Illicit Drug use in the Asia Pacific Region - Burnet Institute

Situational analysis of illicit drug issues and responses in the Asia–Pacific region
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Historical and cultural
interactions with drugs
Opium has been reported in China since
the 8th century . However, it was not until
the 16th century that European merchants
discovered the commercial appeal of opium
with its production, export, import and use
expanding exponentially . Opium became
important socially, culturally and economically
in much of Asia, and was also the
mainstay of the therapeutic pharmacopoeia
in many communities . From the mid-19th
century until the early 20th century opium
dens were found throughout Asia, catering
to the millions of opium smokers, many
of whom were dependent . Registration of
opium users developed in a variety of Asian
countries from the late 19th century, and
opium was obtained through a rationing
system . The colonial exploitation of this trade
to redress trade imbalances by the British and
French into China, and by the Dutch into
Indonesia, among others, was the cause of
enormous conflict and hardship, the memory
and effects of which linger to the present day
in many countries in the region .
The ban on the production, trade and use of
opium began in the late 19th century in some
Asian nations, but was not regionally complete
until the late 1940s . From the mid-1950s and
through the 1960s heroin use was present
throughout Asia, but was generally a minor
phenomenon . From the 1960s onwards the
use of a variety of drugs — heroin, morphine,
cannabis, amphetamines, barbiturates, tranquillisers,
cough syrups, inhalants — increased
in many of the principal urban centres of Asia .
The American War in Vietnam through the
1960s and 1970s opened routes to western
markets from the Golden Triangle region, and
stimulated production of opiates enormously .
China maintained a relatively firm control
of drug use from the 1950s onwards but
free market economic policies introduced
increasingly from 1979, and the ‘Open Door’
policy of 1982, led to a major resurgence
of drug use . Since then, increasingly ‘open
door’ policies for international trade within
the region have contributed dramatically to
the increase in the availability and use of
illicit drugs .
Current situation:
prevalence of drug use
As with much of the rest of the world, reliable
estimates of the numbers of people using
illicit drugs are rare in Asia and the Pacific .
Various official and unofficial estimates of
the numbers of users of particular drugs exist,
but few have been derived by any reasonable
systematic and data-driven process . There
is general agreement, however, that the
numbers of people using illicit drugs in Asia
have been climbing over the past decades —
at times, and in some places, exponentially;
at other times, and elsewhere, less rapidly .
As well, there is a generally acknowledged
flux of different drugs into different markets,
often displacing previous illicit drugs
from market dominance, and not confined
to major urban centres .
A common phenomenon in many Asian
countries is the registration of apprehended or
disclosed illicit drug users; not uncommonly,
the cumulative number of such people,
from whenever registration began, is taken
as an estimate of the numbers of such drug
users in the country (or even as the exact
number) . Such figures have often been relied
upon by government authorities, but have
also often been made even less reliable by
a failure to discriminate between different
types of illicit drugs — all being bundled
into the word ‘narcotics’, or for example
dada in Malaysia, simply meaning ‘drugs’ .
Behind such use of registration data there is
a lack of understanding of the phenomenon
of illicit drug use which characterises the
‘first wave’ of responses in these countries
to the burgeoning use of illicit drugs . More
sophisticated approaches to the estimation of
population sizes of users of particular drugs
are now gradually being introduced in many
Asian countries .
Asian countries such as China, Malaysia,
Myanmar and Vietnam maintain registration
systems for drug users, supported by legislation
and enforced by sanction . Even when
such registrations are officially promoted as
representing the number of drug users in
the country, there is now usually unofficial
agreement and acknowledgement that the
real numbers are much higher . China has
witnessed a 15-fold increase in the number
of registered drug users from 70,000 in 1990
to 1,050,000 in 2003; whereas before 2000
these numbers were seen to reflect the actual
number of illicit drug users . There is now
official acknowledgement of estimates in the
range of 6–12 million drug users . Four other
Asian nations have estimated drug user populations
of two million or more — Indonesia,
Thailand, Laos and the Philippines; and three
acknowledge estimates from 200,000 to less
than one million — Malaysia, Vietnam and
Myanmar . Brunei is the one country reviewed
in the Asia region that has no official or
unofficial numbers of drug users .
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Executive summary