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Community-based drug projects provide an alternative to compulsory detention in Asia
Roger Pebody, 2015-10-27 17:50:00
A series of pilot projects in China, Indonesia and Cambodia are showing that non-coercive, community-based drug treatment projects are feasible and more effective than the approach of many Asian countries, incarceration and compulsory treatment. The findings were presented at the 24th International Harm Reduction Conference in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia and in a report launched at the conference.
Half of the world’s opiate users and the greatest concentration of people who inject drugs live in Asia, which also has the world’s largest market for amphetamines.
While governments around the world have favoured prohibitionist and punitive approaches to drugs, this tendency has been especially strong in Asia. As well as imprisoning and executing significant numbers of people who use drugs, eleven countries make significant use of compulsory detention centres in which ‘treatment’ and ‘drug rehabilitation’ is forced on inmates. The interventions used in these centres are not evidence-based and are often delivered by unskilled staff. After release, rates of relapse to drug use are high.
In 2012, a dozen United Nations agencies called for compulsory detention centres to be closed, but several countries have opened more since then. As there is limited published evidence on effective community-based alternatives in Asian countries, Harm Reduction International decided to document examples in six countries with the hope that this may help countries transition away from coercive approaches to drug treatment.
The services described are typically small programmes that exist alongside larger networks of compulsory detention centres. They come from Cambodia, China, India, Indonesia, Malaysia and Vietnam.
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