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North Korea 'ramps up manufacture of illegal drugs' amid sanctions

Sanctions are taking their toll on the North Korean regime, which has allegedly resumed the production of narcotics to earn the hard currency required to advance its nuclear and missile programs. Julian Ryall reports.

Droge Methamphetamin Crystal Meth (imago/blickwinkel)

With the latest round of international sanctions making it increasingly difficult for the North Korean regime to obtain the hard currency that it requires to fund its nuclear and missile development programs, reports have emerged from the isolated state that it is once again stepping up the production of illegal narcotics, both for export and for its domestic market.

Quoting its network of covert contributors within North Korea, who communicate via mobile phone, the Seoul-based DailyNK news site has reported that state-run trading companies have begun to produce and sell illicit drugs.

Sources within North Korea say that companies have been "ordered to earn foreign currency" and, as legal means of doing so have been curtailed by the United Nations' export bans, "are turning to drug manufacturing on an industrial scale."

https://www.dw.com/en/north-korea-ramps-up-manufacture-of-illegal-drugs-amid-sanctions/a-40169753

https://news.vice.com/article/north-koreas-got-a-big-crystal-meth-problem

North Korea's Got a Big Crystal Meth Problem

By Nathan A Thompson

April 25, 2014 | 10:50 am

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

North Korean meth is the bomb — at least, according to US officials who tested two batches last year. The packages of sharp, ice-like crystals measured 98 percent and 96 percent for purity respectively. According to an indictment against the suppliers, who were arrested in 2013, the drug was so pure that "people in New York, they went crazy… the places that we put it in the States, New York… Boston, all these places, I mean, they went crazy."

According to a new report by Dr. Sheena Chestnut Greitens, an assistant professor of political science at the University of Missouri, the North Korean government has used drug manufacture and a host of other nefarious activities to raise funds since the 1970s. The regime defaulted on its international loans in 1976 and Greitens describes how that same year "a dozen members of North Korea's diplomatic corps, including the North Korean Ambassador to Norway, [were] ejected… for 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."

North Korea cooks up a nuclear surprise. Read more here.

After the collapse of the USSR, North Korea lost its communist financers and that, combined with tough sanctions and disastrous policy decisions, resulted in the famine of the 1990s where an estimated one million people died. Factories were not operating and fishermen starved in the harbor, as they had no oil to power their boats. Desperate to survive, the Kim regime forced community farms to cultivate opium poppies and demanded as much as 60 kilograms of raw opium per harvest. "We should be growing grain, not poppies," said one defector quoted in Dr. Greitens' report. "But the instruction from the central government was that if we grow poppies we can sell the product for ten times as much to buy grain."

After the famine ended in the 2000s, North Korean factories began to produce a more modern type of drug: methamphetamine. "Officials from North Korea's various security agencies were reportedly involved in guarding the plants and factories," writes Greitens. Within the factories, real-life Walter Whites were hired to school local chemists in the art of synthesizing pure, potent meth crystals. "Experts were brought in to advise on production."

A line of crystal meth or "bangdu" in Chinese (Image via Flickr)

North Korean meth and heroin was highly prized on the black market and Triad and Yakuza gangs were lining up to distribute the drugs across China, Japan and the US, according to Greitens. "The gangs would pick up packages of drugs dropped at sea… Drugs were also transported by train (and other methods) across North Korea's northern border into China."

But why rely on desperate gangsters when you have a host of agents stationed legally inside target nations with diplomatic immunity? Indeed, North Korean embassy staff continued to be thrown out of their host nations on various charges. As well as drugs, North Korean officials have been caught smuggling such things as rhino horns and ivory, 500,000cigarettes and counterfeit $100 bills so convincing that US treasury officials dubbed them "super notes."

"Given the variety of products involved in these incidents and the repeated presence of North Korean diplomats in them, these incidents appear to be primarily the result of a 'self-financing' policy," writes Greitens, "by which embassies are expected to finance their own operations, and contribute money back to the regime in Pyongyang."

North Korean defectors in the South struggle to be Korean in a whole new way. Read more here.

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https://www.heritage.org/testimony/north-koreas-connection-international-trade-drugs-counterfeiting-and-arms

North Korea's Connection to International Trade in Drugs, Counterfeiting, and Arms

May 20, 2003 21 min read

Larry Wortzel

Larry Wortzel

Adjunct Research Professor at the U.S. Army War College

Dr. Larry M. Wortzel no longer works for the Heritage Foundation.

Before the Governmental Affairs Subcommittee on Financial Management, Budget, and International Security

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Mr. Chairman and distinguished members of the Committee, thank you for inviting me to address the North Korean connection to international trade in drugs, counterfeiting, and arms.

North Korea's exports from legitimate businesses in 2001 totaled just $650 million, according to Wall Street Journalreports of April 23, 2003, citing South Korea's central bank. Income to Pyongyang from illegal drugs in the same year ran between $500 million and $1 billion, while missile sales earned Pyongyang about $560 million in 2001. North Korea is producing some 40 tons of opium a year, according to U.S. Forces Korea officials cited in The Guardian on January 20, 2003, and earns some $100 million a year from counterfeiting currency.[1]

Thus, like the regime of Saddam Hussein, the Kim Jong-il regime resembles a cult-based, family-run criminal enterprise rather than a government. And, like the former government of Saddam Hussein, the regime of Kim Jong-il operates with a complete disregard for international law and human life. The famine that Kim Jong-il permitted to continue in North Korea killed as many as 3 million people.[2]

The disclosures now coming out about the way that Saddam Hussein and the Baath party ran Iraq show us what happens when a criminal gang takes over a nation and turns all of its resources to support the thugs in power. Unrestrained brutality, murder, torture, rape, and plunder were inflicted on the people of Iraq by the family of criminals from Tikrit. Of course, Saddam Hussein and his thugs could get rich and keep the state running because Iraq has so much oil. Kim Jong-il does the same to North Korea while kidnapping people from Japan and South Korea.

North Korea has no oil to export. In fact, it is one of the most repressed economies in the world, according to the Index of Economic Freedom, published annually by the Wall Street Journal and The Heritage Foundation. North Korea has no viable economy at all, its only major exports being dangerous weapons and dangerous drugs. To maintain himself in power, Kim Jong-il must ensure that the cadre of the Korean Workers Party, the North Korean People's Army, and the People's Security Force-his communist political base-are fed and have heat in the winter. Kim is aided in this goal primarily by the People's Republic of China, the communist leadership of which has vowed not to let North Korea collapse.

North Korea's international behavior and lack of a viable economy present a security dilemma of major consequence for the world. Our attention was most recently focused on the problem of North Korea's criminal behavior by the Australian Navy's apprehension of a North Korean ship carrying 110 pounds of heroin worth $50 million on April 20 in the Tasman Sea off Australia.[3]

There are also persistent stories about North Korean diplomats carrying illegal drugs across borders in diplomatic pouches.[4] In 1994, China stopped North Korean embassy employees smuggling 6 kilograms of North Korean-grown opium into China. In 1995, officials of the North Korean Ministry of People's Armed Forces were arrested by China. Austin Bay discusses these in a Washington Times opinion piece of May 15, 2003. The drugs are deadly, and the way that Pyongyang ships them around the world is but one of the indicators that under Kim Jong-il, North Korea is a rogue state. North Korea's behavior would be much more deadly if, instead of drugs and counterfeit money, Kim Jong-il was shipping weapons-grade nuclear material or nuclear weapons to terrorists and other failed states.

The Drug Trade

North Korea ships drugs everywhere. In my view, in a country where such strict government control is exercised over all aspects of personal and public life, such actions reflect a conscious government policy. The United States Department of State, in its annual International Narcotics Control Strategy Report, is reluctant to make that analytical judgment. In 1999, for instance, the State Department wrote that:

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