Mad drug or mad drug policy?

7 March 2000

Over the past four years, the amphetamine business has boomed. Everyone can see that. Since 1996, the statistics on arrests and seizures have soared. A recent survey found that 1-in-8 students take amphetamines or deal in them. Some think the volume is now around 500 million pills a year. Some think it is much higher.

Since 1996 also, there has been a big campaign to bring the trade under control. By cutting off the supplies. By mobilizing the army. By a barrage of PR. The amphetamine pill was renamed as the ‘mad drug’. Government buildings were plastered with threats of death for dealers and users. The media focus on stories of crazed users waving knives and jumping off buildings.

The big rise and the big PR campaign have almost exactly coincided. It’s time to ask: is this working, and if not, why not?

The PR campaign is supposed to influence the demand for drugs. But is it based on any information about this demand? Some research done in Chulalongkorn University has come up with three important pieces of information.

First, the distribution system is very different from other drugs (heroin, marijuana) and very effective. It works like a pyramid scheme. A dealer recruits a customer. Then he offers the customer discounts if he will find other customers. Then he suggests the customer set up as a sub-dealer and develop another level of the pyramid.

This distribution structure is very familiar—it’s just like the underground lottery. It has carried the drug into every school, village, slum, community. It constantly expands the market. It eliminates the conflict between buyer and seller which afflicts other drug supply chains. It offers the user a way to earn the income to pay for his own purchases. It is so pervasive, it becomes almost invisible.

The second finding is about consumers. There are two groups. The first are working people who take the drug so they can work longer hours. The second are students and other young people who take it for recreation. For both groups, the drug ‘works’. For working people it enables them to earn more income. For the young people who take it before playing snooker, going to the disco, motorbike racing, or having sex, it enhances their enjoyment.

Here’s the crunch. These users look at the government’s campaign which tells them the drug will make them mad, and find it bears no relation to their own experience. The same is true of the media’s emphasis on psychotic incidents. The users promptly stop believing what the authorities and the media are trying to tell them. Non-users can see their friends don’t go mad after they take the drug, so this disbelief affects them too.

The third finding is about treatment. Currently the authorities treat offenders in much the saw way as users of other, harder drugs. They send them to rehabilitation and to jail. One result is to create a transition path to harder drugs.

Beneath all three of these findings there is one simple fact. Amphetamines are different—different from the hard drugs (heroin, thinner etc) which the Thai authorities have gained a lot of experience about in the past. The main difference is that the user can function perfectly well as a member of society. Of course, there are some people who self-destructively take excess quantities with psychotic results. They wave knives and jump off buildings. But here the problem is the self-destructive urge, not the drug (the same effect can be produced with excess of alcohol or other legal drugs). For the majority of users, as the Chula study notes, amphetamine is a ‘social drug’. The users are not a separate, identifiable group, but people you pass in the street every day. They are not mad and not dead.

Such ‘social drugs’ are part of every modern, urban, industrialized society. They are taken for a mixture of reasons ranging from stress-relief to fashion. Stopping the supply of one particular drug won’t change the demand for the category. Treating it like a hard drug creates a fatal gap of communication with the user.

The authorities need to stop telling people nonsense about amphetamines making them mad. Society needs to educate people about how to manage this drug, in the same way that society educates its members about alcohol, nicotine, caffeine and other drugs, both legal and non-legal. People need to be taught how to manage it, and also how to reject it. If parents, teachers, friends and others treat the users of such drugs as outcastes, and if the authorities locks them up with hard drug users, they will only nurture a sub-culture of covert use.

As the statistics get worse, the official PR seems to becoming more frantic and authoritarian. The ads, full of authority figures and oompah music, have a finger-wagging tone which rarely works with young people. In interview, a senior statesman described drug users and dealers as ‘traitors… who destroy the country, youth and state’. It is not clear how this overwrought message is supposed to appeal to someone about to take a little red pill for fun.

Obviously the society would be healthier if fewer people took such drugs, fewer resources were devoted to the trade, and less money was made in drug profiteering. But the current campaign has got the wrong message and the wrong tone of voice.