BANGKOK — In the fall of 2015, I witnessed a late-night kidnapping. The perpetrators weren’t seeking cash, gold or any kind of ransom. They didn’t bother to wear masks.

They belonged to a Baptist vigilante crew sworn to bring wrath upon drug users. Sure of their righteousness, the men let me tag along and observe their crimes: home invasions, assaults and the abduction of a gaunt day laborer with a speed habit.

We were in the Himalayan foothills of Myanmar, near the border with China, the heart of the world’s largest methamphetamine trade. It is here that drug lords continue to churn out one of the Southeast Asian underworld’s top-selling products: little candy-pink pills, packed with methamphetamine, that smell a lot like vanilla frosting.

The pills are becoming more popular in the region than heroin or even marijuana. Armed syndicates produce roughly two billion of these speed tablets a year — more than triple the number of coffees Starbucks sold worldwide in 2015. The rampancy of meth in Southeast Asia has convulsed the people and politics of the region, roiling it with social upheaval with maxed-out prisons, police killings and vigilantes.