Asean governments recently met in Singapore for a regional meeting about drugs, where the host nation urged renewed commitment to a “drug-free region”. The problem isn’t simply the recycling of an outdated mantra first declared in 1998, nor the fact that the region’s drug markets have only expanded since then, but that this approach ignores how government policies themselves shape those markets — and the devastating harms that follow.
In his opening speech to the regional meeting, the Singaporean Minister for Home Affairs K Shanmugam began by chronicling deaths related to drugs in different parts of the world. He lumps together deaths caused by overdoses in the USA with those caused by violence related to drug markets in places like Mexico and Ecuador. The statistics are indeed devastating, but the citing of these deaths without any acknowledgement of the harms driven by policies or the complex problems driven by political, structural and socioeconomic factors seeks to absolve the responsibility of governments to do better to protect life and uphold human rights. The international drug control conventions state that the priority goals of national drug policies are to improve the health and welfare of all people. Singapore’s continued justification of the death penalty is not only at odds with international human rights law but also with the principle that drug policies should be to protect lives — not take them away.
In 2016, Association of Southeast Asian Nations (Asean) governments adopted a work plan on drug issues that ends this year. The Philippines led the review of the work plan’s implementation, but following the regional meeting hosted by Singapore, the results of the review do not appear to be publicly shared. Ahead of the meeting, the International Drug Policy Consortium sent a submission of civil society perspectives to Asean drug policy agencies on the impacts of the regional drug strategy since 2016, with recommendations for the way forward. For the most part, it has been a harrowing decade: about 30,000 people killed in a “war on drugs” in the Philippines, prisons overcrowded with people held for drug offences (Thailand has the world’s second highest rate of women’s incarceration, mostly for drug offences), abusive drug rehabilitation systems and continued executions of people for drug offences.
Amidst regular reports of increased availability and consumption of drugs in the region, some governments have recognised the need to change their approach. While admitting that most people in prisons are from low socioeconomic backgrounds and played minor roles in drug supply chains, Thailand reformed their drug laws to adopt more alternatives to incarceration, which led to a significant drop in people incarcerated for drug offences, from 250,000 in May 2021 to 206,000 in May 2023. The legal regulation of cannabis in the kingdom also contributed to the new drug policy direction of pursuing a health-led approach over one centred on punishment. Unfortunately, the imprisonment trends reversed after a change in government resulted in a regression in drug policy direction. Malaysia also recognised the problem it had with overincarceration due to disproportionately punitive drug laws and established a national task force on drug decriminalisation of minor drug offences. However, legislative reforms in 2024 resulted in the expansion in the scope of people ordered into compulsory centres for drug users. The retention of criminal penalties and corporal punishment for drug use and possession for personal use further fails to achieve the government’s stated objective of pursuing a health-centred response to drug use. Vietnam also took a step backwards by proposing to criminalise people who use drugs, in addition to the existing system of compulsory orders into drug rehabilitation programmes in detention centres. On the use of the death penalty, Singapore carried out over 50 drug-related executions from 2015 to 2024, with disproportionate impacts on economically and racially marginalised individuals. However, Vietnam and Malaysia took decisive steps to reduce their use of the death penalty for drug offences.
Asean governments will convene again on Monday, this time at ministerial level in the Philippines, to adopt some key decisions on the region’s drug strategy direction. After so many lives lost and devastated, they must take responsibility for setting policies that respond to the complex realities of drug use and supply in the region in ways that improve the health and welfare of all Asean peoples, and align with international recommendations on drug policy. Setting “drug-free” goals ignores such realities and scapegoats people accused of drug-related activities for structural and socio-economic challenges that governments are mandated to fix. The Asean community vision 2045 aspires towards a “resilient, innovative, dynamic, and people-centred Asean”. We need to see this reflected in the outcomes of the ministerial meeting and the next Asean drug strategy.
Gloria Lai is Regional Director: Asia, International Drug Policy Consortium.
