Record seizures fail to dent Southeast Asia’s booming synthetic drug trade: UN report

PEOPLE FIRST POLICIES

For public health advocates, the most important question is not how many tonnes of drugs were intercepted, but whether people’s lives are actually improving or not.

For Verapun Ngammee, the director of Ozone Foundation, a harm reduction and public health non-profit based in Nonthaburi, Thailand, record seizures do not necessarily mean that drugs are becoming harder to find.

In many communities, drugs remain widely available despite intensified law enforcement efforts, he said, leading to questions about whether enforcement alone is reducing demand or reducing harm.

“What we often see is that supply chains adapt very quickly. When one route is disrupted, another route emerges. As a result, many users experience little change in access to methamphetamine,” he said.

In some cases, he said users report greater purity or stronger effects than in the past. And that lower prices and higher potency can increase health risks, particularly among young people and vulnerable groups.

Success should be measured by reductions in overdose, improvements in health outcomes, fewer people entering the criminal justice system and stronger community wellbeing, he argued.

“One thing that is often missing is the lived experience of people who use drugs and their families. We also need to talk about mental health, stigma, family breakdown, unemployment, homelessness and barriers to healthcare,” he said.

Ultimately, drug policies have to end up in better outcomes for people including on education, the experiences of young people, and jobs and livelihoods, said Gloria Lai, the Asia regional director at the International Drug Policy Consortium, a global network that works collectively to promote person-centred, rights-affirming drug policies.

“It goes back to the principle of not just focusing on trying to reduce and suppress drug use or supply, but making sure that in everything that you do, you’re putting people first and you’re thinking first about the safety of communities and the health and the well-being of communities, even as you carry out these operations,” she said.

“If in the end all we’re doing is catching, arresting and convicting low-level dealers or people who use drugs and incarcerating them, then that’s not an efficient or a useful response overall.”

Sim agreed that demand reduction was equally important and rejected viewing drugs through a purely law-enforcement lens.

He described organised crime groups as sophisticated businesses that adapt to enforcement pressure and argued that responses must address both supply and demand.

The challenge, experts said, is that criminal groups have become highly adaptive and have gained strong footholds in communities right across Asia.

“Seizures are not what’s going to stop this. It doesn’t mean you give up on seizures,” Horsey said.

“They provide intelligence, they provide information, but it isn’t the answer.”

Additional reporting by Jarupat Karunyaprasit.