COOPERATION IN DRUG MATTERS

High on the agenda of the 16th ASOD Meeting held in Manila from 4 to 8 October 1993 was the consideration of the proposed ASEAN Three Year Plan of Action on Drug Abuse Control. The Plan is intended to guide ASEAN cooperation in the priority areas of preventive drug education, treatment and rehabilitation, law enforcement and research. The Meeting discussed an annotated outline of the Plan and requested the ASEAN Secretariat to seek funding for a consultant to prepare the Plan.

With funding from the United Nations Development Programme, the ASEAN Secretariat commissioned a consultant to develop a draft Plan for the consideration of ASOD. After endorsement by the 17th ASOD Meeting scheduled in October 1994 in Singapore, the Plan will be incorporated into the ASEAN 3-Year Plan of Cooperation for submission to the appropriate ASEAN bodies.

The Plan spells out the objectives for each priority area and the strategic thrusts to guide ASOD's programmes and activities. In line with the Fourth Summit declaration that "ASEAN shall intensify its cooperation in overcoming the serious problem of drug abuse and illicit trafficking at the national. regional and international levels", ASOD agreed that the Plan should continue to intensify working relationships between ASOD and third countries or international organizations and also facilitate the early ratification of all relevant United Nations Conventions governing the control of drugs.

During the period under review, three projects have obtained funding for implementation in 1994. The projects are intended to improve ASEAN's ability to effectively manage drug demand reduction programmes involving prevention, treatment and rehabilitation. Following the visit of an EC technical mission to ASEAN Member Countries, Laos, Vietnam and Sri Lanka in January 1993 to evaluate the feasibility of three ASEAN projects submitted to the EC for funding consideration, the EC agreed in August 1993 to fund two components of the project ASEAN Three-Year Plan of Action on Preventive Education (namely, Strengthening Preventive Drug Information Programmes and Parent-Youth Movements Against Drug Abuse) and the project ASEAN Training Courses for Drug Rehabilitation Professionals.

ASOD will explore other sources to fund the ASEAN Narcotics Law Enforcement Personnel Development Project, which contains a number of training modules on the management of intelligence gathering, money laundering, forfeiture of assets and undercover investigation.

Through the project Strengthening Preventive Drug Information Programmes, ASEAN hopes to improve the region's capacity for initiating, implementing and evaluating mass media (including traditional media) campaigns to promote awareness of drug abuse. A series of surveys and seminar workshops will be organized to produce country media action plans, multi-media prototype models as well as media guidelines for improving preventive drug education campaigns. Finally, the information dissemination strategies developed will be evaluated for effectiveness. This project will be coordinated by the Dangerous Drugs Board of the Philippines with the assistance of the ASEAN Training Center for Preventive Drug Education based at the University of the Philippines.

The project Parent-Youth Movement against Drug Abuse, which is also coordinated by the Philippines, will organize parent/youth movements for the purpose of initiating community prevention campaigns against drug abuse, promote voluntary efforts and organize workshops for training youth and parents in counseling and parenting skills. The project will also establish parent-youth support groups to assist with counseling and crisis intervention.

The third project, ASEAN Training Course for Drug Rehabilitation Professionals, is coordinated by the Anti-Narcotics Task Force of Malaysia. The project addresses the need in the region for training programmes to upgrade the skills of professional drug abuse counselors particularly in the areas of relapse prevention and aftercare programming. Courses will cover topics such as group counseling, psychological. assessments, the addiction process, prevention of relapse, management of aftercare services and data collection and assessment. Trainers will be invited from ASEAN and the EC.

In the area of supply reduction, ASEAN-EC cooperation on drug matters was also extended to the control of drug precursors in the past year. As a follow-up to a seminar held in Europe in April 1993 to familiarize ASEAN participants on the EC's experience with drug precursor control, and as agreed by the 16th ASOD Meeting, an ad hoc ASEAN-EU Meeting on Drug Precursors was convened in Yogyakarta, Indonesia, in January 1994 to discuss an EC proposed draft agreement on precursor control. The Meeting agreed that international cooperation in the control of drug precursors was an important strategy in the fight against the illicit trafficking of drugs but that the nature and form of a proposed agreement, if any, should be negotiated on a bilateral basis.

To further institutionalize ASEAN-EU collaboration on drugs control, the EC, at the 11 th Meeting of the ASEAN-EU Joint Cooperation Committee (JCC) Meeting in Davao City, Philippines, from 21 to 22 January 1994, proposed the setting up of a Sub-Committee on Narcotics, which will meet yearly before the JCC to coordinate collaborative drug control activities.

In an effort to intensify cooperation on drug control at the regional and international levels, ASOD invited observers from Laos, Vietnam and Papua New Guinea to its 16th Meeting held in Manila in October 1993. The 16th ASOD Meeting and the 27th ASC agreed that Laos and Vietnam would be invited to participate in three EC funded projects, namely:

Strengthening Preventive Drug Information Programmes;
Parent Youth Movement Against Drug Abuse; and
ASEAN Training Courses for Drug Rehabilitation Programmes. In April 1994, the Philippines, as coordinator of the first two projects, despatched a project team to Laos and Vietnam to meet with relevant drug control officials and to facilitate implementation arrangements.