Like most things connected to money and profit in Myanmar, there is a sinister side to the north's resurgent economy, a subtext that generally eludes visitors' attention. Still, at least one travel book, Nicholas Greenwood's original and often very funny "Bradt Guide to Burma," has picked up on it. Not only are the owners of Mandalay's popular Lucky Hotel close relatives of the former Sino-Shan opium warlord Khun Sa, Greenwood tells us, but another "retired" drug kingpin, Lo Hsing Han, is also involved in the Mandalay property market and may even have a hand in the innocuous but lucrative trade in secondhand Japanese cars that are driven to the border and sold to dealers from Yunnan.
Mandalay is a place where all kinds of deals are made. One report in the Bangkok Post quoted Mandalay residents as saying that "there are three lines of business here -- the green line, the red line and the white line. That's jade, rubies and heroin."
Myanmar, along with countries such as Pakistan and Laos, is one of the world's premier cultivators of opium. Papaver somniferum, the Eurasian poppy, grows ideally at just over 1,000 meters above sea level, an altitude readily found on the Myanmar side of the "Golden Triangle." The drug is hardly new to Southeast Asia, where it has been used as a stimulant and painkiller for centuries. Burmese kings took a stronger stand against the drug in the past than modern governments, it seems, punishing offenders by pouring molten lead down their throats. Despite protests from China, which is genuinely concerned about the spread of drug addiction in their own territory, the present leaders of Myanmar appear to have a more lenient attitude toward dealers, an attitude encouraged, it is said, by generous payoffs. The drug syndicates' precise balance sheets may not be available, but it can safely be assumed that profits from narcotics in Myanmar are staggering.