An Asean free from 'wars on drugs'

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 The problem isn't simply the recycling of an outdated mantra first declared in 1998, nor the fact that the region's drug markets have only expanded since then, but that this approach ignores how government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.