The Most Powerful Narco-State You’ve Never Heard Of
With investigative journalist Patrick Winn
In conversation, and in Narcotopia: In Search of the Asian Drug Cartel that Survived the CIA, investigative journalist Patrick Winn traces the history of Wa State. For decades, Patrick reveals, the CIA worked with the Wa, turning a small, little-known Indigenous group in Southeast Asia into one of the most powerful and least understood drug producers in the world.
A condensed transcript of our conversation edited for clarity is below. You can also listen to the audio (50+ minutes!), which explores more of the lives of the founders of Wa State, how the CIA’s support of the Wa helped spark the War on Drugs, why the U.S. acted very similarly in Afghanistan as it did in Wa territory, and more:
Ben: Patrick, to begin, can you give us some high-level background on the Wa and Wa State?
PW: Sure. The Wa are an Indigenous people — there are around a million Wa — living on steep mountains that separate Myanmar and China. It's really difficult to grow basic crops there. The soil is bad, but there is one thing it’s really good for: opium poppy.
35 years ago, the Wa created their own state, called Wa State. It's not on Google Maps, but it’s there: a highly functioning nation-state with roads, highways, an electricity grid, cell phone towers, ministries of health and finance, a school system — everything. And the financial engine of this unacknowledged nation-state is narcotics.
Ben: You write, “Few cultures are so strongly linked to a commodity. The Amish build furniture. The Swiss make watches. The Wa cook meth — and before meth was in vogue, the Wa churned out heroin.”
No offense, but you forgot about the Belgians and chocolate, the Italians and fashion, and Alison Roman and Korean food.
PW: Sorry for dissing all the wooden shoemakers in Holland, too.
Ben: Digging into the history, how did China's takeover by the Chinese Communist Party in 1949 begin to alter the trajectory of the Wa?
PW: Mao Zedong wanted to ensure that Communist rule was iron hard to the farthest borders of the country. His wish had implications for many ethnic minorities, including the Wa. Communist China swallowed up about half of the original ancient Wa homeland.
While that was happening, the CIA noticed the Wa, this Indigenous group with a warrior reputation right on China's backdoor. The agency saw an opportunity. A then-secret memo from 1953 said the Wa want to be ruled by white men.
Ben: The full sentence from the memo is, “The Wa have a special feeling of affection and respect for white men — and are unanimous in their desire to have the white man assist them and even rule them.”
PW: “Unanimous,” Ben.
Ben: That's the word that stuck out to me. No one even unanimously likes Jane Goodall.
PW: Ha, right. This was a real CIA fantasy. But they began trying to coopt the Wa and turn them into a thorn in the side of China.
Ben: In the process, you chronicle how the CIA helped turn Wa territory into a drug haven.
PW: Yup. The CIA really didn’t want this area to fall under Communist control.
Their first strategy was to ally with a different group, anticommunist Chinese who’d fled to Myanmar. The CIA tried to form them into a fighting force to retake China from Mao. That didn’t work.
So the CIA regrouped and began pushing the peasantry in the mountains of Myanmar to grow opium, including the Wa. The fighting force they supported then turned into a drug cartel, synthesizing the Wa’s opium into heroin and selling it. Meanwhile, the cartel would collect intelligence on China, launching raids from Wa territory next door.
I call it narco-espionage. Basically, it was this big complex involving trafficking opium and gathering secrets from China, and it all kind of clicked and worked together until the late ‘60s and early ‘70s.
Ben: You also note that, without intending to, the Pentagon created the perfect customers for heroin.
PW: That’s right. In the '60s and '70s, if you wanted to sell heroin, Southeast Asia wasn’t a very good market. Peasant farmers didn't handle cash very much.
Who did? Americans fighting the Vietnam War who got a regular stipend from the U.S. government. The heroin that soldiers abused came from what we call the Golden Triangle — the highlands of Southeast Asia, including Wa territory.
The CIA was still entangled with the drug cartel producing some of the heroin. They knew they were supporting a cartel that was making American soldiers sick, but from their perspective, they had to get intel out of China any way they could.
Ben: Despite the CIA’s efforts — and the consequential side effects — Wa State did fall under Communist control.
PW: Yeah, one of the main characters of my book is a Wa guy named Saw Lu. Raised in an American Baptist missionary sect, he thought — and this was unusual for a Wa person — that America could come in and, in his words, “civilize” his people and save the Wa.
His vision warred with the perspective of a guy named Lai, who wanted China’s backing. They had this epic clash where they tried to kill each other for quite a while.
To just fast forward through all this, Lai won, and Wa state became Communist for about 20 years — only for in 1989, a group of Wa to rise up against the Communists. They established the modern Wa State. No longer would an empire come in and tell them what to do.
Ben: This gets us to arguably the most important leader in Wa history. Can you talk about Wei Xuegang?
PW: Wei Xuegang is, I think, the greatest drug trafficker in Asian history. He's taken incredible pains to be in the shadows. If you’ve ever seen Breaking Bad, he’s a little like Gus Fring.
When casting out the Communists in 1989, Wa State was in severe poverty. They needed to get up on their feet, and Wei came in, having already been a very well-established drug trafficker, saying I'll be your financial chief.
His goal was for the Wa nation-state to be a refuge for growing poppy and synthesizing heroin. Yes, he would get very rich along the way, but the idea was that most of the money would go into Wa State's coffers to build roads and schools and things like that.
Wei, a kind of corporation unto himself, was really effective. Drugs remain at the center of the Wa economy today, but it’s no longer heroin. In fact, by the early 2000s, the Wa had mowed down all their opium poppies, their economic lifeblood. It’s like if Saudi Arabia said let’s shut down the oil refineries.
Ben: Or the Dutch shutting down wooden clog production.
PW: Imagine how devastating that’d be to their economy.
Ben: And to your feet right now.
PW: Indeed. So it was quite a turn of events. But Wei had a vision.
Long before any of the Mexican cartels, he saw the future of synthetic drugs. Instead of growing poppy, the Wei started siphoning chemicals from China and India that would normally go into making things like sinus medicine and began producing methamphetamine.
Today, the Wa produce these little hot pink pills, called ya-ba, which are a mixture of caffeine and meth and smell like vanilla cake icing. With more than fifty billion pills produced so far this century, ya-ba is among the most popular illegal products ever created.
And whereas before the Wa sold their narcotics to Americans, by the early 2000s, Southeast Asia was a roaring economic success story. The Wa got out of the business of selling drugs to Americans and now sell them in the Asian market.
Ben: Meanwhile, the U.S. government began saying that Wa State is a monster “poisoning our society for profit” — right when they stopped poisoning American society.
PW: It boggles the mind. The attitude from the Wa leadership at the time was like, okay, we get it. You want us to be supervillains. The Wa are now closely aligned again with China, but otherwise, the U.S. has effectively cut them off from the global financial system. It’s illegal to conduct a financial transaction with any Wa official under U.S. law.
Ben: Related, you describe how Wa State isn’t exactly paradise today.
PW: I don't want people to read or listen to this and be like, wow, everything in Wa State is so great. It's not.
They have lots of the features of a functioning state, but it's still very poor. There’s no middle class. As in most nations, the rich hoard wealth for themselves. There’s no social safety net in Wa State.
And the Wa continue to be shaped by American empire. The U.S. didn't need to go across the world and alter the fate of this Indigenous group. But we did, and it's still happening.
Who knows what the future of Wa State holds, but it’s very stable. Wa State will be around in the next 50 years. Whether it's a pleasant place to be as a Wa person, I’m not so sure.
Ben: Well, if the Wa’s long, still-unfolding history is any indication, there are many more twists and turns to come.
Patrick, thank you so much for being here. It was a pleasure learning from you.
PW: Thanks so much for having me. I’ll be listening to Skipped History from Bangkok!