NCJ Number
187266
Date Published
1999
Length
39 pages
Annotation
This article examines the relationship between the Burmese State and the drug lord Khun Sa.
Abstract
Khun Sa was born in February 1934 of a Shan mother and Chinese father in the Burma borderlands facing China. He ultimately was the leader of a 20,000-strong army and controlled more than 80 percent of Burma's opium production and approximately half of the world's heroin supply. The article describes Khun Sa as both creation and creator of the Burmese region's drug trade and raises questions about the power of one man to direct complex economic, social, and political changes. It claims that outlaws with Khun Sa's mix of economic and political power can emerge only in areas that are both politically peripheral and economically significant. Modern fiscal management, or mismanagement, has often created the economic preconditions for the appearance of these outlaws. Through smuggling, counterfeiting, and bootlegging, these outlaws are not merely rational individuals responding to illicit opportunity, but actors reconciling arbitrary state policy with economic rationality. Local and regional conditions that created Khun Sa and his rival opium warlords are being replicated, with variations of time and place and with unpredictable consequences for the future of fragile States across Central Asia. Figures, notes, references