The Golden Triangle region that joins Burma, Thailand, and Laos is one of the global centers of opiate and methamphetamine production. Opportunistic Chinese businessmen and leaders of various armed groups are largely responsible for the manufacture of these drugs. The region is defined by the apparently conflicting parallel strands of criminality and efforts at state building, a tension embodied by a group of individuals who are simultaneously local political leaders, drug entrepreneurs, and members of heavily armed militias. Ko-lin Chin, a Chinese American criminologist who was born and raised in Burma, conducted five hundred face-to-face interviews with poppy growers, drug dealers, drug users, armed group leaders, law-enforcement authorities, and other key informants in Burma, Thailand, and China.

The Golden Triangle provides a lively portrait of a region in constant transition, a place where political development is intimately linked to the vagaries of the global market in illicit drugs. Chin explains the nature of opium growing, heroin and methamphetamine production, drug sales, and drug use. He also shows how government officials who live in these areas view themselves not as drug kingpins, but as people who are carrying the responsibility for local economic development on their shoulders.

Ko-lin Chin is Professor of Criminal Justice at Rutgers University. He is the author of several books, including Heijin: Organized Crime, Business, and Politics in Taiwan; Smuggled Chinese: Clandestine Immigration to the United States; and Chinatown Gangs: Extortion, Enterprise, and Ethnicity.

This is a necessary book for students of global drug commerce and a rare glimpse of contemporary life in the northern Burmese hill country, a region inaccessible even by the reclusive standards of Myanmar.

Opium, a relatively recent product in Burma, and its derivative, heroin, have become Burma's major illegal commodities. Their production and trade is dominated by the Wa tribe.... Chin seeks to provide a brief history of the Wa; the opium, heroin, and methamphetamine trades; drug use and control; and the drug business and politics. In the absence of reliable historical studies and hard data, the author assembled research teams, devised questionnaires, and used the information acquired to develop his narrative.

Ko-lin Chin provides a rare insight into drug production and trafficking in Southeast Asia. Despite the Golden Triangle being a pivotal force in the global drug trade, its inaccessibility means that it is rarely the focus of academic research. Not only doesChin successfully negotiate this hidden world of northern Burma to do his field research, but his work is remarkable in placing its drug trade in a geopolitical context. His field research involves numerous interviews with people either involved in, or affected by, the drug trade, ranging from opium growers to state officials. He weaves together his research findings with a detailed historical account of the political and ethnic influences that have fostered the drug trade in this area, including both the opium trade and, more recently, methamphetamine production and trafficking. His courage and objectivity in this venture is admirable.

Ko-lin Chin has written a seminal study of one of Southeast Asia's most destructive conflicts and deadliest exports, and this book deserves to be read by Asian scholars across a broad spectrum of disciplines. The author demonstrates how to conduct fieldwork in dangerous locations, never lose sight of the human factor, and also how to construct a balanced book of great use in the broader academic and policy worlds.