The importance of context and detail in pharmaceutical reporting

I was thinking of writing, change of state You’ve been sending out newsletters for so long, only to end up postponing them for one reason or another. But that doesn’t mean we’ve forgotten about this newsletter or the topic of drugs and drug policy.

I’m reading a book: I finished reading a book about drug dealing, so I’m going to write about it Mekong river review. I don’t know if this review will end up in the magazine, but either way, I’ll find a way to share it: change of state After finishing your preperations.I’m also reading In the Kingdom of Hungry Ghosts: An Encounter with Addiction Written by Gabor Mate. This will also be reviewed in this newsletter. You need to stop being distracted by Chinese web novels, webtoons, Korean dramas, audio dramas, one-pot rice cooker recipes, Spotify playlists, and whatever else you’ve been obsessing about on and off in the past and start working on it. there is. Several months. 😅

I also try to keep up with drug-related news. In Singapore, there is a now familiar narrative framed in terms of crime and punishment. In December last year, a Singaporean man who cultivated cannabis plants at his home and imported edibles from the UK was given five blows with a cane and sentenced to five years and four months in prison. This is the first time he has been convicted of importing cannabis edibles. He had previously pleaded guilty to importing drugs, consuming drugs and possessing drug paraphernalia (a glass bong), but a fourth charge of growing cannabis in his apartment was also taken into consideration.

This month, the Central Narcotics Bureau announced the number of people arrested for drug use (we decline to use the derogatory term ‘drug abusers’, but we will write more about this in a future newsletter). ) reported a 10% increase in 2023 compared to the previous year. Previous year. 27% of them were under 30 years old. The number of true youth (under 20 years old) arrested for drug use also increased by 13%. The youngest person arrested last year was just 14 years old. (This month, CNB also arrested two girls, a 14-year-old girl and a 13-year-old girl, who were using methamphetamine.)

Approximately 30% of those arrested are considered “new” drug users by the CNB, meaning they have not been arrested before. This means that approximately 70% of those arrested have actually been arrested and placed in the system before, but later relapse and return to drug use. The most common drugs arrested were methamphetamine, heroin, and marijuana.

Such news reports provide data, but are often missing important context and details. These encourage us to think of drugs as crimes while ignoring the many human experiences behind the arrests and convictions. Drug use manifests itself as an aggressive and moral failure, and no one should ask any more questions about what exactly harm has been caused, or whether one’s response is proportionate and effective. Not encouraged.

For example, consider a man sent to prison for ordering groceries or owning a bong. What harm has been done here? Who has he hurt? He planned to sell some of his edibles to his friends. What harm could be caused by its use, and who would it be sold to? Perhaps the argument would be that he and his friends are harming themselves, but if we From the information we have so far, it is not clear to me what effect this amount of cannabis consumption had or could have had on their bodies and health—but we Many of us are doing things that are not good for us (*oh, smokers *oh*). At the end of the day, people have agency over their health and what they want to do with their bodies. And if they’re not harming others — and by that I mean direct, clearly demonstrable harm, then there’s a vague “if we don’t arrest him and stop him in his tracks.” It’s not a hypothetical scenario of ‘imagine what would happen’ – so why do we do it? Is incarceration (and all the trauma that comes with it) ruining your life? What harm is caused by the punishment we are receiving?

What about the other people behind the statistics? All of them have been demonized by the CNB as “drug abusers,” but what are their stories? What is the reason for this? How will their arrest affect their lives in the future?And this is a very basic question that these drug arrest reports will never answer, but how many of them are drug arrestees? It’s actually an addiction What about the substance they were arrested for? The discriminatory term “drug abuser” does not differentiate between daily/recreational use, frequent but controlled use, high-risk use or addiction. The state-sanctioned narrative that we are usually presented with in Singapore does not acknowledge the existence of various drug uses.

The information presented in CNB’s arrest and seizure reports, even data points, is of limited usefulness because there is so much we don’t know. Statistics on the number of arrests and the total weight of drugs seized only reflect law enforcement activities, not the actual situation of drugs, drug use and addiction in Singapore. The CNB says it seized 82.9kg in 2023, more than the previous year, but what does this actually mean in terms of the overall illegal drug market in Singapore? It was 82.9kg all Will there be heroin floating in Singapore in 2023? Probably not…I mean, was it 90%? 70%? 20%? Did the seizures have a major impact on heroin supply? We can’t tell from this statistic alone. The same goes for when the CNB says it has “dismantled” 25 drug organizations – how do they define “drug organizations”? How many people need to be involved to become a “syndicate”? What does this number mean in comparison to the total number of drug organizations in the city? Because we can know that too Shall we? Considering that law enforcement agencies seem to dismantle a steady number of 20 or more drug organizations each year, this means that the same people are coming together to regroup or create new organizations. Does that mean there are that many organizations to eradicate each year? These are all questions for which we don’t have clear answers. Without these questions, the data we investigated would be useless, at least not with publicly available data. do have not been particularly helpful in providing information about the scale and scope of drug use and drug trafficking in Singapore.

According to the Ministry of Home Affairs’ budget, the estimated development expenditure for 2024 is S$11,555,600, bringing the total expenditure to S$201,953,000. (You can read his full 2024 spending estimates for the Home Office here.) Looking more broadly at state spending that could be related to the drug war, one wonders if the numbers would be even higher. Masu. People arrested for drug-related offenses will also be sent to prison, which will be covered by the Budget’s Offender Management and Rehabilitation Programme, which is also part of Yellow Ribbon Singapore’s work. That’s what it means. It costs a lot of money to tackle problems that we don’t have a clear picture of. This is because (1) many of the problems have been pushed underground through criminalization, and (2) the stories we tell ourselves don’t encourage us to think of drug users as drug users. More than a criminal.