Who Let Anubis Out? Myanmar Drug Trade

"Over the past few months there's been an increasing buzz that Mitt Romney will pick a vice president who's safe, white, and duller than him. Which pretty much narrows it down to a piece of chalk." – Jay Leno

"Just two weeks after a felon in jail got 41 percent of the democratic vote in West Virginia, President Obama got embarrassed again in Arkansas yesterday when an unknown lawyer got 42 percent. See, that proves once and for all that there's only a 1 percent difference between a lawyer and a convicted felon." – Jay Leno

"According to a study released today, the average member of Congress can only speak at a tenth grade level. Which is worse than it sounds, because the average tenth grader speaks at a third grade level." – Jay Leno

"Remember Al Gore, the tubby vice president? He has a new girlfriend – that is unless the Supreme Court takes her away from him." – David Letterman

The most interesting place to be these past few weeks has been Egypt, watching the campaigning and voting for their first democratically elected president. The most inspiring was that everyone has gotten so interested in the campaigns, there were generational debates from coffee-houses to family dinners at night, people were pondering the strengths and weaknesses of each candidate. The five candidates provided enough of a spectrum of beliefs, from three types of conservative and two types of liberal, enough that you might overlook that they were selected by an elections committee, in a version of democracy-lite, it may be less filling...

One of my favorite stories comes from a conservative Islamic candidate, who was very anti-USA. It turned out that he almost didn't make it as a viable candidate, once it came out that his sister and mother lived in the US, in the People's Republic of Santa Monica. His mother had become a citizen of the US, and owned a California driver's license. Guessing why he was the only family member who was so uptight, it was theorized that he wasn't allowed to visit because of his views, or it might have been the care-baskets his mother sent him from Cantor's that pissed him off... The Egyptian legislature changed the law insisting that a candidate for president' parent had to be residents of Egypt, and that controversy went away, except for the occasional chuckle whenever he would go out and lecture...

Conspiracy theories were made up, trying in vain to tarnish each other. One theory even made it to Jay Leno, showing how fast these things carry in this day of the Internet. The proclamation by the Muslim Brotherhood that it was now allowed for a widower to have sex with his dead wife, for sixty days after her passing. Hey, I read about it in the NY Times, so it must be true, right??? One of my favorite hoaxes like this involves the story of the person who opened up a box of Colonel Sander's Kentucky Fried Chicken, only to find a fried rat along with his crispy chicken. This never happened, it was made up by the comedian Paul Krassner, yet every few years it would resurface and be reported in some newspaper needing filler space and wanted a weird story to fill it. The cool part about the Egyptian story, apart from it being rather gross and creepy, is that it might start a whole series of new urban myths that float throughout the Middle East...

Another group of stories and videos, that were widely shown but not reported at all in the US, are the travails of Ahmed Shafik, the former general and prime minister from the Mubarak government. Whenever he made personal appearances in order to give a speech, he was often met with a barrage of shoes thrown at him, and we all know what THAT means... It's as if people have been saving their old shoes for years, waiting for such an occasion... We should know who will have made the run-off vote by the end of this weekend. The next president will determine the tone of the next constitution, the amount of power he has versus the amount given the military, and many other decisions that will affect the region for many years to come. It would be a shame if someone was elected that turned the people's optimism into cynicism, which is the natural phase of emotions after any election. Just don't hurry the process along, like al Maliki did in Iraq... Oh, yeah, don't forget the normal accusations of vote tampering and corruption, those are always many and numerous, and ignored from Cairo to Tehran to Florida and Ohio...

One of the costs of freedom seems to be a rising and thriving illegal drug trade, if we can use Myanmar as an example. Since the military junta has relaxed its rule over the country, the exporting of opium and methamphetamines has skyrocketed. Last year the Thai police confiscated over 2 million pills, and this year it will eventually go over that mark.

There have been several theories as to why production has increased, all pointing fingers in different directions, depending on who you talk to. The Thais point out that now that they are semi-retired, military generals in Myanmar spend their time in the drug trade, beats sitting around and praying, I guess. Myanmar officials say that its the ethnic tribes like the Wa and Karin who have traditionally dealt in the drug trade in order to buy weapons to fight the military, so you should look to their areas for cultivation. On the world market, as the war in Afghanistan winds down, less heroin is being flown out by the CIA and private mercenaries, reopening the market to competition. The Chinese are currently more interested in making money from prescription drugs, both legally made and illegally, though the older, traditional ties from the Triads still hold.

As for the making of speed, most of the ingredients come from Thailand, shipped across the border to Burma, where the danger is involved in cooking the meth, then shipped back across the border into Thailand, for greater distribution. Every major hospital in Thailand has had ingredients stolen from them... Traditionally, its been the Thai military and police who have been in charge of the drug trade out of Thailand, with the tourist police making sure that all of Europe's favorite druggie past-times are available in the areas dominated by tourists. When I traveled in the north of Thailand, marijuana was often given freely, because they wanted to soften me up to buy opium or heroin. When I traveled in the south of Thailand, I could get marijuana from any bar girl or guest hotel, but the opium was usually sold by a Dutch or German tourist. Package tours trekking the highlands often included an evening visiting a local tribe, and letting the young men ingest opium for a few dollars extra. I never did that, as I had tried heroin before, as a younger man, and didn't enjoy the experience. I gained more brownie points when I practiced tai chi as a form of sharing and entertainment with the tribes we visited, and was able to talk to the elders while my fellow trekkers were off vomiting themselves into dreamland... Of course, I'm waiting for the CIA to send in advisors to help the Myanmar government eradicate the criminal trade, because they've done so well in Pakistan, Yemen, and Central America. Won't that be enough to justify their bloated budgets after we bring our troops home?