A Narco State of Mind
Coming Soon…
“There is no way to tell the story of Myanmar and where it’s headed if you are leaving out the Wa,” insists Patrick Winn, a reporter with two decades experience in Southeast Asia and author of the book Narcotopia. “It’s just a giant piece of the puzzle missing.”
Many of Winn’s stories have addressed how global forces affect local lives, and this book is an object lesson in that theme, capturing the idea that entire societies can be transformed by drugs, just as Saudi Arabia is defined by oil. For some, this trade has brought wealth and power; for many, it has brought violence, stigma, and dependency. His book traces how this transformation came about in Myanmar’s northeast corner, weaving personal stories with regional history.
The Wa region is a mountainous region in far northern Myanmar near the Chinese border, a self-governing enclave nestled in Shan State. The Wa have lived there for centuries, fiercely independent and often caricatured as savages, even cannibals. When the British lumped its diverse colonial territories together into Colonial Burma, it included Wa lands on paper, even though it never controlled them. After independence, Burmese leaders urged Wa chieftains to embrace schools and hospitals, but they refused, preferring self-rule. That stubborn independence underpins their role in today’s Myanmar, and is a theme that threads itself through this complex story.
A pivotal character in Winn’s narrative is Saw Lu. a Wa man born in the mid-1940s who grew into a warlord, Christian crusader, and sometime proxy for competing foreign powers, including being a U.S. DEA asset at one time (with the code name “Superstar”). Winn calls him “probably the most interesting person I’ve ever met.”
The Wa had been introduced to Christianity by American missionaries decades earlier. A small pocket of Wa, along with Lahu converts, revered William Marcus Young as an oracle— some even calling him the “Man-God.” Saw Lu was raised in this environment of missionary zeal. Through these religious connections, he was sent to lower Burma for schooling, where he became fluent in Burmese. He came to believe that literacy, cohesion, and ultimately conversion to Christianity could “civilize” the Wa. Burmese intelligence, recognizing his bilingual skills, vision, and fervor, recruited him in his early twenties and bankrolled his mission to Pang Wai, one of the largest and most fortified Wa settlements.
While Saw Lu ultimately hoped the Wa would embrace Christianity, he treated that as a long-term goal. In the short run, he emphasized literacy, which he believed was the key to uniting the far-flung Wa. Entering a fortified Wa village under the cover of teaching Burmese, he approached with hesitation but was surprised by how readily the villagers accepted him. Yet among the Wa, true respect was tied not to words but to power—something Saw Lu lacked in his role as a teacher.
It was at this point that Saw Lu had a real stroke of luck that began his transformation into something far more than Burmese intelligence had dreamed of— he somehow gained access to a small, abandoned, weapons cache left by CIA airdrops. Against all odds, he parlayed this small number of weapons into a militia through his charisma, bravado and tactical sense, tapping into Wa fears of the Chinese Communists; thus, he turned from schoolmaster into local leader.
Winn then elaborates on the narcotics trade, which is essential to understanding the story from that point on. Around that time, Chinese Nationalist (Kuomintang) soldiers were flooding into northern Burma after their defeat by Maoist forces in China’s civil war. These exiles were armed, but they soon realized that retaking China was a pipe dream; instead they turned to opium trafficking to support themselves. They industrialized the trade, building heroin refineries along the Thai-Burma border. The Wa provided much of the raw poppy harvest, their highland soil uniquely suited for potent yields. The Wa warlords and Kuomintang opium kingpins formed mutually beneficial alliances.
To the CIA— and its proxies, the Taiwanese intelligence service— this was a golden opportunity for keeping tabs on Communist China. They encouraged the Chinese exiles and Wa warlords to become anti-communist assets, in exchange for turning a blind eye to the opium trade. As Winn puts it, “The CIA, first and foremost, exists to promote and strengthen American influence… If you have to get involved with an opium trafficking militia, then you do.” Saw Lu was now one such Wa warlord. He was happy to join forces with the US to further his own agenda, part of which certainly included keeping the Maoists out of Wa lands. Although Saw Lu himself despised the opium trade, which enriched rival warlords, he tolerated it as a temporary necessity towards building Wa strength and unity. He was able to skillfully navigate this complicated terrain, growing his own influence through his connection to the US.
However, for the US, their “deal with the devil” regarding the drug trade had dire, long term consequences. By the late 1960s, heroin derived from Wa poppies was flowing into South Vietnam, feeding the addictions of American soldiers. Winn uncovered documents confirming that U.S. officials knew this pipeline existed. “We’re seeing a lot of heroin refineries go up… for the purpose of supplying US soldiers in South Vietnam,” one report acknowledged. Soldiers, with cash stipends and psychological wounds, became lucrative customers, distorting the regional drug market. Thus, even as the U.S. military fought communism, the CIA’s actions fueled its own soldiers’ addictions… and things only got worse from there. For the narcotics quickly found their way into the US; drugs became such a concern that President Nixon was prompted to launch his “war on drugs” in 1973; this prompted the U.S. to crack down on the same networks its own agencies had sustained ! In one dramatic episode, U.S. agents paid Chinese exiles to surrender tons of opium, which were burned with jet fuel at a Thai base. But the traffickers simply resumed their trade the next season, proving that eradication was futile. The agendas of two US government agencies, the CIA and DEA, were at cross-purposes.
Another important figure in Winn’s book is Khun Sa, who Winn calls “the most well-known, notorious drug lord of Southeast Asia, ever!” Initially involved with an anti-communist Chinese exiles group, he split off to make his own way. He hired a half-Wa/half-Chinese young man, Wei Xuegang, as the brains of his operation; a kind of “whiz kid” with electronics and communications. Khun Sa’s ruthlessness and ambition, yoked to Wei Xuegang’s skills, created a juggernaut in the trade, with a lot of their heroin going from the jungles of Burma to the United States. “I think at one point we're talking about on the order of about half the heroin that's washing into the United States is coming from Burma, a lot of it from Khun Sa,” Winn says, adding that as a result, Khun Sa was branded the DEA’s ‘Public Enemy #1’— and even the CIA had little patience for him.
Winn’s account then turns to the rise of the United Wa State Army (UWSA), now the most formidable non-state military in Myanmar. In the 1960s, the Communist Party of Burma (CPB), a “hardcore” Maoist organization backed by China, had moved into the region, effectively occupying large parts of Wa territory for about twenty years. During that time, Wa fighters were incorporated into the CPB’s guerrilla army and operated under Maoist ideology, though often more as a matter of alliance and arms supply than conviction. But the Wa eventually got sick of being under the thumb of China and submitting to Communist ideology. As Winn puts the sentiment then, “I mean, we were poor before, and now we're really poor!” The Wa soldiers mutinied and the CPB collapsed; the Burmese Maoist leadership was expelled, and their weapons seized. Thus was born the UWSA, and the Wa began to flex their muscle as a “proto-state.” They formed trade relationships with China, and an uneasy relationship with the Burmese military government: they agreed to remain part of the country, but would run their own affairs. For the junta, this was much more palatable than the nightmare of an independent Wa nation.
As a fledgling “state within a state,” the Wa needed revenue, and the most reliable source was the opium and heroin trade they already knew well. They became a mini-cartel in the beginning, as rivals of Khun Sa. Saw Lu, who had faded into obscurity during the Maoist period, returned to the scene. The UWSA rehabilitated him and his anti-Communist ideology, integrating him into their nation-building project. What followed, as Winn describes, was a “battle for the soul” of Wa State. Khun Sa, a rival, built a heroin empire on the Thai-Burma border, while Wei Xuegang— once associated with him— defected and ultimately became the Wa’s financier and trafficker-in-chief after they consolidated power. Saw Lu, meanwhile, detested the opium trade and pressed his dream of a united, literate, morally upstanding, Christian Wa nation. As Winn puts it: “And so the leaders of Wa state have Saw Lu on one shoulder and Wei on the other, and they aren't sure exactly which direction to take the country.”
Drawing on his DEA contacts, Saw Lu pitched Wa leaders on a plan to dismantle the drug cartels in exchange for U.S. financing, describing it as a kind of Wa Marshall Plan. If America would commit to building schools, roads, hospitals, and other infrastructure, they said, he could have their backing. But until then, the narcotics trade would continue. Remarkably, Saw Lu even stirred interest for the scheme within the DEA. On paper it looked like a win-win for Washington— cutting drug flows while gaining an ally on China’s doorstep— but ultimately, the plan never came to life.
A major obstacle was the tension between the DEA and the CIA in Washington. The CIA argued that it was not the DEA’s role to cultivate allies or make political deals, and they doubted the Wa could uphold any agreement. There were also practical concerns. As Winn notes, “you can’t just teleport into Wa State” with schools, hospitals, and roads. Any U.S. aid would have required working through the Burmese military regime, which in turn would have gained power and legitimacy from the deal. That risked strengthening the junta and possibly even encouraging it to challenge Khun Sa and other traffickers with American backing— an outcome the CIA opposed. At the time, the CIA was aligned with drug warlords because of their anti-communist stance, and Congress was pushing to weaken, not empower, the Burmese military. To block Saw Lu’s proposal from advancing, it was alleged that the CIA even wiretapped DEA agents’ homes in Yangon— an illegal move, since U.S. law forbids the agency from spying on American citizens
The upshot of this debacle was that Saw Lu ended up looking “like a clown.” He had gathered the heads of Wa state on a mountain top, and was expecting the DEA to fly in with fanfare and provide seed money for the project. He put up bunting, and made quite a show of it. And they waited… and waited. But the CIA managed to block the plan, derailing what Saw Lu had billed as a historic day of uniting Wa State with the United States. Saw Lu had to go hat in hand to the Wa leaders and apologize, who were angry to have been made to look like such fools. This was the beginning of the end for Saw Lu and his influence in Wa State. Today, Winn notes that Wa State is a “narcostate.”
Today, the UWSA commands tens of thousands of troops, controls a territory nearly as much soil of the Netherlands, an army greater than that of Kenya or Sweden, and finances itself through methamphetamine production on an industrial scale. With Chinese backing, the UWSA has ready access to modern weapons and maintains an autonomy beyond the reach of the Myanmar military, and also other resistance forces. Wa State is effectively a country, though unrecognized, with narcotics remaining its economic engine. Its role in Myanmar’s turmoil is, paradoxically, both stabilizing and destabilizing. On the one hand, it has generally honored ceasefire agreements, avoided reckless offensives, and maintained order in the territory it controls, sparing the region some of the chaos that engulfs other parts of the country. On the other hand, its sheer military and economic power entrenches further fragmentation by making any national settlement and unification harder to achieve. By running a de facto state financed principally through methamphetamine (and, to a degree, ketamine), with heroin historically significant, the UWSA undercuts central authority while ensuring that narcotics remain a structural feature of Myanmar’s economy.
This combination makes the Wa impossible to ignore: too stable to collapse, too destabilizing to integrate. As Winn says, “If you think that [Wa] is just some dark, out of the way place that doesn’t matter, please update your thinking on this!”