A defector from North Korea has made a sensational claim that Kim Jong-un's own regime is heavily involved in the illegal drugs trade to raise funds for the rogue state's development of nuclear weapons. The source revealed that such reality has left the locals "hooked on drugs".
Kim Hyeong-soo, who escaped the regime in 2009, said in an exclusive interview with the Daily Star that North Korea has practically become dependent on the drugs industry which started as far back as the rule of former president Kim II-sung. Hyeong-soo said Kim II-sung gave an internal instruction to party officials to support the opium industry. In order to conceal the illegal trade the officials were also asked to use the code name "White Flowers" to refer to opium manufacturers.
Hyeong-soo worked for the government's top secret research body Longevity Institute. He emphasized that the state initiated the illegal drugs trade until it has expanded to the general market and became quite accessible to the public.
Hyeong-soo also claimed that the people who work in the manufacturing industry would actually steal one or two grams because the cost of such would already be the equivalent of a month's salary.
Illegal drugs also became widely pervasive because legal medication drugs are not easily available, forcing people to use opiates as a painkiller instead, taking it orally or intravenously, Hyeong-soo further claimed. The regime's massive corruption did not help either. Hyeong-soo said that legal medicines donated to North Korea by the international community and South Korea were seized by the regime and sold instead to the people at exorbitant rates, leaving North Koreans with little access even to conventional pain relief medicines. Even medicines for such common , but fatal -if left untreated- diseases like tuberculosis were not spared and instead sold on the black market. The cost of a month's worth of tuberculosis medicines would be equivalent to a worker's five years of salary. Hyeong-soo said that such was the grim reality that he saw relatives' children pitifully die of the common disease because medicines were unaffordable.
Hyeong-soo boldly concluded that he can literally say that "North Korea is just a big criminal state where Kim Jong-il and Kim Jong-un have taken 25 million hostage".
