Meth’s new frontier: The marshlands of Bangladesh

Annual seizures of meth in the country have gone up 80,000 percent — yes, eighty thousand percent — in nine years.

Villagers plant rice in the village of Singair, about 21 miles from the Bangladeshi capital Dhaka. ( Rafiqur Rahman/Reuters)

Editor’s note: Muktadir “Romeo” Rashid co-reported this story.

Rural Bangladesh is a sleepy, swampy sort of place.

At dawn, moms in burqas emerge from huts to scatter chicken feed in the dirt. On hot days, farm boys snooze under ficus trees. The evenings are punctuated by prayer calls that warble over the rice paddies.

Life here feels slow. And yet, improbable as it may seem, these Islamic marshlands have become one of the hottest emerging meth markets on the planet.

Bangladesh is the latest Asian nation to fall under the spell of “ya ba,” little pills made from caffeine and meth. The tablets, which look like baby aspirin, are dyed pink and smell like cake frosting.

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In the past decade, meth pills flowing into Bangladesh went from a trickle to a tsunami. Just nine years back, police were seizing only about 35,000 pills per year. You could comfortably fit all of that inside a backpack.

Annual seizures have since swelled to 29 million pills, an increase of more than 80,000 percent. That’s enough meth to tweak out everyone in Texas — with plenty left over for Nebraska.

Bangladeshi authorities hardly know what to do with the mountains of meth piling up in their evidence rooms. In the far eastern borderlands — along the country’s busiest trafficking routes — anti-drug squads must dispose of their seized meth creatively.

“We have a system,” says Lt. Col. Abuzar Al Zahid, a bear-like man who commands a Border Guard Force base in a port city called Teknaf. “I tell my men to dig a hole.”

The colonel’s subordinates will dig a deep pit near the station. Then he’ll order them to dump buckets of hot pink pills down the hole.

Of course, you can’t just leave millions of pills buried in the dirt. That’s a tempting target for any addict with a shovel. Before the officers fill in the hole with dirt, Abuzar makes them round up all of the station’s confiscated whiskey — another illicit drug in Islamic Bangladesh. The men then smash hundreds of bottles and douse the meth in booze.

The result: a viscous, pink slurry of intoxicants, seeping into the soil. The colonel regards this spectacle as a morale booster.

“When they’re destroying these drugs, I want our soldiers to feel hatred,” he says. “It’s a psychological operation to make them hate this drug.”

How did this place, so languid and pious, get transfixed by dirty speed? At a glance, this phenomenon is baffling. Think like a meth trafficker, however, and it starts to makes sense.

Bangladesh is one of the world’s most crowded countries. Imagine forcing half of America’s population into an area smaller than Illinois. That’s a lot of potential customers squeezed into a confined place.

All of this teeming humanity is overseen by corrupt police officers, many of whom make roughly $25 per week. That salary doesn’t incentivize them to risk their lives taking down well-armed traffickers. If anything, it leaves them vulnerable to drug syndicates doling out bribes.

Bangladesh is also swimming in teenagers. Roughly one-third of its 160 million citizens is between 15 and 30 — a drug dealer’s demographic dream. Most of these young adults live in the impoverished countryside. There isn’t much to do out there but pray, work the fields and maybe play some cricket.