For every load of North Korean drugs Japan intercepts, many more are getting through. With North Korea’s economy in tatters, illegal drugs have become a major source of hard currency for Pyongyang–and Japan its market of choice. Amphetamine use is rising 20 percent a year among Japanese gang members, truck drivers and teenage girls looking for powerful diet pills. At the same time, Japanese crime syndicates dominated by ethnic Koreans are only too eager to do drug deals with the communist North. In the two years since Japan seized its first batch of North Korean amphetamines, the haul has topped 500 kilos, a third of all amphetamine seizures over the period. That makes Pyongyang one of the biggest dealers in Japan’s $4 billion-a-year amphetamine business.
North Korea took up drug trafficking in the 1970s. A decade later, it started growing its own poppies. According to a recent U.S. State Department report, North Korea now has some 17,000 acres of poppies under cultivation, making it the third largest opium producer in Asia, after Burma and Afghanistan.
Catastrophic flooding in 1995 wiped out much of the opium crop, forcing a shift in Pyongyang’s drug industry. Producers diversified into meth labs. Last year officers at the United Nations Drug Control Program were stunned to discover the purchase of 50 tons of ephedrine–the key ingredient in amphetamines–by a North Korean front company. According to the U.S. State Department, North Korea would need 2.5 tons a year for the chemical’s only legitimate use, in cold remedies. The rest, it fears, went into illicit labs, where it could be used to make nearly 40 tons of amphetamines, worth $8 billion at Japanese street prices.
North Korea’s drug program is run out of Bureau 39, an office in Pyongyang that reports directly to Kim Jong Il, according to North Korean defectors who worked on Pyongyang’s drugs program. In February, the Washington-based Congressional Research Service estimated that the North Korean government earned $71 million from drug smuggling in 1997. It’s not hard to imagine where that money ends up: supporting the lavish lifestyle of North Korea’s elite. Says one Western diplomat who follows North Korea: “Kim Jong Il is using it to buy loyalty.” More disturbing, drug money could also be supporting programs to develop long-range missiles and nuclear weapons.
Around the same time the Japanese nabbed the Chinese freighter in Sakaiminato, ships in Japan’s Self-Defense Force gave chase to two North Korean boats disguised as Japanese fishing vessels. After Japanese cruisers fired warning shots, the ships fled and were later spotted by satellite returning to a port in North Korea. To date, nobody has figured out their mission. The most common fear is that they were dropping off spies. Yet given North Korea’s growing role in Japan’s drug trade, the drama may have been nothing more than just another dope deal gone sour.
