Uneven development stimulates drug consumption in South-East Asia

United Nations-supported development policies have focused on eradicating the production and trade of illicit drugs in South-East Asia. However, tensions between development initiatives and those seeking to control the trade have created changing patterns of drug consumption.

Since the mid-1990s, donor-funded alternative development programmes in Lao People's Democratic Republic (Lao PDR) have attempted to reduce opium cultivation and use amongst ethnic highlanders. In addition to local consumption, they grew opium poppies as an economic buffer against rice shortages. Substitution projects were mostly unsuccessful until the government, backed by the United Nations, insisted on almost total eradication in 2003.

Highlanders have had to find alternative ways to make a living. In northern Lao PDR, this has prompted people to migrate to lowland areas in search of wage labour employment. It has also encouraged new forms of substance use that help highlanders deal with lowland life. Highlanders take methamphetamines to help them deal with the pressures of their changing work environments and greater engagement with the market economy.

The impact of development on drug consumption is often overlooked. The Nam Theun 2 dam project in Lao PDR is one example. Extensive social risk assessments considered the project's associated sexually transmitted HIV threat, but paid no attention to possible drug use. This is despite the dam being built close to heroin routes into Viet Nam, which is likely to attract workers from Viet Nam, where heroin injection is more common.

Looking to the future?

Viet Nam provides clues as to what Lao PDR's post-opium HIV environment may resemble. Coinciding with regional geo-political changes, transport modernisation, the growth in plastic syringes and forced opium eradication, heroin flooded Viet Nam in the mid-1990s.

As in Thailand and Myanmar, the growth in heroin injecting in Viet Nam increased the risk of HIV infection. Seroprevalence rates among injecting drug users who tested positive for HIV in Viet Nam had been declining until 1996. However, rates rose to between 60 and 85 percent in several provinces as easy-to-use heroin replaced liquid opium, which had been injected by mainly older men. Development agencies were too slow in responding. Fears are now growing that methamphetamine dealers will target Viet Nam's young people.

Experiences from across South-East Asia suggest that:

• drugs must be placed at the centre of development agendas
• development planning must anticipate changing patterns of drug use within new risk environments rather than reproducing falsely optimistic goals of universal eradication.

Chris Lyttleton
Department of Anthropology, Macquarie University, Sydney, NSW 2109, Australia
T +61 2 98507783
F +61 2 98509391
Chris.Lyttleton@mq.edu.au

Patrick Griffiths
School of Applied Communication, RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia
Patrick.Griffiths@rmit.edu.au

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