Myanmar: Profits of Drug Trade Drive Economic Boom in Myanmar

Jun 5, 2015 | Thomas Fuller, New York Times
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Visitors flying into this buzzing tropical metropolis step into a modern glass-and-steel airport that symbolizes both Myanmar’s aspirations to rejoin the wider world after years of isolation and the country’s troubled past. The company that built the terminal, Asia World, was started by one of the country’s premier drug kingpins, a warlord whose militia peddled heroin extracted from the opium fields of the mountainous hinterlands. It is nearly impossible to visit Myanmar today and not encounter the company’s other projects: roads, hydroelectric dams, the country’s biggest ports and one of its most luxurious hotels, the Sule Shangri-La in downtown Yangon.