Opinion | From the Philippines to Indonesia and Afghanistan, Asia’s brutal drug policies have failed
Ten years of heavy-handed drug policy has not lowered use but it has increased the misery for addicts and for those who enter the trade out of economic necessity. It’s time for a new strategy
Asia is characterised by some of the world’s harshest approaches to combating illicit use of drugs, an almost entirely one-dimensional security approach as opposed to a more integrated humane, political, social and security approach. The victims are mainly the urban and rural poor at the end of the chain, not the well-armed drug barons with the means to protect themselves.
Have draconian measures such as extrajudicial killings, the death penalty for drug offences, compulsory detention for people who use drugs and, in some cases, corporal punishment meted out by caning, achieved the stated goal of reducing drug demand and supply in the region? Can countries in Asia claim progress is being made towards the goal of a “drug-free” region?
These are important questions that governments must answer as the 10-year global drug strategy adopted at the United Nations in 2009 comes to its end. In March, governments are set to meet at a high-level UN meeting in Vienna to review progress made over the past decade and define future directions for global drug policy.
The so-called “war on drugs” has persisted for decades without an honest assessment by governments of its effectiveness, nor its impacts, despite UN reports showing ever-increasing drug markets year on year, as well as many harmful consequences. In a report on the past decade of drug policy in Asia released on Wednesday, the International Drug Policy Consortium presents a comprehensive assessment that portrays a grim reality.
The UN has reported a 167 per cent increase in the production of opium in Afghanistan and a 29 per cent increase in Myanmar since 2009. Seizures of methamphetamine tablets have increased nine-fold from 2008 to 2015. These trends reflect high levels of demand and increasing sophistication by drug traffickers, while showing the utter ineffectiveness of waging costly drug wars that overwhelmingly prioritise the use of law enforcement at the expense of public health and human rights.
Afghan children sit next to a poppy field in the Argo district of Badakhshan province in June 2018. The US government has spent billions of dollars on a war to eliminate drugs from Afghanistan, but the country still remains the world's top opium producer. Photo: AFP
Over the past decade, the use of drugs, along with its associated health risks and deaths, have surged in Asia. The UN reports an almost 100 per cent increase from 2011 to 2018 in the use of amphetamines. The rates of prevalence of HIV, viral hepatitis and tuberculosis among people who inject drugs in Asia remain disproportionately high compared with other regions of the world, and have seen no overall decrease since 2009. Although the reported number of drug-related deaths has fallen from 104,116 in 2011 to 66,100 in 2016, it is important to note that data on drug-related mortality remains scarce and of poor quality, with no systematic reporting of overdose deaths in any country in the region.
