Experts wary of junta's policy shift on drug offenders

Paiboon considers the current policy of segregating or labelling major drug dealers, retailers and drug abusers according to the number of ya ba pills in their possession to be inappropriate. The people who are usually captured with large amounts of drugs in their possession are usually the “drug workers”, he said, not the major dealers.
Paiboon said the circumstances of the conviction and money transactions should carry more weight in separating the big fish from others in jail and preventing their interaction. This segregation could lead to retailers or workers becoming major players. He said the big fish alone should be punished, while retailers or workers, besides serving time behind bars, should be rehabilitated and provided with vocational training so they could turn over a new leaf.
However, Supreme Court senior judge Sriamporn Salikupti said only drug abusers should enter rehabilitation, while drug dealers, big or small, must be punished to prevent repeat offences. A common defence – that these workers were forced by poverty into narcotics transporting and should be punished less severely than major dealers – was wrong, he said.
“If people think like that, drug rings would use poor people to move drugs; anyone arrested with a large haul would claim to be a “worker”; and more people would be hired to move drugs because of the light punishment when caught,” Sriamporn said.
“Drug transporters focus on Bt20,000-Bt30,000 payment per trip with disregard for damage, while other individuals work hard in a decent job to earn the Bt300 minimum daily wage.” He said that totalling up drug amounts to differentiate the “abuser-retailer-major dealer” for punishment was a good method, as it held convicted people accountable for the crime so they would not repeat the offence.
Sarawut Benjakul, secretary-general of the Legal Education Office at the Thai Bar under Royal Patronage, said drug transporters and drug dealers aimed for quick cash and were motivated differently from drug abusers. Rehabilitation could be effective for drug abusers while those involved in drug trafficking – investors, manufacturers or drug transporters – committed a serious crime against society, he said. Other countries focused more on probing drug rings’ transactions and seizing their assets.
Another court judge, who requested anonymity, suggested that while some court proceedings in a case would apply the law and hand down severe punishment to drug dealers, the imprisonment step could adopt an inmate segregation [separation into similar groups] method to prevent people from getting deeper into drug dealing crimes – a more doable solution.
“The policy idea is interesting but isn’t easy to do, as drug dealers might take advantage of this by claiming to be merely workers to avoid punishment,” he added.
Jitnara Naowarat, deputy attorney-general at the Office of Narcotics Litigation, said the law’s stipulation that possession of more than 15 ya ba pills with intent to sell, set an initial assumption for this complicated crime that comprised manufacturers, major dealers and also distribution channels to drug abusers. “Retailers/transporters are part of and contribute to the mechanism. Hence, the amount of drugs in an individual’s possession as an indicator is useful in the case of proceedings and reduces the burden of witness inquiries. Since the mechanism depends on retailers, such suppression of them would make drug distribution to the abusers more difficult,” he added.
Expert prosecutor Kosonwat Inthu-janyong said people caught transporting drugs knew in advance of the severe punishment. So, if they were regarded as merely workers entitled to leniency, more would be hired to move drugs and dealers would no longer have to transport drugs themselves. “Identifying transporters as not major dealers means the suspects are entitled to a disciplinary procedure and vocational training. Their release would mean bad seeds being set free in society. They are used to earning a lot of money and easily. Segregating [assessing] them by the amount of drugs in their possession is thus correct.”  Wichai Chaimongkol, director of Narcotics Control Board’s Region 5, said the drug situation was stable due to a steady demand and so narcotics manufacturing and smuggling continued.
Apinan Aramrat, director of the Chiang Mai University’s Northern Substance Abuse Centre, said drug suppression measures so far hadn’t involved major dealers.