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Compulsory Drug Treatment in Southeast Asia – Neither Ethical Nor Effective
Publication date:
Global Politics - The strategy of the Joint Declaration for a Drug-Free ASEAN founded on the specious belief that taking a sufficiently ‘tough’ stance on the drug trade would result in its demise, has been shown to be as nonsensical as it was empirically dubious. ASEAN will not be drug free by 2015, nor will it be by the new extended deadline of 2020.
According to the latest regional studies by the UNODC and the Transnational Institute, the use of Amphetamine-type stimulants (ATS) such as Methamphetamine has both increased and diversified in recent years. Heroin use has reached ‘epidemic’ levels in several parts of northern Myanmar, while the continued implementation of repressive drug control policies has resulted in increasingly harmful patterns of consumption.