Paper short abstract:

Since the late 1980s, Myanmar’s borderlands with China have been important frontiers for agribusiness, logging and mining. This paper explores how extractivist forms of resource extraction have generated new drivers of drug production and drug use and the impacts this has on borderland populations.

Paper long abstract:

In recent decades, Myanmar’s conflict-affected borderlands with China have become important new frontiers for agribusinesses, logging and minnig. The commodities produced in these regions and the capital that is accumulated from resource extraction now play an increasingly significant role in shaping wider processes of development across Asia. At the same time, the Myanmar-China borderlands remain a major site of illegal drug production and have experienced a significant increase in levels of drug use. This paper analyses how illegal drugs have become embedded in the forms of extractivism that have underpinned how these borderlands have been integrated into the global economy. Extractivism denotes a particular pattern of ‘development’ whereby the gains from resource extraction are privatised in the hands of a small number of beneficiaries and transferred elsewhere, while the costs – environmental degradation, dispossession, violence – are externalised and shouldered by local places and populations. This paper first analyses the linkages between agrarian extractivism, smallholder crises and opium cultivation. It then explores how drug use has become embedded in the extractivist modalities that dominate the mining sector. This paper reveals how extractivism can generate new drivers of drug production and use that layer upon longstanding histories of drug production in Myanmar.