 1.7 tonnes of ice worth close to $30 million was seized by Myanmar authorities in a boat off the country's south.
Myanmar's multi-billion-dollar drug industry is believed to outstrip rivals in Latin America. But with a low body count and publicity-shy kingpins, it rarely generates the same global headlines.
