Border guards in northern Vietnam’s Dien Bien province have arrested a drug trafficker with 120,000 pills of synthetic drugs, Vietnam News Agency reported Monday.

The authorities caught red-handed a local man transporting the drug by motorbike in the province’s Dien Bien district on Sunday night, according to the report.

The detainee confessed that he was hired by two unknown men to transport the drug for distribution at the wage of 50 million Vietnamese dong (200 U.S. dollars).

Vietnamese law prescribes the death penalty for people convicted of smuggling over 600 grams of heroin or more than 2.5 kg of methamphetamine.

Making or trading 100 grams of heroin or 300 grams of other illegal drugs also faces the death penalty.

In August 2017, the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) reported that East and Southeast Asia were at the heart of the global synthetic drug trade.

It said that some drugs manufactured and trafficked in and from the region were causing serious public health problems in the region and other parts of the world.

The region has recently been acknowledged to be the largest methamphetamine market, with seizures surpassing the total for North America.

Most countries in the region have reported record meth seizures in recent years, and the number of people admitted for methamphetamine treatment has also been on the rise.

(Xinhua/NAN)