North Korean workers areallegedly being given a methamphetamine-based drug in the hope it will speed up a major construction project.
Project managers in the city’s capital of Pyongyang are said to be under so much pressure to finish the job on time that they have resorted to openly providing builders with the drug.
Hundreds of thousands of North Korean citizens have been roped in to finish the project, which consists of a 70-floor skyscraper and more than 60 apartment blocks.
It was approved earlier this year by North Korean leader Kim Jong-un.
“Project managers are now openly providing drugs to construction workers so that they will work faster,” a construction source in Pyongyang told Radio Free Asia.
“(They) are undergoing terrible sufferings in their work.”
Human rights workers in Asia said the working conditions amounted to slave labour and urged the UN to take further action against Kim Jong-un.
