Drug Victims’ Remembrance Day Observance Event – Speech by Mr K Shanmugam, Minister for Home Affairs and Minister for Law

My Parliamentary colleagues,

Mr Zainol Adi, Acting Deputy Director, Narcotics Control Bureau (NCB), Brunei Darussalam;

Mr Mohd Wendy, Acting Assistant Director Preventive Drug Education, NCB, Brunei Darussalam;

Mr Tan Chong Huat, Chairman, National Council Against Drug Abuse (NCADA);

My colleagues from the Home Team;

Distinguished guests;

Ladies and gentlemen.

Introduction

1. Today, we mark the very first inaugural Drug Victims Remembrance Day in Singapore.

2. We have decided to set aside the third Friday of May every year, to remind ourselves, to get Singaporeans to better understand, the harms drugs cause, and remember the victims of drugs.

3. You watched some videos earlier – very powerful. Drugs cause harm to children, parents, brothers, sisters. They harm the abuser. They harm the families, the community. All are victims.

4. Last week, in Parliament, I made a major Ministerial Statement. I spoke about the situation in many countries. Serious problems, because of drugs, including in many first-world countries.

5. Our drug policy, the decision to take a tough approach was first set by Mr Lee Kuan Yew and his generation. The laws, the presumptions, the enforcement, and the whole approach was set by him and his team. And we have carried it on. If we get our approach wrong, the violence and the damage that drugs caused in all these other countries, will definitely happen here. We have to stand firm, be on the right path, and we must keep to that.

Consequences of Drug Abuse

6. The facts relating to the damage are unarguable. They are very clear.

7. If you look at the 2021 World Health Organisation (WHO) report, in 2019, there were 600,000 deaths attributable to drug abuse. In other words, every single day, worldwide, 1,400 people died of drug abuse, every day in 2019. In the last year, in the United States alone, every five minutes, one person died from drug overdose.

8. Even then, that doesn’t capture the entire statistics. It does not account for the lives that have been lost from the violence and killings that are linked to the drug trade. One example: in Mexico . Since 2006, 19 years if you include 2006, nearly 450,000 people have been killed. A large number of those killings are linked in some way to the drug trade.

9. In addition to these deaths: In 2021, around 40 million people suffered from drug use disorders. That number has gone up by almost 50% over the past 10 years.

10. What do we know about drug abusers? They will resort to crime to feed their habit. Often to get the next high, they won’t have money, so they have to resort to crime.

11. They lose their sense of right and wrong – they have no choice but to steal, committing crime; they will not meet their work obligations, family obligations; and they will do things that endanger themselves and endanger others.

12. What do drug syndicates do? They feed on these addictions for profit. They want to keep the addicts hooked on drugs.

13. Even as the drug situation is getting worse, unfortunately many countries around the world are taking a more relaxed approach to drugs, including decriminalisation and legalisation. This often is based on a lot of push by drug companies which stand to profit through the lobbying, but also because many countries have lost the war. They are not able to enforce it anymore. And so they say, “What can we do? Let’s go down this route.” And sometimes the misguided approach, I think, to what human rights involve.  So, what happens? Often, the demand for drugs increases. That, in turn, encourages syndicates and traffickers to supply more drugs, causing more harm to society. It is really a vicious cycle that they get into, entire countries.

14. But even against this global background, in Singapore, we have managed to keep our society relatively drug-free, relatively safe.

15. If you look at the CNBC report recently, they pointed out that in 2023, last year, the US had more than 100,000 drug-related deaths, whereas we had 20. But if you normalise it – the US population is much bigger, it has around 330 million or so;  if you normalise it for the relative population size, if we had the same drug situation as the US, we should be having 1,600 people dying. Instead, we only had 20. 20 in my view is too much, but 1,600 in a small place like Singapore – just imagine that.

16. Put another way, our drug policies have saved us, even on that front, more than a thousand lives per year, for some years.

17. Let me give you another example.

18. Last year, CNB seized around S$15 million worth of drugs. In comparison, Hong Kong – often compared with Singapore – seized almost S$760 million worth of drugs, just in the first 11 months.

19. In Hong Kong, the trafficking activities were carried out by syndicates working across borders - more than 8.4 tonnes of drugs were trafficked into Hong Kong.

20. In Singapore, traffickers are careful. They know that we have the capital punishment, serious punishments, so either they don’t traffic, or if they do traffic, they keep the amounts small.

21. In 2022, the Straits Times interviewed an ex-drug trafficker, who described how he used to calculate drug quantities to avoid capital punishment. He said, and I quote, “Let’s say there was no death penalty, we would have brought in a lot more”.

22. There is clear evidence for this.

23. In 2018, my Ministry did research work amongst convicted drug traffickers. It showed clearly that they calculated, they restricted the amounts they trafficked so that they will not face the death penalty.

24. We went further, we conducted research in the region around Singapore, from where many of our drug traffickers come from. And we did a statistically valid, a proper survey, asked them questions - remember these are places from which our drug traffickers, those who have been arrested come from.

(a) 86% of the people who answered the survey said that they believe that the death penalty makes people not want to commit serious crimes in Singapore.

(b) 87% believed that the death penalty makes people not want to traffic substantial amounts of drugs into Singapore.

(c) 83% believed – even if you lock them up forever, life imprisonment – the death penalty is more effective as a deterrent . Because if you have the death penalty, I’m more scared, I’m more worried. I won’t want to do it.

25. So, the death penalty clearly is a much greater deterrent, and it helps restrict the supply of drugs in Singapore.

Increasingly Liberal Attitudes of Youths; Drug Abuse Starting Younger

26. But everything I said doesn’t mean we don’t face challenges. We face a lot of challenges. Young people today have many sources of information, that drugs are glamorous – online, films, entertainment industry.

27. Last year, we saw an 18% increase in the number of new drug abusers arrested. More than half (51%) were under the age of 30.

28. We pick up teenagers and young adults, with a full and bright future ahead of them, but now potentially risk a lifetime of drug addiction, unless they manage to kick the habit.

29. We have to try our best to stop and reverse this trend.

Significance of Remembrance Day

30. Part of building a drug-free culture; part of getting the message across to Singaporeans; part of getting everybody to understand, is this Remembrance Day. It is one of our key initiatives that we are launching this year.

31. It reflects our determination to show the harms caused by drugs and bring it to the forefront of the consciousness of our people in Singapore.

32. It is also a key way of bringing across the message that drug abuse is not victimless. There are a lot of victims and many of them are truly innocent.

33. When activists campaign for a trafficker, who calculated and brought drugs into Singapore in order to make money, does your sympathy go towards him? Or does it go towards that little girl that you saw (in the video)? That ‘little girl’ depiction is not untrue. It is very reflective, unfortunately. But worse things happen, and I will come to one or two cases later. But who are the victims?

34. First , the abusers  themselves are victims. Their physical and mental health will suffer as a result of addiction.

35. Second , their families and loved ones also suffer, silently and invisibly. They have to care for the abuser and at times have to care for the children and dependents who are neglected by the abuser. They also shoulder the emotional, financial, and physical fallout as a result of a drug addiction of a member of the family.

36. Third , the rest of the community  also suffers. They could be the target of crimes because people need to commit crimes to feed their habit; they could be the target of violence that drug abusers often exhibit when they are under the influence of drugs. Even if you don’t come into contact (with drug abusers), you are also a victim because drug abusers and drug abuse increase healthcare costs, and everybody pays for that.

37. At the same time, we also want through today, to remember those who have overcome drug abuse, and the struggles that they faced to overcome their addiction.

38. I quoted a number of examples in Parliament. One such example is Hannah Chun. Hannah was first caught for drug abuse when she was 17 years old. She relapsed several times and even gave birth to her son while she was in prison. But in 2009, when she came out (of prison), she decided to kick the habit, and she has remained drug free since then.

39. She gives back - , and she volunteers with the Singapore Prison Service as a befriender. She also leads the Women’s Prison Ministry at her church, ministering to inmates and ex-offenders.

40. We would like to thank Hannah, and many other ‘Hannahs', for championing the anti-drug cause and showing that overcoming drug abuse is possible.

Remembrance Day Campaign Details

41. I will now say a little bit more about this Campaign. It began two weeks ago, it will last for two more months.

42. Leading up to today, members of the Inter-Ministry Committee (IMC) on Drug Prevention for Youths have organised several activities.

43. The Members of Parliament and office-holders that you see in the front are members of the IMC, which I chair.

44. I would like to thank the Ministry of Education (MOE) for organising school assembly programmes and lessons for our students. Teachers screen the campaign films that all of us watched earlier, and get the students to reflect on what they have watched.

45. Engaging students is a top priority, so that they understand the harms of drugs, and don’t get swept away by what they see online.

46. I would also like to thank the Ministries in the IMC -  the Institutes of Higher Learning, MOE in particular; People’s Association, who have allowed use of community spaces; MINDEF, for hosting many exhibitions in their community spaces. All of these were done prior to today’s exhibition.

47. After this weekend, a smaller scale version of this main exhibition will be brought to eight different locations around Singapore over the next eight weeks. The aim is to reach out to many more Singaporeans.

What the Exhibition will Showcase

48. In the exhibition, we will see stories shared by families whose loved ones have been brought up with drugs.

49. These stories are extracted from a book launched by the Singapore Prison Service, titled ‘Waiting For You’.

50. These are real, unfiltered stories, that show the harms which drugs caused. In one story, titled ‘My Absent Father’, the victim described how her father, who was addicted to drugs, had abused her physically. She said, and I quote, “although the physical pain of his abuse has left me, the emotional pain continues to live in my memory”. Despite this, she still speaks of how much she longed for her father’s love, and her hope that he would return drug-free so that they can share a happy future together.

51. This is just one story.

52. There are many others – vivid, heartbreaking accounts showing how everyone suffers.

53. Just as importantly, this exhibition will also tell the stories of those who cannot speak for themselves. These are victims who have lost their lives because others have abused drugs.

54. We want to give a voice to all these victims.

Some of you may know or read about Nonoi. In 2006, the two-year-old girl died because her stepfather, who was addicted to cannabis, dunked her repeatedly into a pail of water to stop her from crying. She was only two years old, helpless and  defenceless, against her stepfather. She died from the incident. Unfortunately, she was also found with injuries that suggested that she had been sexually assaulted by the very people she relies on to protect her.

55. Another example – in 2019, a 24-year-old man killed his 56-year-old mother, Madam Lee, and his 90-year-old grandmother, Madam See, after taking LSD. He said he took LSD out of curiosity to experience the sensory changes. He turned violent and killed both of them.

56. Two innocent lives lost, just like that.

57. Last year, a 31-year-old man crashed his rental car into the side of a public bus.

58. He was under the influence of Ecstasy, Meth, and amphetamine, which affected his ability to drive safely.

59. He died, but seven innocent passengers in the bus were injured.

60. I am just giving you three incidents. Thankfully, in Singapore, these incidents are limited in number. As I have said, 20 people have died, of course, many more are victims. But relative to other countries, it is a small number.

61. We want these victims to be remembered, rather than just arguing on behalf of drug traffickers, who are the cause of the problems, who are out to make money from these killings and deaths.

Conclusion

62. I am going to ask all of you to join me in lighting a candle, and observing a moment of silence, to remember all the victims who have suffered.

63. Thank you.