The world's largest illicit OPIUM-growing area is the Golden Triangle—a region in Southeast Asia of some 150,000 square miles (388,500 sq km). The Golden Triangle extends from the Chin hills in the west of Myanmar (formerly Burma), north into China's Yunnan province, east into Laos and Thailand's northern provinces, and south into the Kayah state of Myanmar. It encompasses all the Shan state in Myanmar and supplied some 35 percent of the HEROIN used in the United States between the 1960s and early 1990s. Between 1990 and 1999, however, changes in heroin traf-ficking greatly reduced the importation of heroin from Southeast Asia. In 1990, Myanmar, Thailand, and Laos supplied about 56 percent of the heroin consumed in the United States. By 1999, Latin America supplied most of the heroin to the United States, accounting for 82 percent of the heroin seized in the U.S. The Southeast Asian...