Asia | Banyan

Asia is still just saying no to drugs

Prohibition may be falling out of fashion in the West, but Singapore and its neighbours remain fierce advocates

“FOR the first few days,” explains Aki, a young man who helps run a drug rehabilitation centre on the outskirts of Myitkyina, the capital of Kachin State, in northern Myanmar, “some of them try to run away. So we have to keep them like this.” A young man, naked except for a tattered pair of shorts, lies prone on a filthy mattress, one leg locked in a wooden device resembling medieval stocks. He sweats and shakes, like many suffering heroin withdrawal. Dozens of other men mill around the clinic: a dimly lit, mattress-lined, hangar-like building reeking of sweat and foul breath. Beyond the back door is a much smaller, concrete-floored room with a wooden bath, a squat toilet and, next to it, a tiny padlocked cell crammed with four painfully skinny men: they, too, had tried to escape.

The men receive no medication; treatment consists solely of herbal baths and Bible study (many Kachin are Baptist). For the first 15 days of their three-month stay, they receive no counselling because, as Aki explains: “They never tell the truth, because they are addicts.” Aki’s boss, the Reverend Hsaw Lang Kaw Ye, takes an equally dim view of his region’s many opium farmers: he is part of a citizens’ group that cuts down their crop. Asked if he provides the farmers with any compensation, he scoffs: “We don’t give them anything. We just destroy opium fields.”

This attitude is typical of drug policy in much of Asia: needlessly severe and probably ineffective. According to Harm Reduction International, a pressure group, at least 33 countries have capital punishment on the books for drug offences, but only seven are known to have executed drug dealers since 2010. Five are in Asia (the other two are Iran and Saudi Arabia).

Off with their heads

In Singapore, capital punishment is mandatory for people caught with as little as 15 grams of pure heroin. The arrival cards foreign visitors must fill in at Singaporean immigration posts warn, in red block capitals: “DEATH FOR DRUG TRAFFICKERS UNDER SINGAPORE LAW”. Singapore may kill fewer people than it used to—between 1994 and 1999 no country executed more people relative to its population—but its executioners are not idle: less than two months ago a Nigerian and a Malaysian were hanged for trafficking cannabis and heroin respectively.

Singapore’s neighbours, Malaysia and Indonesia, also execute drug offenders. Indonesia’s previous president, Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, reportedly disliked the death penalty, and imposed an unofficial moratorium on executions from 2008 to 2013. Joko Widodo, his successor, has no such qualms: since taking office in 2014 he has approved the execution of 18 drug traffickers, and has pledged to show “no mercy” to anyone in the business.

The Philippines ended capital punishment in 2006, but its new president, Rodrigo Duterte, has found a workaround: killing people without the bother of a trial. Since taking office six months ago, more than 6,200 suspected drug dealers or users have been killed in his anti-drug campaign. While his bloody drug war has drawn criticism from human-rights activists in the Philippines and abroad, it remains wildly popular among ordinary Filipinos. The ten-member Association of South-East Asian Nations is committed to eradicating drug use, processing and trafficking by 2020—an implausible goal, especially since the Golden Triangle, the region where Laos, Myanmar and Thailand meet, produces a hefty share of the world’s opium.

Harsh penalties for drug offences are common across Asia. The sorts of alternatives now favoured in the West, such as diverting addicts to effective treatment programmes instead of trying them and saddling them with criminal records, are virtually non-existent. Several countries require drug offenders to enter rehabilitation programmes, but these are often like prison. Staff at rehab centres in Vietnam have reportedly beaten inmates and forced them to toil in the fields; guards in Cambodia have reportedly raped female inmates.

Asia’s harsh anti-drug policies are falling out of step with the rest of the world. Marijuana for recreational use is now legal in eight American states; 28 have legalised it for medical use. Dozens of countries have decriminalised marijuana consumption. Heroin is available on prescription in several European countries. The rich world increasingly treats addiction as an illness rather than a crime.

These trends have Asia’s drug warriors worried. Last April the UN General Assembly convened a special session on drugs. The previous time it did so, in 1998, it vowed to make the world drug-free by 2008. It later moved the target date back to 2019—the year by which Canada now wants to set up a legal market for cannabis for recreational use. At the UN meeting Mexico’s president, Enrique Peña Nieto, urged the world to “move beyond prohibition”. Kasiviswanathan Shanmugam, Singapore’s fearsome law and home-affairs minister, was unmoved: “Show us a model that works better,” he told the general assembly, “that delivers a better outcome for citizens, and we will consider changing. If that cannot be done, then don’t ask us to change.”

Mr Shanmugam has a point: in Singapore, drug consumption is admirably low. But Singapore is small, with secure borders, little corruption, effective anti-drug education and laws that allow warrantless searches and detention without trial. In poorer and less well-run countries the consequences of prohibition have been depressingly predictable: prisons packed with low-level offenders, corruption and thriving black markets. Demand remains strong: between 2008 and 2013 the amount of methamphetamine seized in East Asia, South-East Asia and Oceania quadrupled. Eventually, Asia may reach the same conclusion as much of America, Europe and Latin America: that the costs of prohibition outweigh the benefits. But for now, as Mr Duterte’s popularity attests, drug wars are good politics.

This article appeared in the Asia section of the print edition under the headline "Still just saying no"

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