Shortage of "Ice," the crystal precursor used for producing methamphetamine pills, has made clandestine chemists along the Thai-Burma border frantic enough to look for drugs used for relief of cold and cough in northern Thailand, according to several sources.
 
"Not all of them are serviceable," a pharmacist in Chiangmai told Shan Herald. "Only those that contain pseudoephedrine can be useful to drug producers."
 
"I think they have an expert chemist over there," she remarked, "because extracting pseudoephedrine from these drugs is not a simple job."
 
The price of Ice, 580,000 baht ($17,000) per kilogram in early August has gone up to B900,000 ($26,500). "However, there are only buyers," said a trader in Tachilek, "but no sellers."
 
All these brands contain pseudoephedrine, reportedly the most important ingredient in making yaba pills
 
The situation is such the bosses are despatching agents to Thailand to rummage the drug stores along the border to purchase all drugs that contain the required ingredient. "Sulidine (a cold-relieving tablet) is only 1.5 baht here," said a driver in Maehongson. "But they are offering me 2.5 baht each plus expenses to send them to Maesai (opposite Burma's Tachilek)."
 
Meanwhile in Tachilek, the buyers are even offering one yaba (methamphetamine) pill (about $1) for every two cold relief pills, according to an informed source.
 
Ice, known as pingkoi in Chinese, is imported from China and India. "I'm not sure," said an anti-drug official in Chiangmai. "But maybe China is really getting more serious now."
 
Methamphetamine can be produced from ephedra, a plant known in China as mahuang. It is until now not subject to legal restrictions of any kind unlike the opium poppy. Its alkaloid ephedrine can be replaced by pseudo-ephedrine, an active principle widely used in nasal decongestants, and can even be obtained from benzaldehyde during the sugar-refining process, according to Yaa Baa: Production, Traffic and Consumption of Methamphetamine in Mainland Southeast Asia, a report published by Institute de Recherche sur I'Asie du Sud-Est Contemporaine (IRASEC) in 2004.