Southeast Asian nations torch $1 billion of seized drugs

Myanmar, Thailand and Cambodia torched nearly $1 billion worth of seized narcotics on June 26, a defiant show of force as police struggle to stem the rising flow of drugs in the region.

The burnings, to mark the U.N.'s world anti-drugs day, follow another year of record seizures of narcotics from the remote borderlands of Myanmar, Laos, southern China and northern Thailand.

Myanmar in particular remains one of the world's great drug-producing nations, a dark legacy of decades of civil war in its frontier regions where troops and ethnic rebel forces have vied for control of the lucrative trade.

Armed gangs churn out vast quantities of opium, heroin and cannabis and millions of caffeine-laced methamphetamine pills known as "yaba" which are then smuggled out across Southeast Asia.

An estimated $385 million was burnt in three official ceremonies around Myanmar on Monday, according to a senior police officer in the capital Naypyidaw.

At the biggest bonfire in Yangon, huge clouds of smoke filled the sky as authorities set fire to stacks of opium, heroin, cocaine and methamphetamine tablets worth almost $230 million.    

"We burnt a record amount of drugs today... because police have seized more in recent years," drug enforcement officer Myo Kyi told AFP.

On an industrial estate on the outskirts of Bangkok, Thai authorities incinerated some $589 million worth of drugs including 7,800 kilograms of yaba pills and 1,185 kilograms of the more potent crystal methamphetamine.

And in Cambodia, officials burned 130 kilograms of drugs estimated to be worth some $4 million.

The huge seizures are often touted as proof these countries are making inroads into the vast regional drug trade.

But law...