Interesting that two very different national legal policies have such similar outcomes among Asians.
Phillipines has experimented with allowing anyone to murder anyone else they suspect of using drugs. That hasn’t significantly decreased the rate of illegal drug use in the country. This is despite making payments to people to summarily execute drug addicts. Thousands have been executed across the Phillipines. I can’t find any evidence that drug use in the Philippines has decreased in the past 5 years.
Care to wager on the fraction of US users of illegal drugs?
https://www.fmprc.gov.cn/mfa_eng/wjbxw/202302/t20230209_1102...
> In 2021, findings by NCDAS show about 19.4 percent of Americans have used illegal substances at least once. Out of the 280 million aged 12 and older, 31.9 million are drug users, with 11.7 percent on illegal substances and 19.4 percent either having consumed illicit drugs or misused prescription drugs in 2020. If alcohol and tobacco users are included, the number of people in the United States who are abusing substances totals 165 million.
> During the past 12 months, 48.2 million Americans over the age of 18 consumed cannabis at least once.
> During the past 12 months, 10.1 million Americans have consumed opium at least once.
Opium is at 3.3% by your number, which is comparable to the numbers I showed on Thailand.
We can both cherry pick data but USA has tried prohibition of various substances for over 100 years. Prohibition by itself caused more problems than it solved.
But I can understand people wanting strong government action, especially in Mindanao which has two different insurgencies (Islamic and Communist) to contend with besides drug gangs. One of my relatives had a work trip (she worked for the national government) to rural Mindanao and they sent her by military helicopter with a squad of soldiers for protection.
On the other hand, countries like the Netherlands and Portugal figured out a way for drug users to not die. That's probably the first thing you should fix: how to help people to not die when using drugs. Educate your population about it, most Dutch people I know are very aware of drugs; their effects, risks, etc.
The cat's out of the box, there's only one level of repression that could have a chance to work on stopping the flow of drugs: maximum repression by the government, maximum shame by the population, is that really what you want? I don't believe that's a solution if you are already in a free society...
China learned this lesson during the opium wars, too. They couldn't stop the flow of opium because it would have been terribly unpopular with the people. The script has been flipped with Fentanyl (and to a lesser extent, TikTok).
It remains to be seen whether we actually care about the drugs, though. Simply ignoring their presence may be a legitimate strategy.