Will Politicians And Religious Leaders Ever Talk About The Drug Problem

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I watched a documentary recently about the problem of drug addiction among the fishermen on the east coast of Peninsular Malaysia.
I grew up in a fishing community in Penang in the ‘60s. Most fishermen fished just offshore from small boats, before “industrialised” fishery appeared in the form of big trawlers with cold rooms that went out to sea for days.
Suddenly, any able-bodied man could become a trawler crewman and earn good money. A young man barely out of his teens could already earn more than his father.
Then factories started opening up in Penang and young women, too, found jobs and steady incomes, though they were rather derogatorily called “Minah Karan”. As humble as the job of a deckhand or a factory worker might be, it was far better than what most of their parents had.
Money to spend
But bad things came a-visiting too. Drug problems exploded among the young men, especially now that they had money to spend.
The old drug problem with ganja (marijuana), supposedly brought across from Sumatra, had escalated to the hard stuff of heroin imported from Thailand.
Penang was then also a popular haven for backpackers, if not actual hippies, for whom drugs were often part of the lifestyle. That didn’t help.
Many in our community became victims of drugs. We all knew of people, friends as well as family, who had their lives broken or even prematurely ended by drugs.
It’s been decades since I left my kampung. Drugs became a remote problem I didn’t have to deal with. The closest was when I got involved in my employers’ HIV/AIDS initiatives many years ago, when we skirted the edges of the dark world of life-destroying drugs and viruses.
But I always got to go back home and turn my back to the unpleasantness I saw. But for the poor souls left behind, however, the clock continued ticking, and it was attached to a time bomb.
Forgotten victims
The particular documentary that I watched was focused on Dungun, Terengganu, where fishing is a big industry, but also where drugs is a big problem – a story that is replicated in many other fishing communities elsewhere.
Drugs aren’t a problem that affects merely the homeless and petty criminals. Many addicts are husbands and fathers who’ve been addicted for decades and who watched many of their friends succumb to it.
It’s jarring to be reminded that in spite of today’s prosperity, there are many in the underbelly of society who live and often die of drugs or other afflictions, such as crime and AIDS.
The tragedy hits the womenfolk hardest. Many have had to bear the burden of bringing up their families alone or without much help from their addicted husbands or sons, and often even having to care for them as well.
There are affluent addicts in cities, too. A few died recently from an overdose at a musical concert in Kuala Lumpur. There is an even more widespread drug problem among the poorer of the city’s residents.
Clueless and uncaring
There’s the criminal aspect of drugs, but that’s just part of a bigger social issue. Nobody seems to have a handle on how to fix it, whether the local government of Dungun or the mighty government of the far-off USA with their own runaway opioid crisis.
We certainly need to take the pushers and dealers off the streets and jetties and concert halls. Unfortunately, apart from some overworked NGOs and government agencies, this scourge of our society isn’t getting much attention from those who really run the country, the politicians.
Terengganu is a vastly Malay-Muslim majority state, with enough resources from oil royalties to get a lot of things done. It’s controlled by the strict, almost puritanical Islamic conservatives, and has been so for decades.
But you don’t hear much about such tragedies from our Malay-Muslim political or religious leaders there. Though I somehow doubt I’d like it much if they did talk about it either. It’ll just be the usual victim-shaming and hysterical whines about the people of other races trying to destroy the Malays.
Political problem
Here’s why we don’t hear much about it – because the drug problem is hard, almost intractable, without any easy answers or opportunities for politicians to even pretend to have a solution.
Another reason is the smug feeling amongst the many sitting comfortably in their own homes that these addicts are bad and/or misguided people who keep making bad life choices, therefore deserving whatever misery that befalls them.
What exactly am I asking for? Not solutions – I doubt if there’s any that can be guaranteed to eliminate this problem totally. But I do ask that this matter gets on the agenda of our political and religious leaders, so we can have some honest discussions and some rational solutions tried out.
I don’t see that. Our political and religious leaders know real power comes from scaring people into thinking only they can protect our race and religion from nefarious people trying to convert us or destroy us or feed us non-halal stuff.
Inconvenient truth
Real power nowadays doesn’t come from pointing out how our society is being destroyed by this disease from within. That’s too inconvenient, too jarring and risks waking up too many of the rakyat into asking tough questions for which there are no easy answers.
This story hits close to home. Not only did I grow up in a similar fishing community, but for a while I, too, was a fisherman. Fishing was and will always be a hard life. Money is uncertain and occasionally people don’t come back from the sea.
Add in the many social issues of modern life and it’s understandable how many in the fishing community can fall for the temptation of drugs.
However, it’s less understandable why so many of our self-appointed saviours and defenders are ignoring this blight. - FMT
The views expressed are those of the writer and do not necessarily reflect those of MMKtT.

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