Gunning down drug dealers won't break Southeast Asia's addiction

As the death toll continues to rise in the Philippines, previous attempts to police drug trafficking in Southeast Asia suggest a long-term failure for Duterte

In the short term, users may experience a euphoric energy burst, acute alertness and a rapid heart beat. Long-term effects include addiction, debilitating psychosis, severe mood disturbances, amnesia and dental problems.
Methamphetamines have risen to “dominate Southeast Asia’s illicit drug market” according to Jeremy Douglas, the UN Office of Drugs and Crime (UNODC) representative for the region. Meth seizures in the region quadrupled from 2008 to 2013, according to UNDOC figures, and in mainland Southeast Asia, the meth business was valued at $15 billion in 2013.
Anxieties about the meth trade are manifesting in the Philippines, where Rodrigo Duterte has launched a brutal ‘war on drugs’. In September, the president extended the crackdown, which has already claimed over 3,000 lives, saying that there remain too many dealers and that he “cannot kill them all”.
John Collins, executive director of the London School of Economics’ International Drug Policy Project, said Duterte’s crackdown will undoubtedly “hollow out communities through violence, killings and an erosion of the rule of law.”
As well as facilitating human rights abuses, experts such as Douglas suggest that Duterte’s strategy will fail to address the country’s drug problem in the long term. “Targeting at the low level is not likely to have much more than near-term impact on street distribution,” he said.
It is not the first time a Southeast Asia administration has launched a war on drugs. In early 2003, Thailand’s then-prime minister, Thaksin Shinawatra, announced the beginning of a crackdown, saying: “In this war, drug dealers must die.”
As with Duterte, Thaksin’s bravado earned him support from the Thai public early on – an independent poll showed that 90% of the electorate initially backed the policy.
Up to 2,800 people were killed within three months, over half of whom reportedly had no links to the drugs trade. Although there was a short-term dip in drug use, worryingly high levels of consumption soon returned. In 2015, Thailand’s narcotics agency seized a staggering 1,140 kilos of crystal methamphetamine and 9,750 kilos of methamphetamine tablets. And, according to UNDOC, the number of meth labs grew from 2 between 2008 and 2010 to 193 by 2012.
Foreign minister Paiboon Koomchaya told Reuters in July that the policy had been a failure, and even hinted at the possibility of reclassifying meth to minimise the mandatory penalty for possession, suggesting a paradigm shift in the nation’s drug policy. “The world has lost the war on drugs, not only in Thailand,” he said.
Douglas believes that Duterte’s drug war could go the same way as Thailand’s. “Given the similarities to the drug war that started in Thailand in 2003 it is reasonable to assume there will be a similar outcome,” he said.
Sanho Tree, director of the Drug Policy Project at the Institute for Policy Studies said such efforts to eliminate drug use have so far backfired. “The drug economy evolves under Darwinian principles. As we throw more law enforcement and militarised resources at this problem, the type of people we typically capture tend to be those who are dumb enough to get caught,” he said.
Such large-scale crackdowns have not been seen elsewhere in Southeast Asia, but Collins points out that “drug policy in Southeast Asia has generally been typified by a strong law enforcement approach focusing on street distribution and users.”
Indonesia’s unyielding drug laws drew international attention last year when two members of the so-called ‘Bali Nine’ – a group of nine Australians found guilty in 2009 of attempting to smuggle 8.3kg of heroin from Indonesia to Australia – were executed, along with six other prisoners.
Last year, 14 people faced the firing squad for drug offences while few more. As of February this year, more than 69,000 people were incarcerated in the country for drug-related crimes.
Yet figures from the International Drug Policy Consortium suggest that tough punishments are not working. From 2011 to 2015, the number of drug users in the country increased from 3.6 million to 5.9 million.
It is a similar story in Malaysia, where the death penalty is a mandatory punishment for serious drug offences, although the sentence is rarely carried out today. But hard-line anti-drug policies appear to have had little impact. According the National Anti-Drug Agency, there were about 15,000 registered drug addicts in the country. Today, that number exceeds 130,000.
According to Douglas, whilst policing is important, more needs to be done to address the root causes of the demand for illicit substances. “Law enforcement needs to be part of the response, but it does not need to be the primary response, in Southeast Asia reality is that governments have not dealt with market demand and use,” he said.
Poverty and corruption are key drivers of drug addiction, Collins said. “By going to war with drugs and drug users, these underlying issues remain, which is one of the reasons why the ‘war on drugs’ has never worked in any context.”