Letters | The war on drugs has failed. It’s time Hong Kong followed the science

Name: Philippine drug war victims forced out of graves as leases expire
Uploaded: 2021-08-13T23:30:18.000Z
Duration: 3 min 14 s
Description: Philippine drug war victims forced out of graves as leases expire

Plenty of evidence now shows the folly of treating drug use as a crime rather than a health issue. The decriminalisation of drug possession for personal use is recommended by the UN, and 23 countries have some form of decriminalisation

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Hong Kong customs officers busted a cannabis farm in Yuen Long on August 5. Photo: Felix Wong

Letters

Published: 7:30am, 14 Aug 2021Updated: 7:30am, 14 Aug 2021

The Hong Kong drug investigation group talks up its latest arrests, with Chan Siu-kau, acting superintendent of customs’ drug investigation group, telling the press: “We have blocked the drugs from entering the local market.” (“Modern property hid huge cannabis grow house”, August 7).

If the acting superintendent thinks that “blocking the drugs” will have anything other than a minor and short-term effect, he is deeply deluded.

The world has been fighting a so-called “war on drugs” since the Harrison Narcotic Act of 1914. The Act had immediate and negative effects, including “the failures of promising careers, the disrupting of happy families, the commission of crimes which will never be traced to their real cause, and the influx into hospitals to the mentally disordered of many who would otherwise live socially competent lives”.

Sound familiar? That’s a quote from New York Medical Journal writing in May 1915. Yet, instead of accepting the expert opinion of deeply engaged doctors (“following the science”, in today’s parlance), authorities chose to double down. Predictably, things got worse.

Today, a full 106 years later, the message from doctors is the same. Prohibition harms. A recent BMJ meta study of 114 studies notes: “An estimated 271 million people used an internationally scheduled (“illicit”) drug in 2017, corresponding to 5.5 per cent of the global population aged 15 to 64. Despite decades of investment, policies aimed at reducing supply and demand have demonstrated limited effectiveness.”

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Philippine drug war victims forced out of graves as leases expire

“Limited effectiveness” is putting it mildly, as prohibitive policies were also shown to have contributed to HIV and hepatitis C transmission and fatal overdose, among other problems.