The product of thirteen years of research, interviews, and experience, this is the most authoritative book ever written on the interrelationship of drugs, insurgency, counterinsurgency, and politics in Burma. Widely respected as one of the world's leading experts on Burma, Bertil Lintner has drawn on his extensive travels and personal meetings with rebel commanders, ethnic leaders, and other key figures to present a compelling and comprehensive picture of politics and society in a poor and bitterly divided country. Fighting between the central government and myriad political and ethnic insurgencies entered its forty-seventh year in 1994, with no solution in sight. While other countries in the region are developing into freer, more open societies, once-democratic Burma has been ruled by a medieval military dictatorship since 1962. The complex nexus between the drug problem, military rule, and Burma's civil war has rarely been considered when international narcotics agencies have evaluated the drug problem in the Golden Triangle. Consequently, millions of dollars have been wasted in a misguided effort to treat the problem as a localized vice, rather than addressing the underlying historical, social, and economic factors behind the drug explosion. Meanwhile, opium production is increasing steadily year by year. . This book aims to explore the inextricable links among Burma's booming drug production, insurgency, and counterinsurgency and to explain why the country has been unable to shake off over thirty years of military rule to build a modern democratic society. Burma's ethnic strife, the author argues, is not a peripheral problem confined to the country's border areas. Without a lasting solution to ethnic divisions and the civil war they have fueled, Burma will remain a source of political despair - and the opium it grows will continue to flood the markets of the world.