The 46th ASEAN Senior Officials Meeting on Drug Matters (ASOD) Opening Ceremony – Speech by Mr K Shanmugam, Coordinating Minister for National Security and Minister for Home Affairs

Heads of Delegation,

ASEAN Secretariat,

Distinguished Guests,

1. A very good morning to all of you.

2. We warmly welcome you to the 46th ASEAN Senior Officials Meeting on Drug Matters (ASOD).

3. We look at ASOD as an important platform to coordinate our efforts across ASEAN, and really to reaffirm our commitment to work towards a drug-free ASEAN.

Global and Regional Drug Situation

4. If you look around the world, the global situation on drugs continues to worsen.

5. You see the 2025 World Drug Report – it says in 2023, more than 300 million people abused a drug. That was an increase of 8% from the previous year, 2022.

6. The European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction, basically says that drugs are found “everywhere”. In 2023, Cocaine seizures hit a record high for a seventh straight year. Seizures of amphetamine-type stimulants, like methamphetamine, also reached a record high in 2023.

Devastation Brought by Drugs

7. And what are the consequences? You see them again, plainly in front of your eyes.

8. In June 2024, a World Health Organisation (WHO) report found that 600,000 people die annually because of drugs. That is more than one person dying every single minute during the year.

9. In Australia, in the 20 years from 2002 to 2022, deaths due to drugs – drug-related, have doubled .

10. In 2023, England and Wales, they recorded the highest level of drug-related deaths, which was an increase of 11% from 2022.

11. In the US, between 2020 and 2024, about 500,000 Americans have died due to drug overdose.

12. They also affect public safety, because there is a close nexus between drugs and crime – all sorts of crime, from petty crime to very serious crime, including homicides.

13. In Mexico, there have been 460,000 drug-related homicides from about 2006, in the last twenty years.

14. In May 2025, seven young persons were shot dead at a festival in a church – it looked like a gang dispute related to drugs and territory.

15. In Ecuador, January of this year, you had 781 murders – it was considered the “deadliest month” and many were related to the drug trade.

16. In the UK, from 2014 to 2023, in 10 years, the number of fatal collisions where a driver was under the influence or affected by drugs was a contributory factor, increased by 164% .

17. In many cases, the victims are children.

18. In Europe, for example – it was reported that gangs are hiring adolescents, to spot the police, adolescents to be drug dealers, and children killing one another with Kalashnikovs.

19. You may have also seen the very shocking video of an incident in Moscow airport, where a man picked up an 18-month-old toddler and flung the child to the ground. The man was reportedly under the influence of drugs. The toddler went into a coma after the attack.

Singapore's Approach to Drug Control

20. We are an international hub for business, for transportation. Therefore, we are very easy transit point as well as an import market, because people in Singapore can afford to pay for drugs.

21. Last year, CNB seized about nearly S$16 million worth of drugs.

22. Just last month, five women were arrested at the Changi Airport transit area for suspected drug trafficking. Cocaine and cannabis were found in their luggage.

23. We take a very tough line because we see it as our primary duty to protect Singaporeans. Over the last 20, 25 years, with the changes in our laws and enforcement approach, we would say this is a fight that has never launched, but we would say we are broadly keeping it under control.

24. When you walk around Singapore you won’t find shops selling openly, you won’t find people openly under the influence of drugs, you won’t find drugs being pedalled in schools, and traffickers know that if they get caught – and there’s a high likelihood that they will get caught – they will be facing the capital punishment. We impose it, and we execute people, and we explain why.

25. There are groups going around who seek to romanticise and play up the stories of traffickers – many of them come from the region. But our surveys also show that many people around the region know and understand that Singapore’s laws are tough, and therefore they shouldn’t traffic in Singapore. And that curtails the flow of drugs in Singapore.

26. The phrase ‘harm reduction’ has been very much invoked in many countries, particularly the West, for some time. Essentially, when law enforcement is weak, when drug traffickers and drug kingpins control parts of the system, and drugs are freely available, even if you open up for a short period, a year, two years, three years, what happens is it becomes prevalent. Once it’s prevalent, it’s very difficult to go back, because people are invested into it.

27. And so when the countries lost the fight against drugs, and in order to fight drugs, because it’s so profitable, you really need a first notch enforcement system, and the legal system and Courts, and you need to see it through all the way. If there is a softening of the will, drugs will quickly take root, as they have in many countries in the West. And once they have done, then you say, I cannot fight this anymore, and therefore I go towards harm reduction.

28. So they try to make the use of drugs safer, and this has been propounded to us, expanded to us many times by others – why don’t you go for harm reduction like country ABC? They’re all successful in harm reduction. And we said, well there’s no such thing as harm reduction working effectively.

29. Yesterday, there was an article in the New York Times. It is reported that now many cities in the US are moving away from ‘harm reduction’ because they see that it doesn’t reduce harm, just more people getting hooked on drugs.

30. There are cities run by Democrats, and there are also cities run by Republicans. So in San Francisco, Philadelphia, people are getting fed up with the homelessness, drugs on the streets, it’s unsafe for women, unsafe for children – you can’t walk around. And then you see Republican states, West Virginia, and Nebraska. Essentially, now – I mean it’s logical, we could have said this to them – but now they say, “Oh, when you go for harm reduction, it normalises drug abuse.” Of course it does – because they are telling people it’s ok.

31. And now they are finding this approach has not reduced the harm that drug abuse causes to other residents, including crime, the littering of needles, children playing with it, transmission of diseases.

32. So ours is not harm reduction, it is harm prevention. It is evidence-based, and we deal with supply and demand.

33. As I said, we distinguish between abusers and traffickers. Abusers are people who need help. They get treatment, they get rehabilitation. But we are very tough on drug traffickers. It is a cynical crime because people profit drugs enough to make money, and they want to profit from the misery of other people, and such traffickers don’t deserve any mercy.

34. Our approach has worked well for us, so far.

35. It has kept the drug problem under control, drug syndicates do not establish themselves in Singapore.

36. As a result, you see us consistently being cited as one of the safest places in the world, for people to live in, for children, for women, for everyone.

37. There is very strong public support.

38. Two years ago, a survey done by the National Council Against Drug Abuse (NCADA) found that 91% - more than 9 in 10 of Singaporeans supported Singapore’s drug-free approach. 87% agreed that our drug laws are effective in keeping us relatively drug-free.

39. People in the region also believe that our approach is working.

40. In 2024, last year, MHA conducted a survey of 12,000 residents in six major regional cities.

41. The survey found that more than 80% of those in the region who were surveyed felt safe to come to Singapore. They felt that Singapore’s strict laws have been effective in preventing crime. More than 84% believed that the death penalty deters people from trafficking drugs into Singapore.

42. In addition to domestic efforts in Singapore, I would say, what goes to Singapore goes to all of you. It’s the same, because you can see the evidence from the West. You can see the evidence from many other countries. Drugs are bad. They destroy societies, and we as ASEAN need to come together.

43. And I would say they are very worrying statistics. I shared it with the senior officials a few minutes ago. If you look at East Asia, China, with a population of 1.3 billion, Japan, nearly 100 million, South Korea, 60 million. And then if you look at ASEAN as a whole, our population is about 600 million, much less, but in terms of say, some aspects of synthetic drugs like meth and so on, 94% of the drug seized are from Southeast Asia, and 6% are from East Asia. That’s just for us, and from, and what is being seized must be a small part of what is out there. So 220 tons seized in Southeast Asia, and about 14 tons in East Asia.

44. That’s not because their law enforcement is weak; Japan, China, Hong Kong – their law enforcement is strong. So what does it do? It affects our people. ASEAN has been a wonderful place, but if we don’t take control of the situation and do something in 10 to 15 years, we will see a very different aspect of our children, our neighbours, and ASEAN as a whole.

45. Singapore will continue to keep its policies. But we think you know, if we want to do something for ASEAN, we have to take strong steps right now. The urgency is now, we cannot afford to lose this fight, because the syndicates exploit every possible legal recourse, every border that is porous, every weak link to peddle drugs to our people.

46. To give you a scale of the challenge: last year, CNB conducted more than 1,000 operations at our checkpoints to check on drug trafficking.

47. That helped us dismantle more than 25 syndicates operating in the region.

48. But this has to be a fraction of what is actually out there.

49. So to contribute to capacity building, outside of Singapore, internationally, we organise an annual Singapore Drug Control Programme .

50. Its first run was in 2022, close to 80 senior officials from 36 countries have attended our Programme.

51. We have also proposed a joint ASEAN statement to be delivered next year, at the 69th Commission on Narcotic Drugs (CND).

52. The statement will reaffirm our commitment towards a drug-free ASEAN; it will express our concern about increasingly permissive attitudes towards drugs.

Drugs Victim Remembrance Day

53. Second, Singapore has also proposed that there be an ASEAN Drug Victims Remembrance Day on 26 June every year, which is also the International Day against Drug Abuse and Illicit Trafficking.

54. We have been holding a Drugs Victims Remembrance Day on the third Friday of May every year. The reason is this: whenever we are about to execute the drug trafficker, you will get a lot of publicity from activists who talk about the person’s family, the fact that the person is going to lose his life. So we simply want to focus also on the victims. For every one trafficker, there are possibly hundreds of victims, and some as young as 3, 4, 5, killed by their own parents or step parents, frequently. Some are sold for money so that the parents can take the money to buy drugs. Rapes, house breakings, thefts, serious crimes – there are people being killed, homicides, traffic accidents. Everyone is a drug victim of trafficker.

55. So we said, let’s remember the victim. Let’s light candles for them from every country, and we have an immersive experience for people to walk through the exhibition and understand how drugs actually impact on people’s day to day events. It’s been very successful – the two editions, and we are hoping that this can be rolled out across ASEAN. Singapore will offer to host the first one, and we bring across, bring together, exhibits from all the different countries, and we put it up, and eventually we hope that it will take place across our partners in ASEAN.

56. We need to bring up public consciousness in a way that people can understand now.

Conclusion

57. The fight against drugs has to transcend borders, because the drug trade transcends borders.

58. Platforms like ASOD allow us to exchange perspectives, shape the ideas, and really strengthen regional cooperation in this very serious fight.

59. So I hope that you will have good discussions over the next few days, today included and I hope that as a result, our position in ASEAN improves.

60. Thank you very much.