Chapter 14 Drugs, Livelihoods, and the Limits of Social Transformation in a Highland Periphery of Myanmar Bobby Anderson This chapter discusses historical and contemporary insurgency and opium cultivation in Myanmar, I first analyse the factors that lend to the durability of a given insurgency in Myanmar over time: geography, resources, and people. I then apply the analysis of this interplay of drugs and insurgency across decades in Myanmar, before turning to Chin state, Tonzang township in particular, to examine how that area fits into the triage of crime and insurgency described previously. I then describe opium-growing areas of Tonzang I worked in from 2018 to 2020, and how they differ from the stereotypes we often hold about such places. This is followed by the conclusion, which considers opium as a proxy indicator for the coerced integration of non- market-reliant peoples into markets, from resource security to cash insecurity, and the limits that the historical and contemporary illicit political economy imposes on the potential for social transformation in the post-junta era. Myanmar’s government has set the year 2019 as a deadline for when the country will be drug-free. —Public Radio International, May 2015 Tonzang is the northernmost township in Myanmar’s Chin State, and Chikha is its north-westernmost town. It lies a dozen miles back from the Indian border, connected by rutted track to a decrepit crossing—across which lies Manipur, a place of insur- gencies within insurgencies like Russian Matryoshka dolls: Mizoram, relatively peaceful, 1 lies further west. Chikha is a dusty little town of a few paved streets, almost stereotypically sleepy, and dotted with the churches of myriad Christian sects. Of the few streets, as in small towns everywhere, one bears the honorific “main”, and on this street lies the 1 India’s Kuki-Chin groups, the Mizo National Front or MNF in particular, were historically supported by China, with MNF leadership based in Bangladesh (then East Pakistan). Mizoram State was created to defang the MNF insurgency in 1986. B. Anderson (B ) School of Public Policy, Chiang Mai University, Chiang Mai, Thailand © The Author(s) 2021 C. Yamahata et al. (eds.), Social Transformations in India, Myanmar, and Thailand: Volume I, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-9616-2_14 215