FDA ceremony to torch 3.4 tonnes of seized drugs
The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) will burn 3.4 tonnes of illicit drugs worth Bt10 billion, as part of the country's 42nd official illicit-drug incineration ceremony in Ayutthaya's Bang Pa-in Industrial Estate on June 26, FDA chief Boonchai Somboon
The drugs, seized from 2,584 cases, included 31 million yaba tablets, 298 kilograms of “ice”, 125 kg of heroin and 125,000 pseudo-ephedrine-laced medicine tablets plus 322,620 millimeters of pseudo-ephidrine liquid medicine. They will be destroyed by the environmentally-friendly “pyrolytic incineration” method which will burn the drugs at a temperature of over 850 degrees Celsius.
This haul of drugs is larger than a previous lot burned on June 29 last year when 2.7 tonnes were destroyed, Boonchai said.
The country’s largest haul of drugs to be incinerated was in 2003 when 5.9 tonnes of drugs worth Bt14.5 billion were destroyed.
In related news, Ayutthaya police yesterday seized 500,000 yaba tablets and 30 kg of “ice” worth Bt340 million in street value from a Bang Pa-in district house used by a Hmong drug network as a drug store.
They also arrested a suspect identified as Hmong man Kriengsak Chotipongniran, 27, who reportedly confessed to getting the yaba from a Chiang Rai couple to keep in the house pending distribution to other retail drug dealers.
