US SAYS SPEED IS WORST DRUG MENACE

BANGKOK, Thailand - Methamphetamine, also known as speed, is the
worst drug menace facing the United States and a growing threat in
Asia, the U.S. drug control chief said Friday.

Criminal organizations that produce heroin have found that
methamphetamine is easy to make and offers bigger profits, said Barry
McCaffrey, the White House national drug policy director.

Stimulants also pose a huge threat in Thailand, China, Vietnam, Hong
Kong and Japan, he said in Bangkok, on the last leg of a three-nation
Asian tour.

His eight-day tour seeks to promote international cooperation against
the complex criminal networks that dominate the trade in illegal drugs.

McCaffrey, in Thailand after stops in China and Vietnam -- the first
made to those countries by a U.S. drug policy chief, met with Prime
Minister Chuan Leekpai, narcotics chiefs, army and police officials.

Thailand regards methamphetamine, mostly produced by ethnic armies in
neighboring Myanmar, as its biggest social menace and national
security threat. Myanmar is also known as Burma.

McCaffrey said law enforcement worldwide needs to respond to the
threat posed by synthetic drugs that can be made by small producers,
not just the major criminal organizations.

They pose a new challenge to Thailand -- which with Laos and Myanmar
make up Southeast Asia' s opium-producing Golden Triangle -- after its
" enormous success" in the past 20 years in reducing cultivation of
opium, the raw material of heroin, and combatting addiction to that
drug.

McCaffrey said methamphetamine has become the dominant drug problem in
the United States, " in South Carolina, Hawaii, Georgia and the
central part of our agricultural states."

Most of the methamphetamine available in the United States is produced
in Mexico and California, he said.

McCaffrey noted that ecstasy, a euphoria-inducing hallucinogen
chemically similar to methamphetamine and widely available in the
United States and Europe, is spreading to countries like Thailand and
China.

In a sign of its spread in Southeast Asia, Malaysian authorities this
week seized ecstasy pills and synthetic drugs worth $68 million in the
country' s biggest narcotics haul, according to Malaysian news reports
Friday. Eleven people were arrested.

On the eve of McCaffrey' s' visit, a cache of chemicals -- enough to
produce 72 million methamphetamine pills -- was seized Thursday at the
Thai-Myanmar border, Thai authorities said Friday.

Thai narcotics authorities estimate that 600 million methamphetamine
pills will be smuggled into Thailand from Myanmar this year.