Bangkok (Thailand), 12 June 2026 – The synthetic drug market in East and South-East Asia continued to expand in 2025, with seizures of methamphetamine and ketamine both jumping dramatically, according to a new report released today by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC).
The report, titled Synthetic Drugs in East and South-East Asia: Latest Developments and Challenges 2026, confirms that methamphetamine seizures surged to 349 tons in 2025, a 48 per cent increase over the previous year’s record and more than five times the amount seized a decade ago. Ketamine seizures also broke records, reaching 52.5 tons, a 185 per cent increase from 2024 and a record for the region.
“Record seizures of both methamphetamine and ketamine in the same year are a sign that the underlying drivers of the regional drug trafficking trade remain firmly in place,” said Delphine Schantz, UNODC Regional Representative for South-East Asia and the Pacific. “As production capacity, trafficking networks, and demand expand, it is clear that the market is not contracting, but rather consolidating and expanding into new areas.”
Beyond the sheer volume of drugs, the report points to a deepening convergence between illicit drug production and the region’s scam industry and wider illicit economy. Evidence from law enforcement operations at industrial-scale clandestine drug laboratories in Myanmar shows that drug manufacturing facilities and scam centre infrastructure have been operating side-by-side, sharing protection, logistics, and financial networks.
“The co-location of drug labs and scam infrastructure is not a coincidence. It points towards shared financial backers, shared logistics, and shared exploitation of areas where enforcement and regulatory reach are limited,” Schantz said. “The illicit economy in this region is becoming more integrated and diversified, and the drug trade is both driving that expansion and being fuelled by it.”
Meanwhile, although ketamine is primarily sourced from the region, ketamine trafficking from Europe into the region has grown substantially, with multiple countries across East and South-East Asia reporting seizures of the drug sourced from European countries. Together with increasing flow of cannabis from South-East Asia to European markets, this points to a growing connection between the two regions.
“Europe and South-East Asia are no longer distant points on separate drug maps,” said Inshik Sim, Lead Analyst at the UNODC Regional Office for South-East Asia and the Pacific. “They are increasingly connected and addressing this reality requires coordinated intelligence and enforcement responses that span both regions.”
Concerning trends have also been reported in Japan and the Republic of Korea, with both countries recording sharp increases in ketamine seizures in 2025, a departure from the historically low seizure levels seen in previous years. In the Republic of Korea, the average annual seizure between 2015 and 2021 was just over one kilogram. However, in 2025 that figure rose to 140 kilograms. Preliminary ketamine seizure figures from Japan similarly show a significant increase, rising approximately sixfold in 2025 compared to the previous year. The scale of the increases suggests that organized crime groups are actively working to expand ketamine markets in both countries where high retail prices make them attractive targets.
Also of growing concern is the rapid spread of etomidate, a pharmaceutical anesthetic that is increasingly being misused as a drug. First identified as a drug of misuse in 2021, etomidate has since been detected across a growing number of countries in the region, particularly in vaping products, but also in tablet, powder, and crystal form, with the number of samples detected growing sharply in the past year.
Traffickers and producers are sourcing precursor chemicals specifically to manufacture etomidate, exploiting the fact that many of these chemicals remain outside international control frameworks. Illicit etomidate production has now expanded into several countries across the region, with transnational criminal networks coordinating supply chains across borders. The substance’s rapid proliferation illustrates how quickly new threats can take hold across East and South-East Asia.
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