Shock tactics
By JASON SZEPSingapore has launched a month-long media blitz that depicts the ugly side of designer drugs, JASON SZEP writes.
HIS baggy pants stained by urine, eyes shut, arms limp, legs wide open, the young Singaporean man lies passed out on a couch in a nightclub. He is, literally, the poster-boy for a new generation of abusers of synthetic “club drugs” in a country known for aggressively enforcing some of the world’s toughest drug laws.
The man’s image is appearing at Singapore’s famously tidy bus stops and subway stations in framed glossy posters and in popular magazines. In another poster, an even younger man is nearly passed out in his own vomit next to a urinal.
The shock advertisements are part of an anti-drugs campaign that reflects official unease at the growing use of “ketamine”, a hallucinogenic anaesthetic, following a major policy shift last year that introduced 24-hour partying to conservative Singapore.
It also comes after a year in which synthetic “club drugs” overtook heroin as the drug of choice.
 |
A poster targeting abuses of synthetic 'club drugs' depicting a man who wets himself while under the influence of drugs. |
In addition to harsh laws that include mandatory death for anyone aged 18 or over caught trafficking more than 250g of methamphetamines, Singapore aims to show that the drugs can be, among other things, just plain embarrassing.
The new campaign, broadcast on radio and TV and given wide play in magazines from last month, aims to portray ketamine users as dysfunctional social outcasts, their clothing blotted by vomit and urine after taking the drug, their mental agility blunted.
“It focuses on how stupid and embarrassing a ketamine abuser can be under the influence of the drug,” said Lim Hock San, chairman of the National Council of Drug Abuse. Young Singaporeans, he said, “need to stay drug-free or risk losing their social credibility”.
State media campaigns have moulded life in orderly Singapore since its independence in 1965, exhorting citizens to improve their lot in nearly every aspect of living – from staying hygienic to speaking better English and even smiling more.
Officials stress that drug use is well under control in the country of four million people. Drug arrests fell 47% in 2003, largely reflecting a 75% tumble in heroin arrests, recent Central Narcotics Bureau data show.
But, like elsewhere in South-East Asia, concern over synthetic drugs is on the rise. The UN-funded International Narcotics Control Board (INCB) says that about two-thirds of the world’s methamphetamine seizures take place in East and South-East Asia.
The pills are often manufactured in China, Myanmar or the Philippines, according to the INCB, and are integral to all-night parties at many of South-East Asia’s hundreds of clubs catering to young crowds drawn by furiously fast techno music.
In Singapore, ecstasy, ketamine and methamphetamine abusers accounted for 54% of total drug arrests in 2003, with the number of ketamine arrests nearly doubling to 497 from 252 in 2002 – a dramatic rise from just 14 in 1999.
The rise came in a year in which Singapore relaxed rules on nightspots to allow 24-hour partying in an attempt to shatter its traditionally conservative image. Many of Singapore’s ketamine users, however, were rounded up in raids on karaoke lounges.
The new media offensive, targeting males aged 15-30, has already sown controversy. Elderly Singaporeans were offended by a TV advertisement that draws parallels between a young man on ketamine and an absent-minded 80-year-old women suffering from memory loss.
“Demeaning advertisements such as this undermine the dignity of ageing,” Loh Boon Seah wrote in a letter to the Straits Times.
Lim, the council’s chairman, said the intention was never to demean anyone and the thrust was to illustrate the harmful effects of ketamine – memory loss, coordination deficiency and lack of bladder control.
The one-month campaign is backed by Singapore’s strictly enforced anti-drug laws that include mandatory death for anyone caught with more than 15g of heroin or 500g of marijuana. – Reuters
RSS
