YANGON – Nearly $300 million worth of confiscated illegal drugs were destroyed in Myanmar’s major cities on Thursday to mark the annual International Day Against Drug Abuse and Illicit Trafficking, officials said.

The drug burnings came nearly a month after U.N. experts warned of unprecedented levels of methamphetamine production and trafficking from Southeast Asia’s Golden Triangle region and Myanmar’s eastern Shan State in particular.

The country has long been a major source of illegal drugs destined for East and Southeast Asia, despite repeated efforts to crack down. The U.N. agency labeled it in 2023 as the world’s largest opium producer.

In the country’s biggest city, Yangon, a massive pile of drugs worth more than $117 million went up in a spectacular blaze.

The destroyed drugs included opium, heroin, methamphetamine, marijuana, ketamine and the stimulant known as ice, or crystal meth, Yangon Police Brig. Gen. Sein Lwin said in a speech at a drug-burning ceremony.

Similar events also occurred in the country’s second-largest city of Mandalay, and in Taunggyi, the capital of eastern Myanmar’s Shan state, all areas close to where the drugs are produced.

A police official from the capital Naypyitaw told the Associated Press that the substances burnt in three locations were worth 297.95 million US dollars. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because the information has not yet been publicly announced.

Myanmar has a long history of drug production linked to political and economic insecurity caused by decades of armed conflict.

Eastern Myanmar is part of the infamous Golden Triangle, where the borders of Myanmar, Laos and Thailand meet. The production of opium and heroin historically flourished there, largely because of the lawlessness in border areas where Myanmar’s central government has been able to exercise only minimum control over various ethnic minority militias, some of them partners in the drug trade.

The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime said in a report in May that the political crisis across the country after the military takeover in 2021 – that has led to what is now a civil war – has turbocharged growth of the methamphetamine trades.

That has caused the flow of drugs to surge “across not only East and Southeast Asia, but also increasingly into South Asia, in particular Northeast India,” the report said.

Drugs are increasingly trafficked from Myanmar to Cambodia, mostly through Laos, as well as through maritime routes “linking Malaysia, Indonesia, and the Philippines, with Sabah in Malaysia serving as a key transit hub.”