A Study on North Korea's Drug Syndicates and “Superlabs”
Authors:   Korean Association of Public Safety and Criminal Justice, Lee Kwanhyung 
Published: January 2024

The purpose of this study is to examine the main actors and production facilities in the North Korean drug industry and their implications. North Korea's drug production and smuggling are known to have started in the 1970s, but this is a long-standing crime since the division of Korea in August 1945 and continues to serve as its traditional source of income. The North Korean authorities' drug crimes have not been cut off, and the “drug business,” which was relatively small until the 1970s, has expanded to an industrial level from the 1980s that continues to this day. Despite the fact that North Korea's drug problem is an old problem, the current situation is known only in a fragmentary manner. Therefore, this paper is a follow-up on the studies dealing with North Korean drug problems from 1945 to the 1980s, with a focus on unveiling the reality of the development of the North Korean drug industry that began to thrive in the 1990s. Moreover, this is a foundational study to better understand North Korea's drug production capacities (technology and scale), networks and patterns, and the ripple effect it has on the Korean Peninsula and the international community. Unlike the typical criminal syndicate, the actors in North Korea's drug industry are workers and special agencies delegated and entrusted with the authority to operate the drug industry by suryong, or the great leader. In other words, these syndicates are actors that carried out operations in espionage, terrorism, weapons, and trade under the suryong dictatorship and were granted additional authority to operate the drug industry. These actors include Kim Jong Il’s younger sister Kim Kyung Hee and her husband, Jang Song Thaek, Office 39, Reconnaissance General Bureau, Ministry of State Security, Military Security Command, and the Second Economic Committee. The production facilities managed by these syndicates include the Ranam Pharmaceutical Factory, the Mannyon Pharmaceutical Factory, the Hungnam Pharmaceutical Factory, the State Academy of Science, espionage agencies, and third-country production facilities. The actors in North Korea's drug industry can be executed, dismissed, purged, expelled, or replaced at any time at the will of the leader. In addition, production facilities are repeatedly closed, restarted, and relocated due to personnel changes or security reasons. In other words, suryong and the North Korean leadership are unlikely to give up the drug industry as long as they generate huge profits even if temporary changes such as replacing intermediate managers, production facilities, and trafficking routes occur like a typical drug cartel. All North Korean officials under the Kim Jong Un dictatorship are also easily crossing the borders of law, morality, and national borders by any means for the sake of serving Kim Jong Un's interests and goals. Looking only at drug crimes led by North Korean authorities, the use of the term “state” itself may not be appropriate for North Korea as it goes beyond “criminal state” or “mafia state.” The reason is that in North Korea, “private” criminal organizations cannot infiltrate the regime on their own, and the leader and the leadership themselves possess criminal characteristics, making it contradictory to be the subject of punishment for drug crimes committed by themselves.