Phnom Penh, Dec. 28, (dpa/GNA) – While businesses across the globe have ground to a halt during the past year, the drug trade in South-east Asia has continued to flourish – and governments continue to respond with heavy hands.
The case of the Philippines is well-known, yet other countries have also pursued their own brutal wars on drugs in the past decade, and more intensely so during the past few years.
But did the crackdowns have the intended effect?
THAILAND embarked on the first deadly wave of its drug war in 2003, giving police a tacit shoot-to-kill order that resulted in nearly 2,300 deaths in just the first 10 weeks. A government report later found that as many as half of those killed had no links to drugs.
In INDONESIA, President Joko Widodo called drugs the country’s “number one problem” in 2016, and sent the country’s narcotics police on a deadly wave of enforcement.
In MYANMAR, authorities seized an estimated 18 tons of methamphetamine pills, synthetic opioids, and precursor chemicals between February and April. In May, a couple of months after Covid-19 had been declared a global pandemic, police in Myanmar announced they had made one of Asia’s largest drug busts in history.
Then, of course, there is the PHILIPPINES, where police have arrested nearly 200,000 and killed an estimated 27,000 people since President Rodrigo Duterte launched his war on drugs shortly after his 2016 election. Duterte vowed a violent crackdown, promising to go after addicts and dealers alike.
“Now there is 3 million drug addicts [in the Philippines],” Duterte said in 2016, likening himself to Hitler killing Jews. “I’d be happy to slaughter them.”
In CAMBODIA, Prime Minister Hun Sen launched his own “war on drugs” at the beginning of 2017 after government research found that “drugs and crime” were one of the major issues of concern for the general population.
The policy was almost certainly inspired by Duterte, who visited Cambodia in late 2016 and announced the two countries would cooperate in law enforcement in the war on drugs.
Since then, more than 55,000 people have been swept up and dispatched to severely overcrowded prisons or violent drug rehabilitation centres. As in neighbouring countries, arrests have disproportionately targeted the poorest. Convictions have relied heavily on torture and forced confessions.
Governments across the region have argued that violent approaches are necessary to protect the general population. In Cambodia, Interior Ministry spokesperson Khieu Sopheak said it was impossible to both battle drugs and respect human rights. “During the anti-drug campaign, human rights need be put aside so it is clean,” he said.
But, while the drug wars have been effective in bringing – or keeping – leaders to power, they have proven less fruitful in terms of actually reducing drug consumption.
Earlier this year, the head of the Philippines drug enforcement police, admitted as much to Reuters: “shock and awe definitely did not work … [the] drug supply is still rampant.”
In the Philippines, a 2015 survey estimated that there were about 1.8 million current drug users. Duterte spoke of 3 million “drug addicts” when he was running for president, a figure he later put at 4 million, and which his foreign secretary placed at 7 million. While the numbers are highly questionable, they do not indicate a decrease.
In Cambodia, the number of drug users decreased only marginally from 20,621 at the end of 2016 to 19,272 in mid 2019, according to the country’s National Authority for Combating Drugs.
The expansion of the drug market is mirrored in continual “largest-ever” busts, like the one in Myanmar, and in the rapidly falling price. In Indonesia, for example, the price of crystalline methamphetamine has nearly halved during the past four years, according to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime. In Thailand, the price for meth had decreased by about two-thirds over the past decade.
Crackdowns mainly net drug users and street dealers, but not the actual traffickers – as research exemplified in Myanmar’s Shan state; rarely do they lead to the destruction of an organized crime network.
Sometimes, government officials are even involved in the deals themselves, with experts reporting corruption as one of the driving factors for continued drug trade.
Poor detention conditions in overcrowded prisons, meanwhile, can also increase the likelihood of drug dependency, according to Amnesty International.
“The conditions are so brutal that many detainees are physically and mentally traumatized by their experience of mistreatment and abuse, which in turn may exacerbate drug dependency,” the organization wrote in a report about Cambodia. With no rehabilitation systems in place, detainees leave prisons traumatized, pushing them further into drug dependency.
Drug distribution can grow rampant, with overcrowded prisons becoming bases for criminal actors to operate and recruit, the Global Commission on Drugs said.
Research, meanwhile, has shown that a health-based approach is more effective in curbing drug consumption by focusing on treating people’s addiction rather than locking them in.
But as political stakes are high and drug crackdowns popular amongst voters, governments are unlikely to move away from their heavy-handed approach any time soon.
GNA