Mick Hartley

Reports of widespread use of crystal meth in North Korea are nothing new – here, here, and here, for instance. The problem has now reached the South, as the drug is smuggled in from the North by defectors and others:

Police have arrested 19 people on charges of selling and using crystal methamphetamine smuggled in from North Korea.

A police spokesman on Monday said, "We arrested 19 people including North Korean defectors on charges of taking and distributing what we suspect is North Korean-made crystal meth, and handed 18 over to prosecutors while four of them are put in remand prison."

"Most of those arrested are either defectors and foreigners," the spokesman added. "We have expanded our investigation due to suspicions that individual [South Korean] citizens or organized group are involved."

All admitted that the crystal meth came from North Korea.

The resulting police investigations confirm that it is indeed a major problem in the North:

Police investigations here of organized crystal meth smuggling from North Korea have revealed some startling information about widespread abuse of the drug in the North.

Many North Koreans apparently regard the highly addictive drug as a healthful picker-upper that is effective in preventing cardiovascular diseases such as stroke and cerebral hemorrhages, when in fact the opposite is true.

Many North Korean households apparently have stashes of crystal meth, which is touted as a panacea in some regions. There are statistics supporting such accounts. The Database Center for North Korean Human Rights interviewed 1,383 defectors from the North recently and found that just 4.7 percent had either taken narcotics or witnessed another person abusing drugs there in the 1990s, but that rose sharply to 36.7 percent by 2015.

Some 33 percent of North Korean defectors who serve time in South Korean prisons are drug offenders. According to defectors, the most widely distributed drug in North Korea is crystal meth. A gram of the narcotic costs just US$15.

The drugs, which are manufactured for export, have been siphoned off for local distribution since the late 1990s, when there was a massive famine, because they work among other things as an appetite suppressant. Methamphetamine was a widely popular slimming drug in the West in the middle of the last century.