In a Q&A, Stanford postdoctoral fellow Darika Saingam explains why Thailand's battle against drugs continues and what is needed to introduce good policy that works to prevent illegal drug trade and supports recovering addicts.

Despite Thailand’s decade-long crackdown on drugs, demand for illegal substances has risen. A green leaf drug known as ‘kratom’ is a symbol of this rise as young people eagerly adopt the drug for entertainment and join an older generation of laborers who chewed it to survive long hours of work in the fields—and are now heavily addicted. Curtailing substance abuse and its consequences takes good public policy and solutions must be area-specific and evidence-based, according to a Stanford postdoctoral fellow.

Darika Saingam, the 2015-16 Developing Asia Health Policy Postdoctoral Fellow, has conducted two cross-sectional surveys and more than 1,000 interviews with drug users, recovered addicts, and local public officials in an effort to better understand the evolution of substance abuse in southern Thailand.

At Stanford, she is preparing two papers that offer policy options suitable for Thailand and other developing countries in Southeast Asia. Saingam spoke with the Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (APARC) where she will give a public talk on May 17. The interview text below was edited for brevity.

For decades, Thailand has been an epicenter of drugs. Can you describe the extent of the problem today?

According to a 2014 report, 1.2 million people were involved in illegal drug activities across Thailand. The total number of drug cases saw a 41 percent increase from 2013 to 2014. New groups of drug traffickers are mobilizing while existing groups are still active. Drug users who are young become drug dealers as they get older. The number of drug users below 15 years of age has increased dramatically.

According to your research, what drives Thais toward illegal drug use and the trafficking business?

Adults in Thailand use drugs to relieve stress and counteract the effects of work. Adolescents use them for entertainment. Historically, farmers and laborers from rural areas of Thailand would use opium for pain relief. More recently, a consumable tablet known as yaba has become popular along with crystal methamphetamine and marijuana. Young people are increasingly using yaba and kratom.

Thailand is still a developing country, but it is industrializing quickly. Social and cultural norms have been shifting and people want an improved quality of life. A lot of young people are unemployed and lack social support and are therefore more likely to turn to drug trafficking for economic opportunity. The economic recession and political strife in countries bordering Thailand have exacerbated the situation.

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Photos (left to right): A man holds up a kratom leaf. / Saingam examines kratom leaves as part of her research to understand illegal cultivation practices.

What is kratom and why is it popular?

For nearly a century, the native people of Thailand have chewed kratom. It is a leaf that grows on trees resembling a coffee plant. Historically, kratom was used to reduce strain following physical labor, to be able to work harder and longer, and to better tolerate heat and sunlight. Kratom is also embedded in Thai culture and given as a spiritual offering in religious ceremonies. My field research in the southern province of Nakhon Si Thammarat has shown that these motivations are still true today.

Within the past seven years, kratom use has skyrocketed and people are using it in increasingly harmful ways. Chewing kratom is not immediately harmful to health, but combining it with other substances is. This is the recent trend. Users have created new ways to consume it such as in a drink known as a ‘4x100.’ It contains boiled kratom leaves, cough syrup and soft drinks. Additional methamphetamines and benzodiazepines are sometimes added to that mixture.

What strategies must be employed to control substance abuse?

The first step is to realize that the patterns of substance abuse are specific to each location therefore solving the problem must also be. Drug usage is also dynamic. Placing hard control measures on one substance often provokes the emergence of another in its place therefore a holistic approach is important.

Thailand should employ multiple strategies toward effective prevention and control of substance abuse. These strategies include examining the problem and creating policies from an economic perspective (supply and demand), an institutional perspective (national and international drug control cooperation), and a social perspective (structural supports for recovered addicts and mobilization of public participation).

What is the Thai government doing to address the drug problem, and what could they be doing better?

Politicians in Thailand must do a better job at representing the people. Government health workers are often gathering information, assessing needs, and reporting findings to politicians, but these needs are not being accurately addressed. An example of this is politicians ordering to cut down kratom trees – a public display that does not get at the root cause of the problem. The reality is that drug users will quickly find substitutes. According to my study, of the regular users that stopped using kratom, more than 50 percent turned to alcohol instead and did so on a daily basis. This is merely a shift from one substance to another.

On the upside, a crop substitution program created under King Bhumibol Adulyadej offers a successful working model. The program works to replace opium poppy farming with cash crop production. It began in 1969 and is cited for helping an estimated 100,000 people convert their drug crop production to sustainable agricultural activities. Crops cultivated can be sold for profit in nearby towns. The program has also introduced a wide variety of crops and discouraged the slash-and-burn technique of clearing land. It is win-win because it stymies drug trade and provides economic opportunity while also being ecologically sound. This type of program should continue to be scaled up.

Can this model be co-opted elsewhere? What lessons from other countries could inform Thailand’s approach?

Yes, the model could plausibly be implemented in other areas in Thailand and in other Southeast Asian nations.

I think a judicial mechanism such as the kind seen in France could benefit the rural areas in Thailand. The French government has established centers across the country that act as branches of the court that try delinquency cases of minor to moderate severity, and also recommend support services for drug users. Members of the magistrate and civil society actors manage center operations thus placing some responsibility back onto the local community.

I believe an opportunity also exists for Thailand to legalize kratom. Legalization would show a respect for the cultural tradition of chewing kratom leaves and allow the government to suggest safer ways of using it. Bolivia has created a successful model of this through its legalization of coca leaves. Coca in its distilled form is cocaine, but left as a leaf, it is not a narcotic. Indigenous peoples are allowed to chew coca leaves. The government policy is being credited for a decrease in cocaine production as well.

Stanford experts from the Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (APARC) spoke with media in Asia and the United States about the dynamics on the Korean Peninsula following recent provocations by North Korea; a roundup of those citations is below.

The United Nations imposed a new set of sanctions against North Korea on March 2 in response to the country’s fourth nuclear test in January and subsequent rocket launch in February of this year. Shorenstein APARC Director Gi-Wook Shin offered his view in an interview with Dong-a Ilbo:

“The new sanctions are unprecedentedly strong and comprehensive, but the dominant view is pessimistic,” he said, emphasizing that the sanctions’ effectiveness stands largely on the shoulders of China, which is North Korea’s largest trading partner.

“Only if China doesn't fizzle out after a few months – but continuously enforces the sanctions – will we see any meaningful effect,” he said.

Shin also called upon South Korea to play a leadership role in dealing with North Korea because the United States has only limited interest in solving the nuclear problem, and China, will not change its approach and continue to move according to its own interests.

Shin relayed a similar message in an interview with Maeil Shinmun last December. South Korea must break from its own perception that it is the “balancer” between China and the United States. South Korea, often described as a “shrimp among whales,” should instead strive to play a larger role as a “dolphin,” he said.

Furthermore, Shin told Maeil that the U.S.-Korea relationship and the U.S.-China relationship are very different from each other, and should be viewed as they are. He pointed out that the U.S.-Korea relationship is an alliance where the two countries act accordingly as one body, whereas the China-Korea relationship is a strategic partnership insofar as the two countries cooperate on selective issues of mutual interest.

In a separate interview with the Associated Press, David Straub, associate director of the Korea Program, was asked about the possibility of peace talks with North Korea as an alternative to or parallel with the U.N. sanctions. Straub said “it would not make sense” and that “there is no support for such an approach in Washington” because of the strategic partnership between China and North Korea. He also told Voice of America that the new sanctions will significantly increase the political, diplomatic, and psychological pressures on North Korea's leaders to rethink their pursuit of nuclear weapons.

It was meant to be a sunny summit. Welcoming ASEAN’s leaders at the Sunnylands estate, President Obama said he had invited them to southern California, not cold and snowy Washington, to reciprocate the warm welcomes he had received in their own countries on his seven presidential trips to Southeast Asia. Appreciative laughter ensued.

Naturally Obama ignored the futility implied by the name of the city where Sunnylands sits: Rancho Mirage. But as a metaphor for ASEAN’s hopes of moderating China’s behavior in the South China Sea, and the summit’s efficacy in that regard, the name of the city is more apt than that of the estate. Rancho Mirage lies in the northern tip of the Sonoran Desert. In the driver’s seat on a desert road in the shimmering heat, ASEAN might be fooled into seeing a geopolitical oasis – a meaningful agreement with China on the South China Sea – finally near and achievable with continuing patience and faith in the “ASEAN Way” of regional diplomacy by consensus and declaration.

The Sunnylands Declaration, released on 16 February at the end of the two-day summit, lays out 17 principles to guide US-ASEAN cooperation going forward. The fifth of these reaffirms “respect and support for ASEAN Centrality and ASEAN-led mechanisms in the evolving regional architecture of the Asia-Pacific.”

On the day the declaration was announced, news broke that China had just deployed surface-to-air missile batteries on a land feature in the South China Sea controlled by China but also claimed by Vietnam and Taiwan – Woody Island in the Paracels. So much for the efficacy of the declaration’s eighth principle of “shared commitment” to “non-militarization and self-restraint in the conduct of activities.”

After “activities,” the Sunnyland drafters could not even agree to add “in the South China Sea,” let alone mention China, its encompassing “nine-dash line,” or the dredging, up-building, and runway-laying that Beijing has being doing at a breakneck, unilateral, mind-your-own-business pace on the contested features that it controls. Missile launchers on Woody? Score another point for the “PRC Way” of creating lethal facts while the “ASEAN Way” drafts wishful norms.

To its credit, the summit did convey “shared commitment” to “freedom of navigation and overflight” in and above the South China Sea, and twice endorsed the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea. But those phrases will not soften China’s refusal to allow international rules to restrain its maritime ambitions.

The notion that announcing principles will change behavior is the main mirage that gained false credibility in Rancho Mirage, at least among Southeast Asians who are disposed to value lowest-common-denominator diplomacy. They hope that China will be influenced by ASEAN-propagated norms to moderate its maritime ambition and behavior.

More than a few of Obama’s guests at Sunnylands retain faith in a single should-be, will-be solution: a Code of Conduct, or COC, in the South China Sea. The declaration does not refer to this illusion. But allegiance to such a code was evident in conversations among participants at the summit and in interviews afterwards.

For well over a decade in Southeast Asia and beyond, diplomats have been discussing the need for a – still non-existent – COC. In 2002 China and the ASEAN governments did sign a Document on Conduct of Parties in the South China Sea, or DOC  But its hortatory spirit and provisions were violated almost from the outset by nearly all six claimants – Brunei, China, Malaysia, the Philippines, Taiwan, and Vietnam. China’s placement of missile launchers on Woody Island, cheekily on the eve of the Sunnylands summit, was but the latest nail in the DOC’s coffin.

China and the ASEAN states undertook in the DOC “to exercise self-restraint in the conduct of activities that would complicate or escalate disputes and affect peace and stability” in the South China Sea. China’s leaders could have observed this principle. Instead they chose to bully Manila and Hanoi, respectively, by seizing Scarborough Shoal and stationing a huge oil rig in waters claimed by Vietnam. They chose to harass and expel Southeast Asians from a vast nine-sided fishing zone unilaterally drawn and appropriated for China’s own priority use. They chose to complicate and escalate disputes, damage peace, and cause instability by unilaterally enlarging, outfitting, and militarizing land features under Beijing’s contested control in a manner that dwarfs in scale and lethality the up-building efforts of other claimants.

It is not in China’s expansionist interest to implement a mere declaration, the DOC. Still less attractive in Beijing’s eyes is a code with teeth – a COC whose enforcing mechanism might actually punish violations. To encourage delay, Beijing insists that the DOC must be implemented first, before a COC can be drawn up and signed. To avoid commitment and to maximize the divide et impera asymmetry of separate bilateral talks between China and each Southeast Asian claimant, Beijing calls the discussions with ASEAN “consultations,” not “negotiations.”

In 2004 China did agree with the ASEAN states to establish a Joint Working Group on the Implementation of the DOC. In October 2015 in Chengdu, China, the group met for the 15th time. Afterwards, a Chinese foreign ministry spokeswoman assured listeners that the participants had reaffirmed “their commitment to fully and effectively implementing the DOC” and their readiness “to “work toward the early conclusion of a COC on the basis of consensus” [emphasis added].

In Southeast Asia, views of China’s behavior range from acquiescence (Cambodia, Laos) to antipathy (the Philippines, Vietnam). Manipulating this dissensus helps China ensure that the mirage of a COC remains in sight, motivating ASEAN, but continues to recede, protecting China.

ASEAN’s faith in its own centrality and the validation of that credence in Rancho Mirage reinforce passivity and complacence in Southeast Asia, including the idea that because ASEAN is indispensable, it need not be united, proactive, or original.

Southeast Asian officials and analysts who excuse ASEAN’s inertia argue that the grouping isn’t a government; China’s not that much of a threat; and geography has, after all, put China permanently next door. Coaxing the four Southeast Asian claimants to settle their own overlapping claims, some say, is just too hard to do. Brainstorming alleviations and ameliorations, let alone solutions, for the South China Sea? That’s too daunting as well. Isn’t the problem really a Sino-American struggle for power? Why get involved? Why not prolong the happy combination of American ships for deterrence and Chinese markets for profit? China’s leaders at least say that they want an eventual COC. Why not keep believing in that and them and avoid rocking the boat?

By its actions, China is signaling its intent to dominate some, most, or all of the South China Sea – the heartwater of Southeast Asia. If and when China manages to coopt and cow the ASEAN states into deference and resignation, Beijing will likely “disinvite” the US Navy from accessing what China controls. If this happens, the “Centrality” of ASEAN that was lauded in Rancho Mirage will have merited that city’s name, and China’s centrality will be all too real.

Donald Emmerson is director of the Southeast Asia Program at the Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center and a senior fellow emeritus at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies.

This article was originally carried by YaleGlobal Online on Feb. 23, 2016, and reposted with permission.