Yaba invasion

It's called crazy medicine. Produced in Myanmar, the dangerous drug very easily crosses the border and reaches cities, towns and villages of Bangladesh through various channels -- sometimes in full knowledge of law enforcers. It now seems unstoppable and is poised to cripple the country's biggest hope -- the youth. Millions are now addicted to the pink pills. They take it as stimulant and end up with organ damage and mental derangement. The Daily Star has prepared a three-part series on the invasion of yaba and is running the first part today.

Those crazy pink pills were what everybody was talking about.

By 2010, they were fetching as high as Tk 1,200 per piece. The youths from teens to those in their 20s and 30s were the main consumers. They partied nights away under the influence of the drug, remained awake for nights together doing nothing; life for them had turned into high profane pottering around.

Nobody knew the total consumption of the drug. But the Department of Narcotics Control was seizing more and more yaba consignments every year. In 2006, they seized only 1, 687 pieces of the pills; the number went up to over 36,000 two years later and to over eight lakh pieces in 2010.

That gave the narcotics officials a rough guesstimate of the pervasiveness of yaba, because it is thought that only 10 percent of the drug could be captured and 90 percent flowed into the market. That was a huge figure.
No matter how much the anti-drug officials tried to control the trade, the invasion of yaba -- the crazy pills as the Thai name meant -- proved unstoppable. And there was only one source the pills were coming from --Myanmar.

Alarmed, they met their Myanmar counterpart in Yangon in 2011. Both sides saw the rising invasion of yaba and agreed to fight it together. Happy came back the Bangladesh team.

The same year, the catch crossed one million pieces; that meant at least 9 million pieces had reached the consumers. A year later, the catch jumped alarmingly to 2.1 million pieces. It was clear that Myanmar was not doing anything to stop Yaba.
So on October 27, 2013, the Department of Narcotics Control sent a list of 37 yaba factories inside Myanmar to its Yangon counterpart, the Central Committee for Drug Abuse Control, and urged it to take action.

Three months later the reply came from Myanmar. It was a small two-paragraph letter replete with grammatical errors, saying that they could not find the yaba factories because the spelling of the places did not match with any real location.

"Could you please put the location on the perspective map and send us back," the letter said. The matter ended there as Bangladesh had no way of pinpointing the yaba factories on maps.

The yaba trade tripled the next year in 2014. Some 6.5 million pieces of the crazy pill were seized.