The 1990s was not a good decade for North Korea, especially by economic standards. The period began with the collapse of the USSR, a primary trading partner, and ended with the loss of trade with China, causing North Korea’s economic output to fall by more than 50 percent. In 1999, the country had one of the 25 lowest gross domestic products in the world. In the same decade, North Korea developed one of the most costly nuclear weapons programs and now may become the world’s eighth nuclear power. If the international community wants to force North Korea to the bargaining table regarding its nuclear development, it must begin by cutting off the financial lifeline that makes Pyongyang’s hard-line stance possible: its illegal narcotics industry, which netted the country as much as US$1 billion in 2001, more than the total combined revenue of US$650 million from all its legitimate exports.

Statements from defectors and a wide array of circumstantial evidence suggest the presence of a state-sponsored opium racket in North Korea since the 1970s. However, according to US Congressional testimony from North Korean defectors, it was not until the early 1990s that the severe economic depression forced North Korean dictator Kim Jong Il to turn to trafficking as a means of supplanting, rather than simply supplementing, the country’s legitimate economy. During a decade that saw as many as two million North Koreans die of famine, Kim ordered each of the country’s numerous collective farms to turn over at least 25 acres of sustaining crops to poppy cultivation. The result, according to South Korea’s National Intelligence Service, was a surge in North Korea’s opium output from three tons in 1992 to more than 50 tons in 1998.

During those years, Pyongyang expanded its drug production from opiates, such as heroin and morphine, to methamphetamines, more commonly known as “meth.” In 1998, Thai police stopped a shipment of 2.5 tons of ephedrine, the operative ingredient in methamphetamine, en route to Pyongyang from India. Although North Korean officials claimed that the ephedrine was for cough medicine, a former North Korean diplomat noted that if used as claimed, the shipment “was enough to last North Korea 100 years.” By the end of the 1990s, seizures of fully processed methamphetamines on the Japanese coast had skyrocketed. In one case in April 1997, over US$100 million worth of meth was found by Japanese officials aboard a North Korean freighter. Japanese officials estimated in 2003 that North Korea controlled an astounding 43 percent of the Japanese meth market, or some US$7 billion in potential revenues.

Yet despite the incriminating case against North Korea, many international players, particularly the United States, have been slow to acknowledge the role that narcotics trafficking has played in keeping Pyongyang economically afloat. As late as spring 2002, the US State Department claimed there was “no conclusive evidence of illicit opium production in North Korea,” preferring instead to emphasize the regime’s weapons sales as its primary financial resource. The US administration chooses to focus on arms shipments (which are mostly unpreventable), rather than to address North Korea’s drug trafficking, which is illegal under international law and thus preventable if laws are enforced. Moreover, while Washington’s Proliferation Security Initiative (PSI) is preparing to intercept current illegal arms sales, covert North Korean transport conduits for future nuclear weapons trading remain unhindered.

Two main ways to control the actions of a totalitarian regime from the outside are threatening military action and applying economic pressure. The goal of North Korea’s nuclear program has been to make the former option impossible; until its drug trade is brought to an end, the latter will remain so as well. If the United States hopes to engage North Korea in meaningful negotiations, it must go a step beyond US President George W. Bush’s September 2003 promise to cooperate with countries hurt by North Korean drug trafficking by working with East Asian law enforcement and, if necessary, to provide funding and personnel to ensure that international trafficking laws are rigorously enforced. Some worry that North Korea would interpret US involvement as warlike posturing and retaliate with nuclear action. However, just as the PSI avoided controversy by presenting itself as an international effort to stop general nuclear proliferation, an initiative to intercept drug shipments could be represented as a multilateral effort to minimize narcotics trafficking on the whole. Until such an initiative is undertaken, Pyongyang will have little incentive to rethink its defiant position.