Manila: Traffickers have been shifting to the manufacture of amphetamine-type drugs in Asia as cultivation and production of heroin drops sharply, a senior
United Nations official said on Monday.

Akira Fujino, head of the Bangkok-based U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime, said there had been an alarming increase in abuse of “shabu” and ecstasy in Southeast Asia over the last few years, as shown by a rise in the number of narcotics laboratories found.

“There’s an increasingly serious problem in amphetamines in Southeast Asia because they do not require any agricultural production,” Fujino told Manila-based foreign correspondents.

“All you need to do is get the starting materials and then any urban laboratory can be established anywhere in the world, small or otherwise big factories.”

He said China and Myanmar were the world’s top makers of amphetamine-type stimulants.

Of the estimated 400 metric tons they make in total each year, three quarters was the methamphetamine known as “shabu” or ice and one quarter was ecstasy pills.

But Fujino said increased law enforcement and other counter-measures had forced traffickers to move laboratories to countries such as the Philippines and Fiji.

In the Philippines, at least 11 clandestine laboratories making “shabu” have been dismantled in the last two years, netting about 3.1 metric tons in 2003 or 10 percent of the total worldwide seizures of the drug.

Fujino said the value of the global illicit drug market in 2003 was estimated at $13 billion at the production level, $94 billion at the wholesale level and $322 billion at the retail level — after taking seizures and other losses into account.

Marijuana remained the largest market with an estimated retail size of $113 billion, followed by cocaine at $71 billion and amphetamines at $44 billion.

Fujino said there had been anecdotal reports from several areas that money from the sale of opium and cocaine was used in past terror attacks.

Although cultivation and production of opium in Afghanistan declined in early 2005, the United Nations said in a recent report narcotics from that country still found their way to Europe, a clear sign that there was sufficient and rising supply.

While coca cultivation has risen in Bolivia and Peru, production of opium in Southeast Asia, particularly in the so-called “Golden Triangle” region, has declined by as much as 78 percent from its peak in 1996, the U.N. report said.