Inside Myanmar drug rehab centre where tough love is the prescription

More than a hundred shaven-headed men pour out of their hostel around 6am for a day of weightlifting, karate drills, dancing and Buddhist prayer. This is drug rehabilitation, Myanmar-style.

The group that includes doctors, musicians and street food vendors sets off for a jog around a verdant, orchid-dotted compound, watched over by supervisors carrying heavy wooden sticks.

Welcome to another day at “Metta Saneain” – the “House of Love” in Burmese – a rehab centre in Myanmar’s largest city Yangon that dishes out tough love to break the cycle of drug addiction.

Myanmar, with a population of about 54 million people, has long been a narcotics-producing powerhouse, with drugs fuelling and financing decades of internal conflict and authorities turning a blind eye to the billion-dollar industry.

The chaos unleashed by the military’s 2021 coup has gutted the legal economy and the country is now the world’s biggest producer of opium and a major source of methamphetamine, according to the United Nations.