Fox News - Pinched by tightening economic sanctions and faced with what might become a contentious transition of power, North Korea is ramping up production of one of its key foreign currency generators -- heroin. When satellite photos were released last week by Amnesty International showing the rogue nation’s prison camp system, some analysts were surprised by the expansion of agricultural lands around the camps. “What was really surprising,” one satellite analyst, who studied the images but asked not to be identified, said, “was how farming acreage on the land around the Yodok camp had expanded. These are poppy fields and have been since we first looked at the camp in 2001.” That assessment was underscored by Chuck Downs, executive director of the Committee for Human Rights in North Korea, who said that the regime's military, which runs the camps and the nation’s illicit heroin production, “do not allow food production by prisoners because they would steal it. They would rather grow drugs.” Downs said that the increase is the result of the bite of trade sanctions that are beginning to devastate the nation's economy and the need to quickly replace the hard currency lost to sanctions. Of particular importance to the regime was the sale of missiles and arms abroad, which accounted for a large proportion of foreign income, but the 2006 trade embargo has vastly curtailed those sales.
Kim Jong Il is gangsta as a motha. Ihad no idea this was who we were dealing with. "Oh you'll slap sanctions on me so I can't sell guns and missiles and shit? No big deal, I'll just have my farmers grow more heroin and have my foreign diplomats slang that shit from their embassy's. Diplomatic Immunity!"
At least that's what I figure he said. Make no mistake, this guy is probably the most successful oppressive dictator in the last 50-60 years. Here's a country who's main export for the last 20 years has been guns and drugs, that won't let its citizens grow food on their farms in fear that they're so hungry they'll just steal and eat it, and yet there is no revolt, no uprising to speak of like we're seeing in Northern Africa and the Middle East.
