Daily Kor for Saturday, May 26, 2012

Regarding story #4, would "bread-and-butter issues" sound better as "rice-and-kimchi issues"? I can't possibly be the first person to entertain that notion, can I?

1. US Treasury report says South Korean intervention in Korean won is keeping KRW undervalued (Reuters, WSJ, Yonhap)
• KRW at seven-month low despite intervention (WSJ)
2. China reportedly launches five-month crackdown on "illegal immigration" from North Korea in Jilin Province's Yanbian Korean Autonomous Prefecture (BBC, Chosun Ilbo)
• China sentences ROK national to death for trafficking nearly 12 kilograms of methamphetamine (Korea Herald)
3. South Korea launches "Code Adam" to more quickly deal with missing children cases (WSJ)
4. Ruling party picks twelve "bread-and-butter issues" on which to focus during first 100 days of new session of National Assembly opening this month (Yonhap)
5. ROK President Lee Myungbak hails opening of Ara Waterway linking Han River to Yellow Sea and making Seoul a "waterfront city" (Yonhap)
6. Two "remorseless" men sentenced to five and ten years in prison for raping teenager after smashing into her with their car (Korea Times)
7. ROK Defense Ministry says North Korea "is ready to test" its next nuke (CNN)
8. South Korean shares snap two-week losing streak (Reuters)
9. On heels of open support for same-sex marriage, US President Barack Obama proposes making Stars & Stripes gayer (Fox News)

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A blast from the past: South Korea a major source of methamphetamine in the late 1980s

... And presumably for part of the 1990s as well. Back in 1990-something, I remember citing this October 1989 article and looking up the source material for a paper or news article I wrote (probably when I was an undergrad in the 1990s but possibly a grad student in the 2000s).

I ran across it again last week while doing a short paper for a public health biology course on concerns over the rise of methamphetamine in East Asia:

South Korea Seen as Major Source of 'Ice' Narcotic:
Rising use of the potent drug is causing alarm in Hawaii, and Japanese gangs are reported active in the trade

SEOUL — Investigators believe South Korea is a major source of the highly pure crystal methamphetamine that is raising alarm in Hawaii as "ice," a potent, smokable form of the drug that authorities say is already catching on in the U.S. mainland and may rival crack cocaine in popularity.

Indeed, crystal methamphetamine is already the drug of choice in East Asia, where marijuana and cocaine are scarce and heroin is all but unheard of on the street. In Japan, the most lucrative market for methamphetamine, police say they annually arrest more than 20,000 people for using and trafficking in the drug, nearly all of which is smuggled in from Taiwan and South Korea.

Methamphetamine abuse is booming in South Korea, too. The Seoul government has vowed to crack down on the epidemic before it gets out of control, but the illicit trade in the drug has evaded Asian authorities for decades.

Crystal methamphetamine has been widely used in the United States for many years in its conventional, powdered form, popularly known as "speed" or "meth" and usually taken by injection, snorted or ingested. Notorious as a favorite drug of motorcycle gangs, experts say its abuse has been rising among the general population in Southern California in recent years, supplied by hundreds of local laboratories.

Ordinary methamphetamine is simple enough to prepare that there is little reason to import it from abroad. Signs are now emerging, however, that a pure grade of methamphetamine cooked in clandestine laboratories in South Korea and other parts of Asia is finding its way at least as far as Hawaii. There, a Filipino youth gang called the "Hawaii Brothers" initially popularized the drug in its "ice," or rock form, and sparked a boom in abuse, according to investigators.

Late last month, South Korean authorities announced the uncovering of a major drug ring that had produced more than a quarter ton of methamphetamine since 1987 and in July allegedly delivered 22 pounds, with a street value estimated as high as $750,000, to a former U.S. serviceman and his wife in Honolulu.

Although Vietnamese couriers were intercepted earlier this year bringing into Hawaii small quantities of methamphetamine believed to have originated in Hong Kong and Taiwan, law enforcement authorities have yet to catch anyone in the act of smuggling the drug from South Korea.

Capt. Henry Lau of the Honolulu Police Department's narcotics division said informants have told investigators that a good deal of the "ice" is coming from South Korea, however. The fact that no major laboratories have been discovered on the islands also points to imports, he said.

"We believe our crystal meth, or the knowledge of how to make it, is coming from Korea," Lau said in a telephone interview.

Yoo Chang Jong, chief of the narcotics division of the Public Prosecutor's Office, which enforces South Korea's drug laws, said a recent surge in overseas tourism by South Koreans is believed to have provided a screen for drug couriers. The Seoul government lifted passport restrictions in January, and foreign travel was up 72% in the first eight months of this year.

Yoo speaks of a "white triangle" for Asian methamphetamine trade: After police cracked down on production in Japan in the 1960s, Japanese criminal gangs relocated their illegal laboratories to South Korea and later to Taiwan, where it is cooked and smuggled back to Japan to feed the habits of tens of thousands, possibly hundreds of thousands, of addicts.

Lately, however, the pattern has been changing, Yoo said. Tighter border controls have resulted in the diversion of much of the South Korean methamphetamine to the domestic market, resulting in a rapidly growing drug abuse problem. Methamphetamine arrests ballooned from 417 cases in 1984 to 3,208 last year, Yoo said.

"The government feels there is a crisis situation in Korea," said Yoo, whose staff will increase from 59 to 256 investigators by December.

The methamphetamine trade also has spread to Southeast Asia, where Japanese gangsters, known as yakuza , whose ranks include many ethnic Koreans, are increasingly active, as well as to the United States, Yoo said.

"Now it includes Hawaii and perhaps California too," Yoo said. "Only quite recently have investigators recognized the change of flow."

A woman identified as Lee Jin Suk, 54, confessed to delivering 10 kilograms (22 pounds) of methamphetamine to a "Mr. and Mrs. Alexander" in Honolulu in July, Yoo said. Lee, said by prosecutors to be the wife of a former National Assembly member, was among 23 people arrested last month in the largest drug operation ever prosecuted in South Korea.

Think how far the meth epidemic has become in the US since then, and how its primary source seems to be local production instead of imports.

Nowadays, interestingly, it is North Korea that is a rising threat for methamphetamine trafficking. There is a connection, no doubt, with Japan being one of the nexuses.

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South Korean drugs increasingly North Korean in origin

It looks like some politicians are waking up to the potential for drug trafficking from North Korea to become a serious problem:

Yoon, who sits on the National Assembly Foreign Affairs, Trade and Unification Committee, said trafficking along the North Korea-China border was increasing and that some 57 percent of the 8,200 grams of foreign-produced methamphetamine seized in the South in 2010 came from China. “It is estimated that a large part of that comes from the North,” he said.

“The imported drugs not only directly harm people in South Korea and China, but they are a deadly threat to the social fabric.”

The North has long been known as a source of narcotics trafficking around the world.

If the prevalence estimated by Yoon holds true, the infiltration of the drugs not only complicates matters for police but could also represents the influence of Pyongyang’s shady security apparatus in the South at a time of lingering tension.

Yoon pinpointed the notorious Office 39 of Pyongyang’s ruling Workers’ Party, which specializes in a range of illicit economic activity to support the regime, as overseeing the operations and that key sections of the army had been charged with production and distribution.

The bureau is regarded as a slush fund creator for the late ruler Kim Jong-il and a key financial support system for Pyongyang’s elite.

He said the three provinces of Northeast China — Liaoning, Jilin and Heilongjiang — had become hotbeds for trafficking the North’s drugs. Reports say it is facilitated by groups from both Koreas as well as China that often work together.

Do we want to be awash in a sea of tweakers? Maybe pot-smoking English teachers are looking pretty good right now. (I kid! I kid! Please don't send me letters.)

One would hope that China would have woken up to this problem by now (since it spills over into their territory as well) and try to put a stop to it (or at least rein it in).

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Korean-American man suspected of killing police officer in San Diego kills self and companion

Down in San Diego, a former Coast Guardsman named Holim Lee who was wanted in connection with the slaying of San Diego police officer Christopher Wilson was found dead with a twenty-seven-year-old woman with the ironic name Lucky Xanasene. She had been shot in the head.

Lucky Xanasene

Though he'd been recognized for heroic achievements in the past, Mr Lee had also gotten caught up in criminal activities, but at least one friend said he was a "really sweet" and "a good guy" who lately had been under the influence of drugs after finding life as a civilian very difficult. Mr Lee's family, who has expressed their deep condolences to Mr Wilson's family, say meth ended up taking over Holim's life.

San Diego police officer Christopher Wilson

The view from K2: I can see the 1980s from here

This past week several blogs (among them, Extra! Korea and The Marmot's Hole) have mentioned the news about K2, a marijuana-like substance that can be used as a substitute for pot because it's legal in the US. It's stupid, but it's legal:

Dr. John Huffman, a Clemson University organic chemistry professor, was researching the effects of cannabinoids on the brain when his work resulted in a 1995 paper that contained the method and ingredients used to make the compound. That recipe found its way to marijuana users, who replicated Huffman's work and began spraying it onto dried flowers, herbs and tobacco.

"People who use it are idiots," said Huffman, referring to K2 smokers.

Hehe. The guy warning people about inhaling the stuff is named Huffman. Hehe. Huffman.

Um, anyway, this is big news because the stuff is apparently manufactured in South Korea (and China) and then exported to the US:

The users are buying a product known as K2 - or "Spice," Genie" and "Zohai" - that is commonly sold in head shops as incense. Produced in China and Korea, the mixture of herbs and spices is sprayed with a synthetic compound chemically similar to THC, the psychoactive ingredient in marijuana. Users roll it up in joints or inhale it from pipes, just like the real thing.

Always helpful for the press to inform you how to take psychotropic substances. Anyway, I decided to blog this because I wanted to point out that this is by no means the first time "drugs" that have been manufactured in South Korea have made their way to the US and created a problem.

In fact, in the 1980s, South Korea (along with Taiwan) was a major exporter of methamphetamine to the US. Yeah, the same meth that is now a huge problem in rural America (where the good White trash folks have learned how to make it themselves):

Since the 1980s, ice has been smuggled from Taiwan and South Korea into Hawaii, where use became widespread by 1988. By 1990, distribution of ice had spread to the U.S. mainland

And ROK-produced meth is still a problem on Guam:

Crystal methamphetamine is readily available on Guam in gram to kilogram quantities because of a steady supply of the drug from the Philippines as well as from Hong Kong, China, Taiwan, and South Korea. The Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) reports that the price of crystal methamphetamine at the retail level--while still high by mainland standards--decreased during the past few years.

You know what? I blame Japan.

Oh, man! I wonder if Felicity Huffman — intense happiness breathing in person — is a made-up stage name that's a wink and nod to getting high?